 During his career at Duke, Dr. Kempner treated more than 18,000 patients with his rice diet, which was originally designed as a treatment for kidney failure and out-of-control high blood pressure at a time when those diagnoses were like a death sentence. Patients who at that time would have died in all other hospitals had a reasonable chance of survival if they came under Kempner's care. The results were so dramatic that many experienced physicians suspected him of falsifying data, because he was reversing terminal diseases with rice and fruit. Diseases understood to be incurable by the best of modern medicine at the time. Intensive investigations into his clinic vindicated his work, which other researchers were then able to replicate. Kempner was criticized for his lack of controls, meaning that when patients came to him, he didn't randomly allocate half to his rice treatment and put the other half on conventional therapy to see which group did better. Kempner argued that the patients each acted as their own controls. For example, here's a patient before the rice diet. The medical profession threw everything they had at him, and his blood pressures were still as high as 220 over 160, whereas normals considered more like around 120 over 80, which is where the rice diet took him. Had he not been given the rice diet, it's true his pressures might have been even lower, zero over zero, because he'd likely be dead. The quote-unquote control group in Kempner's day had a survival expectancy estimated at six months. To randomize patients to conventional care would be to randomize them to their deaths. One can compare those who stuck to the diet, though, to those who didn't. Here's a chart showing the survival of 70 of the sickest of the sick that showed up at their clinic. Of those that started the rice diet but then stopped it within a year, five lived, and 19 ended up dead. For those who made it a year but then gave up on the diet, instead of an 80% chance of dying, they had more like a 50-50, flip of the coin. But of those that stuck with the program, 90% lived to tell the tale. Beginning of the 1950s, drugs became available that effectively reduced blood pressure in hypertension, leading to a decreased demand for the rice diet. What conclusions can we draw from this all-but-forgotten therapy for hypertension? Not only was it the first effective therapy for high blood pressure, and may be equal to or more effective than our current multi-drug treatments. This causes one to speculate on the current practice of placing patients on one drug than another, perhaps a third, until the blood pressure is controlled with lip service advocacy of moderate reduction in dietary sodium, fat, and protein intake, while the impressive effectiveness of the rice fruit diet, which is able to quickly stop the leakage from arteries and lower increased intracranial pressure, reduce heart size, reverse the EKG changes, reverse heart failure, reduce weight, and markedly improve diabetes is ignored. So should we return to the Kempner protocol of starting with the most effective therapy, saving drugs for patients who fail to respond or who are unable or unwilling to restrict their diet? Look, today many people follow a vegetarian diet as a choice, which is similar to what Kempner was often able to transition people to. After their high blood pressure was cured by the rice diet, patients were often able to gradually transition to a less strenuous dietary regime without added medications and with no return of the elevated blood pressure. So if the Kempner sequence of a strict plant-based diet to a more sane plant-based type diet offers the quickest and best approach to effective therapy, why isn't it still in greater use? The powerful role of the pharmaceutical industry in steering medical care away from dietary treatment to medications should be noted. Who profits from dietary treatment? Who provides the support for investigation and the funds for clinical trials? There's more to overcome than just the patient's reluctance to change their diet. What Kempner wrote to a patient in 1954 was as true then as it is now, 60 years later. Disease can be very useful, properly employed, and used in conjunction with intensive dietary treatment. However, high blood pressure with all its possible complications— heart disease, kidney disease, stroke, blindness— is still treated very casually, a striking contrast to the attitude towards other diseases like cancer. Since patients, physicians, and the chemical industry prefer the taking, prescribing, and selling of drugs to dietary treatment inconvenient to patient and physician, and have no benefit to the pharmaceutical industry, the mortality figures for these diseases will still remain rather appalling. Despite hundreds of drugs on the market now, high blood pressure remains the number one cause of death and disability in the world, killing off 9 million people a year, and diet treats the underlying cause. As Dr. Kempner explained to a patient, look, if you should find a heap of manure on your living room floor, I do not recommend that you go buy some air freshener and perfume. I recommend you get a bucket and a shovel, and a strong scrubbing brush. Then, when your living room floor is clean again, then fine. Feel free to freshen things up, but once the underlying cause has been removed. As the great physician Maimonides said about 800 years ago, any illness that can be treated by diet alone should be treated by no other means.