In case you are unfamiliar with the Edison quote, I am reproducing it here visually:
I just ran across this quote recently and, frankly, it blew my mind. Edison died in 1931. How about that for a forward-looking idea?
The whole purpose of this blog is to live healthy through diet and exercise and to use as little as possible drugs and unnatural substances in our systems.
In reading up on that quote, it turns out that chiropractors have used it to bolster their practice over the years. I have no quarrel with this. I have used chiropractors on and off for years for skeletal and muscular matters. They worked.
But, did Edison really say it?
I checked with Snopes, “the definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.”
Here is some of what Snopes had to say:
“…we turned up several newspaper articles from late 1902 and early 1903 that reprinted Edison’s predictions for the upcoming year. Those predictions included some comments from him about the future of medicine, a portion of which incorporated the “doctor of the future” statement now attributed to him:
“Nineteen hundred and three will bring great advances in surgery, in the study of bacteria, in the knowledge of the cause and prevention of disease. Medicine is played out. Every new discovery of bacteria shows us all the more convincingly that we have been wrong and that the million tons of stuff we have taken was all useless.
“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease….”
I am thrilled to learn that the visionary Thomas Edison pointed in the same direction that I have been aiming for the past six years. Granted his statement was made before the development of antibiotics and many of the effective drugs we find in our medicine cabinets today.
Nonetheless, I am thinking of the needless suffering and deaths resulting from smoking, overeating and neglect of our need to exercise our bodies. Think how much healthcare costs would decline if we just learned to take care of ourselves as Edison suggested. We need to quit trying to solve our careless health practices with pills. Remember, over 60% of us are overweight and more than 30% are obese, not to mention teenagers coming down with adult onset diabetes, all as a result of bad food choices.
Here is a quote from my Page on the harm of smoking, “Tobacco use is the single largest cause of preventable cause of death in the United States. On average people who smoke die about 10 years sooner than non-smokers. The New England Journal of Medicine.”
I wish that quote from Edison would set off a light bulb in people’s heads and get them to managing their health better.
Tony
Wellness Secrets of a SuperAger 