Medicine of the Future Perfect?

Even a health guru must sometimes learn from an experience of failure, such that the guru will have learned a truth in time to backpedal before harming anyone outside the immediate family, for example, Michael Butterworth's father, who 'learned' at age 20 that gazing directly at the sun would heal one's eyes of their afflictions, a 'truth' that was literally 180 degrees at variance with the real truth, namely, that turning away from the sun and gazing in that opposite direction would better prevent afflictions of the eyes.

This has nothing necessarily to do with food, but Butterworth's father combined the solar teaching with teachings about food and health, and he learned his lesson about the falsity of the solar teaching by trying it on his brother and temporarily damaging his brother's eyes.

Butterworth would perhaps suggest that his father learned merely a narrow lesson about direct sunlight's effect on eyes, but not on the rest of the body, for his father insisted that his children practice sunbathing even when science had proven the causal link to skin cancer.

Much of what Butterworth writes on his father's obsession with health is amusing, even at times laughable, until one remembers that the children were forced into sharing their father's obsessions, and it's then not so funny, as Butterworth lets his readers know.

Butterworth's essay can be found on pages 221-232 of Kaplan's Octo-Emanations.