Positive Health Online

|||How Macrobiotics Brought me from Cancer to Radiant Health

Whatever your opinions regarding the efficacy of various dietary regimes for cancer – Gerson, Macrobiotics, Vries – you are obliged to stand up and take due notice when a woman, diagnosed with Stage IV ovarian cancer and given two months to live, survives and indeed flourishes and blossoms back to full health by following the Macrobiotic philosophical and dietary regime, taught and supervised by expert Michio Kushi himself.

This heart-rending story of Mina Dobic is not an entirely easy one to read. She literally takes you back to her birth and early years in Communist Yugoslavia led by Tito. I found somewhat cruel her account of her repressive life with her parents, especially her father, who didn't want to contribute financially towards her education. I also could barely relate to her life under the Communist regime, where one of her greatest youthful achievements was organising a birthday ceremony to Marshall Tito! This woman is barely 10 years older than I am, yet reading this sounded more like the life of my now deceased grandparents who emigrated to Canada from Kiev, Russia in 1919!

What was hardest to read was her downward slide into ill health – asthma, migraines, allergies, nephritis, haemorrhoids, vertigo – and her appallingly brutal treatment by the doctors at the hospital where she was finally diagnosed with cancer. I found myself crying uncontrollably, reading about the callousness with which the doctors didn't do anything to relieve her pain, except basically to tell her to shut up and stop complaining. The doctors didn't tell her about her diagnosis, either – this she discovered upon opening the envelope with her file, upon being transferred to another hospital. Mina had been a popular, very successful broadcast journalist, and when she threatened to expose the sadistic Consultant over the airwaves, they arranged her ticket to a better environment.

However, once ensconced in an oncology ward with other women cancer sufferers undergoing radiation and chemotherapy, she decided to forego this brutal treatment. A doctor friend gave her a copy of The Cancer Prevention Diet by Michio Kushi, which inspired her to heal herself with Macrobiotics.

We then follow Mina, her husband Bosko and her two lovely young children on their emotionally and spiritually uplifting quest to learn, practise, cook and live macrobiotically in a country where macrobiotics was virtually unknown. Mina's friends and relatives raised some $8,000 in order to send her to the Kushi Institute near Boston USA for 3 days, where they learned the basics of macrobiotic cooking and had a private consultation with Michio Kushi himself. This trip occurred soon following Mina's self-release from hospital, when she was exceedingly ill and weak and she had to use some 30 nappies per day to cope with her copious vaginal discharges following her surgery. Her recovery is movingly told, not sparing us her tremendous physical obstacles, from bleeding and exceedingly painful hemmorhoids, to losing about 60 pounds where she looked a virtual skeletal bag of bones. She was totally convinced that the foods she had been eating – meat, dairy products, and sweets and fats – had been significant contributory factors to her ill health. She was also utterly in tune with the macrobiotic philosophy of balance of yin and yang, of eating only the finest quality organic foods to build her blood or "chi" and strengthen her digestion and immune system.

Mina's medicinal basic macrobiotic diet consisted of 50% whole grains, 25-45% vegetables, 5% protein, 5% seaweed, miso soup daily, 2% pickles and one half cup of cooked fruit every 10 days. She also used a variety of medicinal macrobiotic remedies, including pickled umeboshi plum, ume-Sho-kuzu drink, carrot/daikon drink, azuki bean and black soybean tea, used to promote discharges, and regulate and strengthen Mina's extremely toxic body. Mina not only got better, but eventually became a macrobiotic counsellor, ambassador and a representative of the Kushi Institute at the First Annual Whole World Health Forum. Unable to return to her native country due to the Bosnian conflict, her family settled in the USA where they are very happy and healthy today, helping many other ill people.

As regular readers of Positive Health are aware, there is a yawning gulf between the macrobiotic diet and other diets using juices and raw food, just as there is between Ayurvedic and Chinese Medicine compared with Naturopathy. It is evident however, that each regime, practised within its own philosophical system, appears to work for many people. That Mina was sentenced to death with Stage IV ovarian cancer, and recovered and became cancer-free after one year of macrobiotic diet and her strong belief in its healing powers is beyond argument.

This book is a must read!

This book can be ordered from the Positive Health bookstore. Please click the Bookshop image at the top of the column to your right, then click on Cancer.