This is a very pleasant book, in which Dr. John Kelly's personal, anonymized case studies from his general practice, complement T. Colin Campbell's path breaking study of nutrition in diverse villages and populations in China. Campbell's main finding was that "poor" populations in China (and the Philippines) do not contract the sorts of cancers experienced by richer populations (in their own countries, but especially U.S. or Europe), who live on a Western style affluent diet heavy in consumption of animal protein. Although Kelly limits himself to giving nutrition advice about cancer, Campbell found that the Western diet gives rise to a whole myriad of other diseases, ranging from obesity to heart failure, while a plant-based diet, which allows you to avoid meat, egg and milk products, rarely gives rise to such Western diseases. Kelly is always very careful never to put doubt into his patients' minds about specialized cancer treatment recommended by their oncologists. On the the contrary, he does everything to reinforce and help along the work of his specialist brethren.
He suggests to his patients how good, plant-based nutrition can bolster the cancer treatment and then keeps a record of what works and what doesn't work. He is also very frank about the cancers that do not respond to a plant-based diet, such as pancreatic cancer once it has declared itself. However, it would be interesting to discover if pancreatic cancer occurs in people who eat a plant based diet
There are a couple of recurring themes throughout the book, one of them is that, if you relapse back into feeding your cancer after starving it of the animal protein it needs, it can spring back to life with a vengeance. Some of his patients follow his recommendations with patience and a good level of constancy and they can enjoy significant remissions and near-disappearance of the cancer. Other patients, a good example of whom is one young sportsman--brought to Dr. Kelly by his desperate father when his son was at death's door--who after near-miraculous improvement, plunged back into a regimen of after-match drinking and bacon-and-egg heavy Irish breakfasts and did not survive.
Dr. Kelly's first recommendation to a patient who has just discovered his cancer is to read The China Study. I read the China Study after reading Dr. Kelly's book. It is an awesome piece of work, but does not focus on individual cases. It is therefore nicely complemented by this book, which contains the sort of concrete examples that only a devoted general practitioner can offer up. I recommend you read both books. John Kelly's book can be read at a single, long sitting. But the China Study will need a couple of 8-hour days.
Why the "ordinary hero" title of my review? This has to do with another double-barreled recurring theme of Dr. Kelly's book, "Where did I, an ordinary general practitioner, come up with the will (he doesn't mention the word "heroism") to fight against the skepticism of my more specialized, and therefore more eminent, brethren who don't wish to hear about the links between nutrition and cancer and my personal successes with my patients, and what can I do to make them take nutrition seriously?"
In the quest for signs of what has made him willing to take a stand for independence and against the common wisdom of the crowd, Kelly searches through formative experiences from the Achill Island summers of his taking responsibility for captaining a boat, and his internship at a hospital in Alabama in the 1960s . One of those Alabama experiences was to prevent a much more senior surgeon from tying up the Fallopian tubes of a young black woman who had come into the hospital to have her appendix removed. To John Kelly's surprise, he learned that the practice was common among surgeons who wished to keep black population numbers down, and it was the first time a surgeon had been challenged when performing that racist act on a patient. Quaking in his boots, Kelly bravely reported the surgeon's conduct to the upper echelons of the hospital, who didn't really want to intervene, but his example led to the surgeon in question telling Kelly a couple of weeks later that, in response to the younger man's unexpected challenge, he and other surgeons in the hospital were voluntarily going to stop the practice of tying up Fallopian tubes.
It will be obvious to anybody who reads this book, if not to Kelly himself, that what drives him to persevere against the crowd, in treating his present day patients in accordance with The China Study, is the sort of inborn decency and concern for his fellow humans that prompted him to speak out for in defense of life, both born and unborn, in that Alabama operating theater.
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