A DOCTOR SPEAKS

DOES CURA ROMANA WORK? Naturally this is any reader's primary concern. Let me begin by describing my own experience on the Protocol, and that of my wife. A year ago, Leslie Kenton offered us the opportunity of being guided through the Cura Romana program.

The day we began, my wife, aged sixty-eight, weighed 139 pounds. All her adult life she had been dissatisfied with the shape of her body, especially her legs. She lost 19 pounds. Now, a year later, she has effortlessly sustained her weightloss within a pound of what it was at the end of the program. She now has the body shape she had dreamed of since she was a girl and she is free of the food cravings that had plagued her since childhood. She has also experienced a reduction in the frequency and severity of migraine headaches which she has suffered since the age of eleven. Her headaches used to require trips to the emergency room, where intra-muscular Demerol (a synthetic narcotic) with Compazine (an anti-nausea medication) had to be administered. In the past year she has had only one or two migraines (instead of the one to three a week which she had been having). Both responded immediately to aspirin or Excedrin-Migraine.

Before I began the Protocol I had for months been experiencing severe backache. It did not respond to acupuncture, herbs or massage. A few hours after I took my first dose of Essential Spray the pain was gone. It has not returned.

I was eighty-five years old when we began the program and I weighed 144 pounds. I had a moderate "beer belly" – as I told Leslie – without the benefit of beer. The beer belly disappeared and my weight steadily reduced. Now, at age eighty-six, my weight remains between 128 and 131 pounds. I feel lighter. I kayak regularly and play tennis twice a week with a partner half my age.

As created by A. T. W. Simeons, then further developed and perfected by Leslie Kenton, Cura Romana does indeed work. It requires only three weeks of careful monitoring of food eaten, followed by six weeks of Consolidation. Neither my wife nor I was ever hungry on 500 calories a day. During Consolidation, she and I became aware of the foods that did not make each of us feel good. We learned this by gradually introducing and testing them to find out which foods our bodies handled well and which they did not. Now, we automatically avoid the latter.

While success is the ultimate practical test of any theory, the process by which success is achieved is most important to those of us who, like Simeons, Kenton and myself, know that the enduring benefit of any achievement depends upon having identified the root cause, which is being addressed.

When I attended a "scientific" high school in the late 1930s, a debate began between a friend and myself about cancer. Subsequently we both became physicians, so the debate continued. He was convinced that cancer would be "cured" in a few years. His conviction was based on the vast escalation of pharmaceuticals after World War II. He believed, as many did at that time, that they were revolutionizing medicine.

I argued that, since cancer was a mutation of the cell's chromosomes, the answer to it would need to be found through an in-depth understanding of genetics and of that which creates, arrests and reverses mutations. This difference in scientific philosophy eventually led to our disaffection.

In the ensuing seventy years it has been evident that my friend's approach has not worked. And, although a knowledge base in genetics has grown significantly, this has not had the financial backing of the pharmaceutical industry or government to make it possible for extensive genetic cancer research to be carried out. The root cause of cancer remains undiscovered.

Not so for Simeons and Kenton. Simeons' success with hCG and Fröhlich's syndrome stirred his curiosity. (Einstein said, "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.") Simeons' awareness of the need to identify the root cause in disturbed regulation of fat metabolism – the ultimate quest for the holy grail of obesity – led to his having located the locus of the issue in the diencephalon: the thalamus, hypothalamus and pituitary.

He chose to ignore the prevailing medical model of "evidence based medicine", the validity of which is built on a statistical-mathematical, deductive, digital-linear model in which one begins with an assumption, then limits observations to the paradigms within which this notion has been constructed. Instead, Simeons employed inductive-logic and experience-based medicine in which one builds a theory from observations – a method which has long been the basis of successful indigenous medicines, such as Chinese, Tibetan and Ayurvedic, all of which are still vitally extant in our time.

Kenton observes that "Simeons was a master of observation and practicality. He refused to be side-tracked by facile beliefs about obesity." Kenton quotes my personal medical mentor, Claude Bernard, as saying that to have an idea about a natural phenomenon, we must first of all observe it. All human knowledge is limited to working back from observed effects to their cause. The ongoing attempt from "evidence-based medical research" to eliminate all inductive-based medicine, wisdom and bodies of knowledge continues to this day. As Kenton states with regard to Simeons' methodology, "If anything, the furor rages even more vehemently now than it ever has".

In my own practice, I have persistently urged the medical community to abhor the trend of our times for seeking immediate gratification by treating symptoms instead of searching for the root of medical conundrums, as Simeons and Kenton have done.

As Kenton cogently illustrates, and as Simeons himself appreciated, the root cause for obesity may lie even deeper than the diencephalon – including within it the relationship between insulin, hCG and leptin, for instance, which has yet to be elucidated. There may be many other factors as well which have yet to be identified.

In this book, Kenton has moved Simeons' work in a new direction by making these remarkable discoveries available to a great many people rather than only to those economically fortunate enough to afford to partake of it in clinics. By following the thread from the injectable to the oral, and finally to the homeopathic, she has engaged knowledgeable experts to assist her in developing the practical Protocol with which this book is concerned.

Finally, I must add a word about this remarkable woman. Leslie Kenton, whom I have known for almost forty years, has tirelessly reconstructed her own life from the detritus of her childhood – as recorded in her recent book Love Affair – for which she takes full responsibility. Thanks to her ability to think "outside the box" while adhering to impeccable standards of research and trial, she has turned her own physical trauma and pain, as well as the subsequent immobility and weight gain, not only into an effective quest for the truth about obesity but beyond, sharing knowledge about health and life which encompasses more profound aspects of our existence. She has helped herself and others to make deep connections with their own essential being. It was she who, in 1971, introduced me – with my orthodox medical and psychiatric background – to Chinese medicine. In 2009 she restored my wife and myself with the gift of our bodies, true weight, shape and functioning. I have no doubt that in the future there will be many more gifts for all of us coming from this fertile, inquiring soul.