Macular Degeneration
An interview with Dr. Jonathan Wright (April 2000)
I first heard about Dr. Jonathan Wright a number of years ago when the Federal Drug Administration raided his clinic with a SWAT team, held him and his employees hostage, and stole injectable vitamin B12, B-complex, herbals, glandulars, other natural remedies, computers and patient records.
That was the biggest mistake they made in the long course of their vendetta against Dr. Wright and nutritional medicine. A local radio talk show host picked up the news and asked Jonathan to appear on his drive-time show. Pretty soon the whole west coast caught fire with support for Jonathan Wright and Tahoma Clinic, and eventually people brought enough heat on congress to force the FDA to back off. (Usually the story doesn’t end so gloriously. More often the persecuting bureaucrats slowly destroy their victim over years, alienate the victim’s family, friends and public support with a stream of vicious propaganda, then indict him for trumped-up crimes, and at last bury him in jail.)
In light of that experience and the seriousness of his profession, you might expect Jonathan Wright to be a bit restrained, even stuffy. In fact, he’s a bit of a jokester with a great sense of humour, so interviewing him is a grand treat.
A son of the South, Jonathan was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1945, but was then taken unwittingly northward to Ohio, whence he left for Harvard University in 1961. Escaping from that bastion of liberalism with his A.B. degree in 1965, he attended and graduated in 1969 with an M.D. from the University of Michigan Medical School. After a residency program in Family Practice, Dr. Wright slowly became aware of what he terms “real medicine” (also called “natural medicine”) to prevent and treat illness, in contrast to the use of patent medication, much un-necessary surgery, and dangerous radiation routinely taught in medical schools. In 1973, he founded Tahoma Clinic in Kent, Washington.
Dr. Jonathan Wright was the first to research and establish an extensive library of medical journal articles concerning diet, vitamins, minerals, botanicals, and other natural remedies. Joined in this effort by Alan R. Gaby, this collection now totals over 35,000 articles. Based on this data and extensive clinical experience, Drs. Wright and Gaby have taught four-day courses in nutritional and natural medicine for physicians approximately yearly since 1982. This course is considered the Number One resource for physicians who want to apply nutrition and nutritional therapies in their practices.
Dr. Wright wrote a monthly column for Prevention Magazine from 1976-1986, and Let’s Live Magazine from 1986-1996. He now writes a monthly newsletter, Nutrition & Healing, $49/year from Agora Publishing, 702 Cathedral Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21201 or call (800) 851-7100, wrightnewsletter.com. For practical, clear information useful to your own health, you can’t beat it.
In our interview Dr. Wright mentions two books, Maximize Your Vitality and Potency—For Men Over 40 (1999) (publisher’s title—topic is mostly testosterone replacement for men who need it) by Jonathan Wright and Lane Leonard ($14.95) and Natural Hormone Replacement for Women Over 45 by Jonathan Wright and John Morgenthaler (1997) ($9.95). These are published by Smart Publications at fax (only) (707) 763-3944, or you should find them at health food stores or online bookstores. He also wrote Book of Nutritional Therapy (1979) and Guide to Healing with Nutrition (1984). In total, his books have sold over 750,000 copies. If you can’t find the books or the nutritional supplements mentioned below, you can order them from the Tahoma Clinic Dispensary, 801 SW 16th Street, Suite 121, Renton, Washington 98055 or call (425) 264-0051 or fax (425) 264-0058. Dr. Wright and Tahoma Clinic are located at the same address but with different phone numbers, (425) 264-0059 and fax (425) 264-0071. The clinic’s website address is tahoma-clinic.com.
Dr. Wright kindly made time for this interview on April 20, 2000.
Moneychanger: I wanted to do this interview for two reasons. First, macular degeneration is a terrible illness that can cause blindness. Second, although many physicians say that it is incurable, you treat it successfully with nutritional supplements.
Wright: Ophthalmology journals tell us that nine percent of the population over 70 will get this problem.
Moneychanger: How does the disease progress?
Wright: It starts with bit of waviness in the vision. In one of the simplest and most commonly used tests for macular degeneration the doctor holds up a grid pattern. If all the horizontal and vertical lines look straight, then you probably don’t have the problem.
However, in the early stages of macular degeneration some of those lines start looking bendy. Instead of straight horizontal and vertical lines on the page, they look curved. It’s not the same for every person, but they are not seeing straight lines anymore.
Imagine what that does to anything in a grid pattern. If we are no longer able to perceive that on our retinas, we are no longer able to perceive everything in its proper position. That’s the way it starts. After a while, though, we simply lose the vision altogether. As it progresses it destroys the central part of the retina, the macula. That’s why it’s called “macular” degeneration.
Moneychanger: What causes macular degeneration?
Wright: Officially the cause isn’t known. Ophthalmology journals tell you that it is a disease of aging but we really don’t know what causes it.
Okay, that’s the party line. Now my idea [laughing] is that a lack of certain key nutrients causes macular degeneration. We can call them “antioxidants.” That is currently a popular buzzword because academics refuse to talk about “vitamins” and “minerals.” After all, they’re only for health food nuts, so they have to call them “antioxidants.”
The problem is not merely a long term lack of those nutrients in the diet. The other really key factor is that the overwhelming majority of people with macular degeneration also have difficulty digesting and assimilating nutrients in the first place. Over and over again we are finding that we not only need to correct nutritional deficiencies, but we also have to compensate for the faulty digestion that has contributed to the nutritional deficiency.
I can’t say that it is entirely poor diet or entirely poor digestion. In over 90% of macular degeneration cases, those two both appear.
Moneychanger: Exactly how does the digestion fails? Is that a function of age, too?
Wright: Yes, partly. When someone comes in with macular degeneration, we run two key tests. First we check the stomach for its ability to produce hydrochloric acid (HCl).
We all know that stomachs are supposed to produce HCl, and that the HCl triggers what are called proteolytic enzymes (enzymes that digest protein). Without enough acid in our tummies, those acid sensitive enzymes don’t work and the first phase of protein digestion doesn’t work very well.
Not only protein digestion is disturbed, but also mineral release from the foods they’re embedded in. We’ve all heard, for example, that there’s iron in red meat. However, if a person doesn’t have much acid in their tummy they not only fail to digest the meat protein, they also don’t get much iron out of it—as well as a bunch of other mineral nutrients.
Over and over we find that folks with macular degeneration have stomachs that don’t work real well. They are making a little teeny-tiny bit of stomach acid, or sometimes none at all. That’s part of why the nutrients that the eyes needed to stay healthy weren’t getting there in the first place.
The second test we perform on every macular degeneration patient is one of those icky medical tests, a stool specimen. That tells us how well the pancreas is performing its job: the second phase of protein digestion plus most of digesting fats, starches, and vegetables. Out of 100 people with macular degeneration, 98 will show abnormal on one test or the other, or both. It is extremely rare to see a person with macular degeneration who is normal on both of those tests.
Moneychanger: Does the stool specimen show whether the pancreas is producing enzymes in the proper quantities?
Wright: Yes, indirectly, but we want to know whether the various things that are supposed to be digested—vegetable fiber, fat, etc.—are digested adequately or not. If it’s not, we infer that the pancreas is not doing its job. We verify that by having people take extra quantities of pancreatic enzymes and repeating the stool test to see if everything is digested now. Nearly 100% of the time, it is. It is an inference, not a direct test, but it is an extremely good inference.
Moneychanger: If proteolytic enzymes require an acid environment then what happens to people who take massive doses of Maalox as a lot of older people do?
Wright: They certainly do, Franklin. Dr. Lane Leonard (a Ph.D. who co-authored my last book on male hormone replacement) and I are writing a book which is tentatively titled Slow Death By Antacids. People who take these things are seriously interfering with normal digestion. When we seriously interfere with normal digestion we don’t get our nutrients, so we’ll die a little quicker.
Moneychanger: What can alleviate indigestion then?
Wright: As this book will tell us, the large majority of indigestions (and I want to underline that I did not say all but a large majority of indigestions) is caused by a lack of acid in the tummy, not too much.
When folks past 40 come into the clinic and tell me they have heartburn and indigestion, I tell them that I want to do these stomach tests. Upwards of 95% of those people come back with test results showing that they don’t have enough acid in there.
So we tell them to take these replacement HCl acid with pepsin capsules with every meal. Of course, I get a lot of stares. They say, “Are you some kind of crazy, doctor? Here I’ve got this acid coming up in my stomach , and you want me to take HCl? I’ll burn myself to death!”
We tell them, “No, no, no, please look at your test. Even if you are a hard-to-please Boeing engineer, this is hard data. Now look at a normal test, and look at the difference. Please, even if you have to keep a glass of bicarbonate of soda handy in case I made a mistake, you do that, but please take these HCl capsules with meals.”
People come back and say “I never would have believed that taking HCl with pepsin with every meal would take care of my acid indigestion. How’d that happen?!” I have to tell them that I don’t know the molecular mechanism, I just know that it works, especially when we have an abnormal test in front of us.
Moneychanger: Is it true that cayenne pepper is also good for indigestion?
Wright: It stimulates the stomach to secrete HCl, so where acid production is declining, we can stimulate it back up with cayenne. On the other hand, if we are seriously low on HCl, that is never a replacement for adequate HCl.
Let’s put a little common sense in here. I know we’re talking about macular degeneration, but this is a part of the whole picture. As we get older, we can’t run as fast as we used to, our muscles can’t lift as much as they once could, and our eyes don’t see as clearly. Why would we expect that the stomach is the only organ in our entire body exempted from this decline? Why should the stomach work more and more aggressively as we get older when everything else slows down? That just doesn’t make any sense. If we just apply a little logic and common sense, we recognise that the stomach is going to slow down, too, just like the rest of us.
So what about all this stuff sold over the counter to block or counteract stomach acid production—Tums®, Rolaids®, Zantac®, Tagamet®, and Pepcid®? We are all being sold an enormous bill of goods. About ninety percent of the time people who take that stuff simply do not need it. In fact, it’s counter-productive.
Moneychanger: I used to have a chiropractor who told me that the best thing for indigestion was a tablespoon of vinegar. What do you think about that?
Wright: That’s a pale shadow of what’s really needed. Vinegar is not nearly as strong as normal stomach acid, but at the very least it is a step in the correct direction. It reminds me of a book popular in the 1940s and 1950s called Vermont Folk Medicine by Dr. Jarvis. His cure for everything was taking apple cider vinegar with a little honey. What he was doing was helping people’s digestions and in fact that does help cure other problems, because it brings nutrients in more efficiently.
Moneychanger: Obviously you don’t recommend that people diagnose and treat themselves, but if someone wanted to supplement HCl, what should they buy?
Wright: Betaine hydrochloride with pepsin, and it usually comes in capsules labelled “ten grains.” That is the same as 650 milligrams, and usually the label carries both measurements. The full adult replacement dose runs from five to seven capsules per meal, which is a bunch. Some of us need that full replacement, and some of us don’t.
Back in the mid-'80’s I learned the hard way how important digestion and assimilation are for folks with macular degeneration. At that time I had been asking people to take the key nutrients and swallow them. It worked, but only 30-40% of the time, and it certainly didn’t work as well as I would have liked. One day in 1986 a woman came in on a sort of hurry-up, emergency basis. She had visited her ophthalmologist twice in the last six weeks, and her macular degeneration was progressing very rapidly. What could we do about it?
This was just before Reagan changed the tax laws, you know the TEFRA thing back in 1986?
Moneychanger: I remember it quite well.
Wright: It’s funny how politics gets into health care all the time. Before they changed the tax laws you could deduct for every single vitamin and mineral you took. This lady’s husband was a CPA, so she came in with these great spread sheets of all the vitamins and minerals she had been taking for the last five years, because they were deducting every single thing! [laughing] I looked at that spread sheet, and sure enough, she had been taking all of the key nutrients needed to improve macular degeneration, and yet she had rapidly deteriorating macular degeneration.
In nutritional medicine if something frequently works on some people when you swallow it, but it isn’t working on these other people when they swallow it, as a last ditch measure you throw the whole thing in an IV bottle and see if it works that way.
That’s what we did. We put it all into an IV bottle, hung it up, and started the IV. About half way into the IV a little yell comes out of the IV room. The nurse runs in there, “Mrs. So-and-so, what do you want?”
She yells, “Look! I can read that poster on the wall! I couldn’t read it when I came in!” (It’s always nice when one of your first results is a dramatic one… that really keeps you going.)
Moneychanger: Aww, come on! [laughing]
Wright: Now this lady is still with us, and she’ll tell you about it any time. We rarely get results that fast. Usually, even with IVs it takes a minimum of two or three weeks to start showing improvement. Maybe her case was declining so rapidly that just a little bit of nutrient made a big difference. Of course, we got all excited and continued her IVs until her macular degeneration simply went away.
Since she had been swallowing all these key nutrients for five years and they hadn’t worked but they did work in an IV, naturally we wanted to know why. So we began checking out her stomach acid and her pancreas; she had both problems. From then on everybody who came in the front door with macular degeneration (or the back door, for that matter) got his stomach and pancreas checked. We had not been doing that routinely before because, after all, this is an eye problem, isn’t it? We found out that no, no, no, it isn’t just an eye problem, it’s a nutritional problem. It happens to surface in the eye, but it’s an overall body nutritional problem that involves poor digestion.
Moneychanger: What are these key nutrients?
Wright: I knew you’d get to that. [laughing] Key nutrients are selenium, zinc, taurine, and vitamin E. I’ve learned about all that just from reading the medical literature and working with folks. Oddly enough, I learned about selenium from the Yakima Valley Daily Herald.
Moneychanger: Not normally accounted a well known source of cutting edge medical technology.
Wright: Not normally, but in the late ‘70s somebody sent me Dr. Joseph Bittner’s article from the Yakima Valley Daily Herald about how he improved his own macular degeneration. He knew that eastern Washington and Oregon are very selenium-poor regions, because he kept cows and had to feed them selenium to prevent white muscle disease. He figured that if it was a very selenium-poor region and he was eating groceries mostly grown there, that maybe he needed selenium, too. So when he got macular degeneration he started scarfing selenium and his macular degeneration got better.
When I read that, I thought, Okay, the next person who comes in with macular degeneration, we’re going to try some selenium. We did and it helped a little. It didn’t get rid of it, but it helped a little, so I started hitting the books on what other nutrients are important to retinal function. This was in the ‘70s, remember, when we didn’t have all the information we have now. Still, we did know that the retina has the second largest concentration of zinc in the whole the body. (The hearing apparatus has the most.) So I added zinc to this program.
Even in the 1970s there was a lot of information about the amino acid taurine and retinal function in cats. For cats taurine is an essential amino acid while for humans it is not. People can make their own taurine, but it’s still a so-called “conditionally essential” amino acid—some of us make enough and some of us don’t. Cats don’t make any at all, so that’s why they were researching cats so heavily.
So—simple minded thinking again, but fortunately we can get by with a lot of simple minded thinking, can’t we! [laughing]
Moneychanger: It’s the best kind, really.
Wright: So it occurred to me that if taurine was so important that a cat didn’t get any in its diet went blind, and that people sometimes made enough taurine and sometimes not, I ought to add some taurine to the program.
Where did the vitamin E come from? Even in the ‘70s everyone knew it was the major antioxidant that you use up when hit with heat or light, and of course the macula is being hit with light all the time. So I threw Vitamin E in.
Even when people only swallowed those four things we were getting about 30-40% results. When we switched to the IV our track record jumped up. (The minerals have to go in by IV. People can pretty well absorb taurine or vitamin E, even if their digestion isn’t too good, but the minerals just don’t get in well at all.) Using IVs, in about 70% of macular degeneration cases we can either stop it cold so it doesn’t worsen, or we can reverse it—and I do mean get it reversed.
Moneychanger: We’re talking about turning the disease backwards.
Wright: Yes, that’s exactly what we’re talking about. Out of that 70%, more than half is reversed, and a little less than half is just stopped cold but doesn’t get better. I know you’ve interviewed Dr. Tom Dorman.
Moneychanger: About three years ago on this same topic.
Wright: Tom joined our clinic about 1996, but has since opened his own practice. He had his own newsletter [Fact, Fiction & Fraud in Modern Medicine, monthly, $69.95/year from 216 Railroad Avenue North, Kent, Washington 98032; fax (253) 854-7050; dormanpub.com. He wrote there that when he joined Tahoma Clinic he heard about this nutritional treatment for macular degeneration and simply couldn’t believe that a bunch of nutrients would get rid of macular degeneration. But he tried it, and much to his surprise, it worked! He’s been using it ever since, and finds that it either arrests or reverses.
Let me give you an example of “reversed.” It is one of the better examples I can think of because I didn’t do it myself and it happened to be my dad. In the mid-‘80s my father (who isn’t with us anymore) was in his 80s and he developed macular degeneration. He was living in southern Ohio. He was a stubborn fellow and called me up and asked what I knew about treating macular degeneration. I told him about the IVs and invited him out to Washington. He said he wasn’t going out to Washington state, he’d find somebody local.
He was not only stubborn but persistent, too, so he visited a bunch of ophthalmologists. Finally in a small town called Xenia he found one and he just browbeat him into giving him the treatment. This ophthalmologist said, “Well, I don’t believe that’s going to work, but I haven’t got anything else for you anyway, so I’ll try it.” That’s a nice open-minded attitude. A lot of docs will say, “I don’t have anything for you, and by the way I don’t believe that nutrition is going to work, so we’re not going to use that, either.”
This doctor was honest enough to admit he didn’t have anything better, so he’d be happy to try this treatment. He called me up and got the recipe for the IV. He gave the IVs, and he also checked my dad’s vision. When he first went in, corrected with glasses he had 20/300 in one eye and 20/400 in the other.
He got all his IVs, and by the end of his treatment series he was down to 20/30 and 20/50 corrected!
I like to quote that story not just because it’s my father, but also because the treatment was done in Southern Ohio by an ophthalmologist who I don’t know and who had never heard of this treatment, and yet he reported similar results. He started treating all his patients that way, and last I heard he was hassling with Medicare about why they wouldn’t cover it.
Moneychanger: What quantities of these nutrients do you take?
Wright: If the person can be fairly assured that his digestion is working well so that the stuff will get in to his system, then one takes around 300 micrograms of selenium (that’s extremely low, Franklin—the toxic limit for selenium starts at 1,500 micrograms and upwards, and some people can tolerate a lot more than that). Some people go as high as 500, and that’s fine with me, too.
Second thing is zinc. That needs to come in as zinc picolinate or zinc citrate, 60 to 90 milligrams to start. (All these things can be tapered down, by the way, as you get results.) If we take extra zinc and happen to be marginal on copper, then it can produce a copper deficiency. In that case, just take a little extra copper.
We give one gram a day of taurine, and taurine is extremely safe, no side effects to watch out for there. For vitamin E we use 400 to 800 units a day of the mixed tocopherols.
That’s the core of the program that we’ve been running since the mid-‘80s, but with the explosion of interest in natural medicine in the last decade, we’ve added many other things. For example, by now everybody’s heard of the herb bilberry.
Moneychanger: That stuff’s great for night vision!
Wright: We make sure that’s in there. Then there’s another amino acid, N-acetyl-cysteine [en uh SEE till SIS tene], that’s very important, as is gingko. The list grows long. Those four things I gave you to start with form the core group without which we don’t get results, but these other things improve results.
A few years back Dr. Alan Gaby and I put all of this into an oral formulation called Ocudyne, and then we upgraded that to Ocudyne II. Besides the four core group ingredients, it has N-acetyl-cysteine, bilberry, and a total of 20 other ingredients which have been shown to be important for eyes. (Ocudyne is designed as a multiple vitamin fortified with everything extra that your eyes need. We did that so people wouldn’t have to be taking all these extra things plus a multiple vitamin) It’s parked in all the natural food stores. In fact it’s the major seller in the area of eye care.
A lot of folks have told us that when they had just barely developed macular degeneration, they bought some Ocudyne and scarfed the label amount, eight capsules a day, which is not an overdose. They report that they have reversed their macular degeneration right there. Why are they coming and telling us? Because they come to the clinic about something else. Those people fortunately have a strong enough digestion that between their diet and the Ocudyne capsules, enough got through to do the job. The ones we usually see for macular degeneration are people who (1) don’t even know about the Ocudyne or (2) have tried Ocudyne and it hasn’t helped them much but they’ve heard that about the IVs, so they come in for that.
Moneychanger: Macular degeneration, then, is a disease of old age that shouldn’t affect nearly as many people as it does?
Wright: Instead of affecting nine percent of the people over 70, as it does now, it really ought to affect one or two percent of the over ninety population, if we got everything right with the digestion.
Moneychanger: Is there anything else my readers should know about macular degeneration? And for readers who won’t take Ocudyne but plan to mix up their own vitamin and mineral cocktail, what is the difference between taking tablets and capsules?
Wright: I’m glad you mentioned that, since the large majority of people with macular degeneration have weak digestion. Frequently people with weak digestion find the tablets in the toilet.
Moneychanger: I understand—they pass through the body unharmed.
Wright: So taking capsules is far and away preferable for people with weak digestion. Did I ever tell you about the patient I had who cleaned septic tanks for a living? It’s a true story.
Moneychanger: No.
Wright: He told me that every once in a while he’d be out there pumping out the septic tank and he’d hear all this rattle! rattle! rattle! in the pipe. When he was new at the job he’d go and look, but after a couple of times he got used to it and could just identify the sound. Turns out he was pumping two, three, four, five inches of pills from the bottom of septic tanks.
Moneychanger: You’re kidding.
Wright: I am not kidding.
Moneychanger: They won’t even dissolve in septic tanks?
Wright: That’s what the man was telling me. When he’d hear that little rattle, if he knew the people and wanted to be nice to them, he’d open up the pipe, fish out a few pills, rinse them off, and knock on the front door and say, “By the way, I thought you’d like to know that your medications or vitamins aren’t really helping you very much.”
So thanks for mentioning tablets versus capsules. You absolutely ought to take capsules, because they digest and assimilate better.
There’s one other thing. Ophthalmologists identify two types of macular degeneration. There’s one they call “dry” and another called “wet.” That’s kind of weird because the back of the eye is wet at all times so they’re both really wet technically. The dry one is where the macula just simply deteriorates and that’s that. In the so-called wet one, an abnormal formation of blood vessels creeps out over the macula so that instead of just deteriorating, all these blood vessels get in the way and destroy the tissue. Folks always want to know if the treatment I’ve described works for dry macular degeneration, wet, or both.
Although we have a better shot at the so-called dry type, some people with wet macular degeneration have gotten better, too. So whatever kind of macular degeneration people have, they shouldn’t give up. They should go after it with this treatment and see what they get.
Moneychanger: Thanks very, very much for your time. It’s always a pleasure to visit with you, but especially so when our conversation can benefit so many people with just a very small change in diet.
Wright: And the outcome can be so devastating if you can’t get it reversed.
Moneychanger: I never had heard of macular degeneration until about 1996. We were having our newsletter printed in New Albany, Mississippi. We went to Wal-Mart while we were waiting and I was sitting near the drug store on a bench. This woman came along and plopped this big man down beside me, not a fat man but just a big fellow. He started talking (when you get away from cities people are a lot friendlier) and he asked me where I was from and I told him Memphis. He said, Oh, I go to the eye doctor up there.
I noticed that he obviously couldn’t see very much, and I asked him what was wrong with his eyes. He told me he had macular degeneration.
I’ve never seen him again, and only quite a while later did I read about your treatment for macular degeneration in Tom Dorman’s newsletter. Here was this man in the prime of life, retired but in great physical shape, who had been active all his life, raised cattle and so forth, and he couldn’t do any of that ever again. He was looking at spending the rest of his days basically inactive because of macular degeneration. Every time I hear those words, his plight wrings my heart again, so I rejoice over what y’all are doing in Seattle.
Wright: I’m sure glad you’re getting the word out.
I first published this interview in May, 2000. Why publish it again now? Because many of you have never seen it, and because I’m so angry and frustrated. Establishment medicine continues to refuse to acknowledge this treatment for macular degeneration. Lately I read that they’re developing mechanical eye-implants for macular degeneration. When I saw that, I knew I had to re-publish this article.
By the way, Susan and I both take Ocudyne II every day, twice a day, from three to five capsules per dose. You can order 200 Ocudyne II capsules for $36.25 from Tahoma Clinic Dispensary, 801 SW 16th St., Suite 121, Renton, Washington 98055, phone (425) 264-0051 and fax (425) 264-0058. I have no financial interest whatever in this recommendation. — F. Sanders
WARNING & DISCLAIMER: By publishing this material, neither The Moneychanger nor the author/interviewee recommends or endorses any specific treatment or therapy for any physical condition or disease. Neither The Moneychanger nor the author/interviewee guarantees or warrants any results from any treatment discussed, nor assumes any express or implied liability for any use to which the reader puts this information. By this interview, the interviewee does not prescribe any treatment whatsoever for anyone who is not his patient. All the information here is offered for information purposes only, subject to the reader’s own research, prudence, and judgment.
Originally published May 2000