It’s been a long time since anything in The Daily World prompted a letter to the editor, but several things motivate me now, including the recent article about a potential $9 million health center in Montesano, and a Nov. 21 piece titled “Health Care Pros Consider Lifestyle Medicine.”

As many of you long timers know, as an herbalist, I’ve faithfully written about and taught the way of herbs as natural alternatives to chemical medicine and also shared information about lifestyle ailments — especially drugs that destroy immune systems, and fast foods that foster obesity, and excessive use of sugar and yeast products that create “candida” (an imbalance between the body’s good and bad bacteria.) My biggest concerns, though, were always about genetically altered food and the irradiation of food with nuclear weapons waste.

Now the American College of Lifestyle Medicine is urging prevention of disease instead of merely diagnosing the ill, prescribing a pill and sending the patient home with a bill. Educating patients about their lifestyle behavioral choices is the first step. Well, hallelujah! It’s been a long time coming!

As for a health center in Montesano: good luck, since the local clinic has had bad luck keeping a doctor for more than a year. The proposed park and ride location south of the tracks is totally uninspiring, too. With its current piles of rock, bark and dumpster glass everywhere, it’s hard to envision a future healing environment.

A bright spot for me in The Daily World’s Jan. 25 Lifestyle section was the great article about bromeliads — cousins of pineapples. Dauna Koval is an excellent writer and obviously knows her subject well. The piece also gave me a chuckle, for I once worked for the president of the American Bromeliad Society (and a college VP) who brought a different bromeliad plant of the week into the office regularly. I can see now his look of displeasure when the auto shop gang gave us “Edselus Extinctus” made from a brake drum, spark plugs, etc.

My last impetus for this letter was Denny Martin’s unbelievable labeling of climate change as a scam! He obviously never learned about cause and effect — that every action has an opposite reaction — or that what’s happening now with the changing climate is far from a normal occurrence, but the results of what We the People have done to Mother Earth. For shame!

Isa “Kitty” Mady

Montesano