Editor’s
Note: Enjoy a
poem by Dr. Hunt in Songs of Eretz Poetry
Review published simultaneously with this essay: http://eretzsongs.blogspot.com/2015/12/poem-of-day-leaves-by-john-hunt-md.html.
My former college classmate, and current friend and
fellow physician poet John Hunt, MD, a pediatric pulmonologist and
allergist/immunologist, recently published “an asthma doctor’s guide for
parents” entitled Your Child’s Asthma. It is available from Amazon for $16.95 in
a large sized paperback, $9.99 for Kindle http://www.amazon.com/Your-Childs-Asthma-Guide-Parents/dp/0985933216. The book is about 200 pages in length
and may easily be read over a weekend.
The ease of the read is greatly facilitated by Dr. Hunt’s
non-patronizing, non-condescending, storyteller’s word choices and tone.
Although written for the layman, students of the medical
arts would also benefit from Dr. Hunt’s wisdom, if one were willing to set
aside his central thesis that asthma is a symptom rather than a disease. Dr. Hunt admits to being an allopath in
his introduction, but then violates the cardinal rule of allopathy--that there
is almost always only one cause for all of a patient’s symptoms. Dr. Hunt insists that the hallmarks of
asthma--wheezing, coughing, and shortness of breath--are actually caused by
various insults to the respiratory system, such as viral infection and allergies--multiple
causes. Mainstream allopaths
believe that asthmatics have something inherently amiss that allows usually
harmless exposures to trigger asthmatic symptoms--one cause (an asthmatic is an
asthmatic because he has asthma).
It is a shame that Dr. Hunt chose to couch his otherwise
excellent advice and easy-to-understand explanations of complex material within
his non-mainstream paradigm for asthma, as readers might be mislead into
believing that their own, otherwise trusted, mainstream physicians do not know
how to treat asthma or are behind the times. Worse, it is a shame because many otherwise willing readers
will pass over his otherwise helpful book.
