In those days, your choice of medical care was pretty limited: You could pick Dr. Smith or Dr. Jones. And neither of them suspected that vitamin C was good for anything but curing scurvy.

Everywhere you went, there was the constant cigarette smoke—yours or someone else's. Pro athletes, movie stars, and doctors endorsed various brands, assuring you that there's "Not a cough in a carload."

And when you went to a shoe store, you could check your fit by putting your feet into an X-ray box, which bombarded your body—and the entire store—with enough X rays to kill half an army.

It's a wonder any of us survived to tell about it.

Alternative Medicine Blooms, and the Medical Wars Heat Up. But starting in the early 1950s, a huge wave of biomedical research crashed onto the American scene, swamping and washing away much of the medical ignorance and sleepy complacency of that time.

Spurred on by new research money and blooming discoveries in basic biology (such as DNA), medical science exploded into hundreds of specialties.

Also at this time, other healing fields (widely regarded then as "fringe" disciplines) began to blossom. The seeds of conflict sprouted.

All this new knowledge saved millions of lives, helped people live better and longer—and greatly increased the wrangling and sniping in medical circles! Our Dilemma Today: Too Many Cures

Until the 1950s, we just didn't know much about the major health problems. Perhaps 90% of our scientific studies have come since that time.

Now we have the opposite problem. Thanks to vast worldwide research, we now have...

* Too many ways to cure cancer

* Too many ways to cure heart disease

* Too many ways to cure chronic fatigue syndrome

* Too many ways to reverse atherosclerosis

* Too many ways to stop strokes

* Too many ways to slow down aging, and

* Far too many ways to lose weight!

As the French would say, we have an embarras du choix, an embarrassment of choices. Fifty years of research has given us mountains of studies, thousands of proven cures, and a wealth of new options. We have proudly replaced our scientific ignorance with scientific confusion. The end result: After years of reading, you're still not sure what to do about your fibroids or hypoglycemia!

This is called progress. It's also called INFORMATION OVERLOAD. It's great to have a choice—but which remedy do you choose? An End to Ignorance, an End to Confusion, finally, sanity and peace have come. Hallelujah.

The medical wars are coming to an end, and the competing factions in the health care community have started to shake hands and get to know each other. Already, 86% of family physicians say they're willing to refer patients to alternative practitioners. (If this were a speech, we'd pause here for applause.) And 70% of MDs in a recent survey said they'd actually like to get trained in one or more alternative therapies themselves! This amazes even us at the Institute for Blended Medicine.

The Most Obvious Evidence of Change: Integrated medicine clinics are appearing everywhere—often associated with a leading university teaching hospital. Medical doctors and doctors of osteopathy are inviting chiropractors, nutritionists, naturopaths, and dozens of other kinds of therapists to share their offices and combine their treatments of shared patients. This is the most remarkable medical advance of the last 150 years. It is going to save countless lives.

Just imagine: You'll no longer have to wonder if you're doing the wisest thing by going to an MD instead of a doctor of herbal medicine (or acupuncturist or homeopath or whatever). You'll get the best of all possible worlds in integrated medicine clinics that strive to meet your needs the best way—and with little bias.

We of the Institute for Blended Medicine have just released this huge handbook as a foundation for the entire field—Bottom Line's Complete Book of Integrated Health Solutions: 2,354 Faster, Easier, Better Cutting-Edge Cures, a pivotal work by blended medicine pioneer Michael Castleman.

Bottom Line Secrets