One Less Excuse: Concise, Up-To-Date, Scientifically Proven & Researched Information to Take Back Your Health

By Christopher J. Salah

FINALLY!
A BOOK WRITTEN FOR THE EVERYDAY PERSON
Heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, kidney disease, as well as most other major illnesses, are all on the rise. Childhood obesity and diabetes have skyrocketed. Our teenagers are on more pharmaceuticals then ever before. Every year we get sicker and sicker, take more and more medications that barely keep us alive, and pay out billions of dollars in taxes and out-of-pocket so we can continue to suffer just a little bit longer. It’s time to take your health back from the pharmaceutical companies. All you need to know is how.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781467599313

Book preview

One Less Excuse © 2013 by Christopher Salah

All right reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for fair use as a brief quotation embodied in articles or reviews without prior written permission.

For information, contact:

[e-mail]

Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication Data

Salah, Christopher.

One less excuse: concise, up-to-date, scientifically proven & researched information to take back your health /

Christopher Salah.

Includes index.

TXu 1-872-933

ISBN: 978-1-4675-9930-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4675-9931-3 (e)

Cover Design & Layout: Nikki Orzel

The contents and information in this book are not substitutes for competent and personal medical care. Any diet or lifestyle changes implemented by a reader of this book are adopted at the sole discretion and risk of that individual reader. Modifications to diet and lifestyle should be monitored by your doctor. All the information in this book has been gained through scientific research and an expert knowledge of the physiology of the human body. If your doctor is not open to the information here it might be time to find a physician who is more open and interested in your health.

Lovingly dedicated to:

My mother, father and entire family for their unwavering support

Nikki, for breathing life into my book and making it a reality

Porter, for going above and beyond

Andrea, for the countless times she patiently read and re-read the proofs along with her inspirational insight

About the Author

I come from a very conservative family. Although I know my parents would have supported me in any career path, it felt that my main choices were doctor, lawyer or do what Dad does. Dad was in the hotel business, which was not for me. My sister was a lawyer, and she made it clear that field wasn't for me either. So doctor it was. However, I'm not sure how I knew it at the time, but I knew for sure that having a nurse take your vitals and spending one to two minutes with the doctor before he or she handed you pills to take…was not medicine. I wanted to help people be healthy and stay healthy; full of energy and life. It was actually my sister who handed me the brochure for the school in Los Angeles that offered a degree in Chinese medicine. I was fifteen years old when this happened.

After high school I quickly finished my two-year Associate's and started a two-thousand-hour program to obtain a Master's of Science in Oriental Medicine. The medicine was amazing. Although I am known as an acupuncturist, this is actually a poor title for people with my degree. We spend more hours of study learning hundreds upon hundreds of herbs and the combination of these herbs to treat illness. Just like doctors use pharmaceuticals, we use herbs — except we aim to treat the root of the condition and not just mask the symptoms of a disease. We learned all types of different techniques to encourage the body to heal itself. Our training also focused on meditation, exercise programs, nutrition, and everything we needed to help people prevent disease and heal the body.

After I finished my Master's, I spent years working alongside orthopedic surgeons as part of a team doing post-op rehabilitation. It was amazing to see that the people who elected to have me as part of their team healed twice as fast and used half their medications. It was here that I started to notice the impact that stress has on the body. It was quite obvious that my patients who felt more stress — because of the circumstances involving surgery — did not heal as fast.

A couple of years later I enrolled in a clinical doctorate program

while maintaining a private practice and continuing to work with the surgeons. As part of my doctorate I started to teach Chinese medicine, discovering that teaching was a passion of mine. I have been teaching in one form or another ever since. During my doctorate years, I spent time in hospitals and community clinics, treating everyone from the homeless person you see every day to the people who have never worked a day in their lives. From the very poor to the very rich; tens of thousands of people crossed my path and every day I helped them as best I could.

Through so much interaction with my patients, their bodies, and their health; with miracle successes and miserable failures, I started to see patterns in who the healthy people were and who the ill were. I saw patterns in who healed faster, who responded better to treatment, and who did not.

It became glaringly obvious that there are two major aspects of life that influence our health strongly; stress and diet. These were the core principles ingrained in the philosophy of Chinese medicine but, over the years, I had started to lose my way and not completely address these factors wholeheartedly. I had become too focused on trying to fix people instead of giving my patients the knowledge to fix themselves.

Knowing that eating well is the foundation for our health, I wanted to be able to answer any and all of my patients' questions. I wanted to be able to guide them in the right direction. To accomplish this, I went to the bookstore and bought about a dozen of the best-selling diet and nutrition books out there: books by Dr. Mehmet C. Oz, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr. Andrew Weil, John Robinson, Dr. Jessica K. Black, T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., and Thomas M. Campbell II to name a few. What was astonishing was that the information and research contained in these books was the same — 90% of the time, all these doctors agreed! This is shocking in the medical world.

Then a change of life happened. I am an adventurous person at heart. Although I absolutely love what I do — being able to help people live happier, healthier lives — I was bored with my life.

One day at school between the classes I was teaching, I saw a poster that read, How would you like to see the world and do what you love? It was from a company that placed acupuncturists on cruise ships. I decided to call, and six months later I was flying to Sydney, Australia, to join my first ship's crew.

Over the next year, this would become the main motivator to write and publish the information in this book.

Part of my job on the ships was to lecture and educate the guests about alternative medicine and health in general. Every single week for nine months I did a lecture on diet and nutrition based on the most current scientific research available. Thousands of people took a seat to listen, and every single week I startled people with this information. Week after week, month after month, I got surprised looks and the same questions over and over.

Now, after almost three years of lecturing and helping Australian, British, and American cruise passengers, I know it wasn't just my American patients at home who needed help. Almost everyone I met who suffered from any form of illness had no clue how to take care of their bodies and correct the imbalances that made them suffer. Many simply took pills that their doctors gave them to keep them alive just a little bit longer.

This book is dedicated to dispelling the collective ignorance to which we (including my former self) are slaves. I have done this by compiling thousands upon thousands of pages of health science, translating it into a language everyone can understand, and writing a short and simple book that addresses the core issues in our lives. I hope everyone who reads this will find something in it that benefits his or