Pioneers of a new medicine: meet a group of renegade doctors who are part of wave of change revolutionizing American medicine

Vegetarian Times, Feb, 1997 by Eric Patterson, Luise Light

When Jeff Starre spoke up in class to ask questions about alternatives to drugs that weren't very effective and had side effects, his fellow students and professors greeted his queries with derision. Starre realized he'd have to find the answers himself While still in medical school at Wright State University, he sought out conventions and seminars on homeopathy and pulled all-nighters to watch videotaped courses from the Canadian Academy of Homeopathy.

Starre's superiors came down hard on him. "You're wasting your time," one of Starre's residency advisers told him during a two-hour tongue-lashing. "You're too smart to be learning about this. Why don't you learn about real medicine?" When Starre and his wife had their first child at home with a nurse-midwife attending, a senior pediatrics resident berated Starre: "I can't believe you'd risk the safety of your child," he told him. "Parents like you ought to be reported to social services for child abuse." Starre learned to keep quiet as he doggedly pursued his outside studies. After graduating in 1990, he opened what is now a thriving homeopathic family practice in Winesburg, Ohio.

Starre had no trouble convincing patients his methods were sound, but for other doctors, patient skepticism was a tough hurdle to overcome. After graduating from the State University of New York in Brooklyn in 1991, Richard DeAndrea read about Dr. Dean Ornish's success in treating heart disease with a vegetarian diet. Deandrea became convinced giving up meat, rather than taking drugs, could cure many illnesses. To put those convictions into practice, Deandrea needed to be in a position of authority but such opportunities were limited for a young doctor of 28. In 1993, he took a job that few wanted: medical director of a private clinic in the Watts section of Los Angeles, which had been gutted by die riots that followed the Rodney King verdict. The Watts clinic, he believed, was the perfect testing ground for his ideas. The majority of patients were overweight and suffered from a host of chronic ailments, including hypertension, diabetes, asthma and recurring bronchitis.

To say DeAndrea's patients were wary would be putting it mildly. When he stopped dispensing codeine, the legal and addictive painkiller the previous doctor had prescribed to two-thirds of the patients, Deandrea was threatened at knife and gunpoint. DeAndrea hired a security guard and focused on his next problem: convincing lifelong meat eaters to go vegetarian. When logic didn't work, DeAndrea tried shock techniques. He told his patients that their "soul food" diet -- the high-fat, high-salt foods many considered part of their cultural heritage -- was killing them. "It was like telling them their grandmother was killing them," says Deandrea. For three months, DeAndrea provoked anger but not change.

The tide finally turned when DeAndrea researched the history of soul food and learned it was really slave food. When he told his patients soul food came from the parts of the animal that the slave master didn't want, they became much more open to exploring what truly was their heritage, the legume- and fruit-based diet of their ancestors in Africa. DeAndrea started die Watts Health Challenge, daring patients to go off dairy products within four weeks, not for him, but for themselves. Next came eliminating red meat and pork, again over a four-week period. Then chicken and fish, and finally, white sugar and soda. Within six months, DeAndrea was vindicated.