Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

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How was an Indian to know that eating juniper berries would make one's liver function better, one's skin color change and one's energy increase? None of these effects could be immediately apparent. The effects might take days or weeks or longer. And yet they knew it.

Writing in the Winter 1975 edition of Indigence, a Brazilian Indian woman, Carmem de Novais, reports that the Indian people of the Amazon jungle "have been able to identify, locate and use plants for curing specific ailments as well as for arrow poisons and fish-stunning substances." While Western science has not yet arrived at a chemical contraceptive that does not harm women, she says, "the Amazon people have been using medicinal plants as a successful contraceptive method for many thousands of years.

"The medicines developed and produced through 'modern technology' are usually extracted from medicinal herbs and plants. The major sources of information about plants and their medicinal uses are the people who live in harmony and very close to the cycles of Mother Earth. The drug companies would take many years if they were to research all the plants by themselves in an attempt to discover their medicinal uses." De Novais mentions Indian medicines such as coca, ipecac, quinine, curare, among others, and traces how some of these led to anesthetics such as procaine and novocaine, and to cures for amebic dysentery, malaria, heart disease, and poisons, and to treatments for nerve disorders, epilepsy and others. All of these were first used by Indians.

"The drug companies secure an adequate supply of the basic plant material, sometimes buying off Indian land for production, and sell the drugs derived from these plants to the world and to the people who first told them about them as well," de Novais notes. "They make great profits from their 'discoveries' without any monetary reward to the Indians from whom they acquired their 'drug secret.' " Quite the opposite in fact. By taking over the land and turning the Indians into laborers, while introducing the money system and imposing Western-style medicine, the drug companies put the Indians in the position of having to buy the medicines they formerly had in abundance.

The question remains: How did the Indians know about the curative powers of plants in the first place?

While researching the portion of this book that deals with the consequences of humans ingesting as much artificial light as we do now, particularly television light, I came upon an odd report in the New England Journal of Medicine. A team of doctors discovered that infant jaundice could be cured by ordinary sunlight. This discovery led to a spurt of articles on the possibility that natural light might be healthy for humans. What a revelation!

The doctors had undertaken their study of the effects of sunlight on jaundiced infants when a day nurse remarked that the infants near the open window were improving faster than those who were away from it. Then, while working on the study, someone discovered that over seven thousand years ago, Egyptians treated jaundiced infants by placing them in the sunlight and feeding them an herb that had a beneficial interaction with the sun's rays.

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