Dr. Peter J. Weiss

This week I attended the kick-off meet­ing of a new Gary Null Health Sup­port Group in Mel­bourne, Florida.

Null

Gary Null is a long­time critic of tra­di­tional med­i­cine and pro­po­nent of aggres­sive dietary mod­i­fi­ca­tion, exer­cise and alter­na­tive approaches to heal­ing.

He’s a pro­lific author with too many self-help books to men­tion, speaker film­maker and radio host. Today’s sub­ject, how­ever, is the coun­try­wide net­work of “health sup­port groups” he spon­sors aimed at lifestyle changes for health improve­ment.

Shan­non Bur­nett, who is facil­i­tat­ing the Mel­bourne group, asked me to par­tic­i­pate because she thought I could be “an open-minded doc­tor.” And I can be. If you’ve read “More Health Less Care” or my other blog post­ings you know I believe in keep­ing an open mind and learn­ing new things. But it’s not always easy. I have to work at it. So I did.

Bur­nett

About 20 of us came together at the Hene­gar Cen­ter in down­town Mel­bourne. Shan­non intro­duced her­self and spoke briefly about the pur­pose of the gath­er­ing.

Her warm and car­ing approach cre­ated a relaxed atmos­phere, invit­ing open­ness from the par­tic­i­pants. Then we intro­duced our­selves, express­ing our own goals and rea­sons for par­tic­i­pa­tion.

For myself, I want to gain more expe­ri­ence help­ing oth­ers change and I want to adopt a more plant-based diet. Every­one was friendly and sup­port­ive. Div­ing into Gary Null’s health improve­ment cur­ricu­lum we watched his film, “Seven Steps to Per­fect Health” which took most of the remain­ing time. I liked the movie.

The mes­sage was upbeat and invit­ing, the steps made sense, and I learned some new things about veg­e­tar­ian cui­sine. But that doesn’t mean I agreed with every­thing I heard that night. Or that I am pre­pared to live like Gary does — because right now I’m not.

Keep­ing an open mind doesn’t require that I imme­di­ately agree with every­thing I see, hear or read. What it does require is that I sus­pend the “auto­matic dis­agree­ment” that seems to pop up when­ever I’m exposed to novel ideas that threaten my cur­rent beliefs. So I spent the evening just “not dis­agree­ing” and tak­ing it all in.

Who knows where it will lead. It’s impor­tant for me not to worry about that right now and just keep an open mind. I’ve heard open-mindedness explained like this: We humans put all ideas in three “buck­ets,” I agree, I dis­agree, and I don’t know and need to learn more. It’s only from the “I don’t know” bucket that we can learn and grow.

Being open-minded means keep­ing that bucket pretty full and resist­ing the urge to quickly fill the other two. The evening fin­ished with a small amount of dis­cus­sion and expres­sions of mutual sup­port.

Shan­non asked us each to take one or two con­crete steps toward bet­ter health and be pre­pared to dis­cuss our progress at the next meet­ing in two weeks. I have already restarted my food diary, and I am plan­ning a “field trip” to a local whole food coop­er­a­tive this week. I want to exper­i­ment with some new foods and recipes. I’ll keep you updated on the expe­ri­ence as we progress through the six-month cur­ricu­lum.

If you would like more infor­ma­tion on par­tic­i­pat­ing, con­tact Bur­nett via email at brevardhealthsupport@​gmail.​com