(1997) Based on a true story, Meryl Streep plays the small town Midwest mother of a child who has severe epilepsy. After experiencing many, many tests, drugs, and other medical techniques, she and her son are left without options and without hope. Instead of opting for the surgery where they sever the brain hemispheres the mother presses on, studies everything she can find about the illness, and, against the wishes of their local doctor, decides to take her child to the Johns Hopkins Hospital where controversial ketogenic diet studies are being done.

I guess what upset me about the movie (based on a real-life story) was the fact that, because she wanted to remove her child from the hospital, the powers that be were trying to declare her an unfit mother and get custody of her child and remove him from her making him a ward of the state so the hospital could do experiments on him. Exasperating!

After getting to the Johns Hopkins Center, her child went on the diet and his epilepsy resolved—actually fairly quickly. The best part of the movie is the ending where they run the credits, and most of the characters in the movie were played by epileptics who had been “cured” with the ketogenic diet.

I recommend the movie First Do No Harm for anyone with epilepsy or knowing anyone with epilepsy (human or animals) because adding specific fats to the diet can control and/or greatly reduce the incidence of seizures.

After watching this movie, I advised a pet-owner to add a slice of bacon to her dog’s diet each morning. Apparently it did the trick because two years later she saw me at a seminar and came up to thank me for the advice. She had done that for both her dog—and herself! She had not told me that she also had epilepsy.

I often tell my clients that often, when people don’t listen to other people’s advice for certain health issues any longer, God brings them a pet with the same dis-ease. This way they can look at things from a different perspective. When they see their animal friend heal, often they regain hope for their own health challenge. That is what happened for her.

Of course there are other wonderful herbs and supplements that are used in overcoming epilepsy, and for most cases of epilepsy, it is fairly easy to get to the core cause, treat it and then control the electrical imbalances of the brain, but the bacon trick for dogs works wonders. Humans usually need different types of fats—not always bacon. It’s something to think about.

Read more about the ketogenic diet

 

Helpful Links and References:

• Epilepsy Foundation: https://www.epilepsyfoundation.org/answerplace/Medical/treatment/diet/
• Epilepsy and Seizure handout: /SpecificDiseases/epilepsy.htm
• Johns Hopkins Ketogenic Diet Program:

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/neurology_neurosurgery/specialty_areas/epilepsy/about_us/ketogenic_diet.html