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BOARD MEMBER RETROSPECTIVE: MICHAEL L. CULBERT, Sc.D.
By Scott C. Tips Editor of Health Freedom News Board Member and Legal Counsel for NHF
December 02, 2004
This column is intended to let NHF members and other readers learn more about the current members of the NHF Board of Governors, but in this case we must make an exception for a very exceptional member of the Board who recently passed away. Dr. Michael Culbert died suddenly of an aneurysm on September 11, 2004, at the age of 67, while at breakfast in Mexico. It was completely unexpected at the time; and, needless to say, it was a shock to all of us who knew him, although some had worried for some time about his poor eating habits and counseled him to change. Despite this advice, he unfortunately did not; and it may have caught up with him last September. But Michael had been so long an important fixture of the health-freedom movement and a guiding light that we just assumed that he would be around forever.
A Man Wearing Many Hats
At the time of his death, Michael wore many hats: He was a member of the Board of Governors of the National Health Federation, he was president of the International Council for Health Freedom (ICHF), he was the editor of ICHF’s newsletter, and he was the Information Director and Vice President of the International BioCare Hospital and Medical Center in Tijuana, Mexico. But that was only because he had shed so many other hats over the years.
A life-long investigative reporter and writer, he had been the editor of Health Freedom News for several years until earlier this year. The vast experience that he had brought to our magazine as a writer and editor harked as far back as the early 1970s when he was one of the reporters and the editor of the Berkeley Daily Gazette in Northern California. While working for that newspaper, Michael got caught up in the State of California’s persecution of Dr. John Richardson, an M.D. who was using laetrile to treat his cancer patients. His libertarian/conservative fervor for medical freedom led him to become not only a fervent supporter of Dr. Richardson but also to travel around the United States promoting the freedom-of-health choice issue.
The Berkeley newspaper wanted Michael to start writing the other side of the health-freedom issue, which Michael refused to do. So, the paper fired him. At that time, Maureen Salaman, who had previously heard of his health-freedom articles and had gone over to meet with him about health-freedom issues, immediately snapped him up to start writing and editing a pro-health-freedom newsletter called The Choice.
Who Also Wrote Many Books
Soon thereafter, Michael began to use his considerable talents as a writer and thinker to author the first of his more than two-dozen books, Vitamin B17: Forbidden Weapon Against Cancer (Arlington House, 1974). This book exposed orthodox medicine’s war against laetrile and defended the use of laetrile in the treatment of cancer.
This book was followed in turn by many others, including Freedom From Cancer (1976) and How You Can Beat The Killer Diseases (1977) (co-authored with Harold Harper). He also wrote and saw published booklets called Live Cell Therapy: Medicine for the New Millennium and Nutritional and Herbal Factors in the Prevention and Management of Cancer (co-authored with Dante I. Camino).
However, more recently, Michael wrote CFS: Conquering the Crippler (1993) and his best-known and largest book Medical Armageddon (1998). Medical Armageddon details the medical calamities of the world, including biological warfare and the suppression of alternative therapies, but goes on to describe what the author sees as the emerging new paradigm in healing for the 21st century.
The books mentioned above are only some of the books authored by Michael, numerous copies of which have been sold worldwide and translated into Spanish, German, and other languages. For his writings, as well as for his health-freedom advocacy, he won several awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the New Zealand Charter of Health Practitioners, and was named by India’s Zoroastrian College as a “Distinguished Academician.”
But Still Enjoyed Meeting People and Making A Difference
Despite his relentless workload, Michael continued to attend numerous international conferences where he was a welcomed speaker and lecturer. Besides speaking at the conventions of the National Health Federation, Michael also spoke at meetings and conferences throughout the United States, Canada, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Guatemala, the Philippines, India, Turkey, and in Europe. He was eclectic and would reach out to everyone who had a genuine interest in the subjects of alternative medicine or health freedom.
He was a co-founder, president, and chairman of the Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy, Inc.; and he took part in the Office of Technology Assessment’s 1990 study of unconventional cancer treatments. In the early 1990s, he also had his hand in the founding of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
Above all, he was an honest man with enormous patience except for those whom he saw as unethical. He was also a very independent and cerebral deep-thinker. As Maureen Salaman said, “He will be missed throughout the world for many reasons, but most notably because he was a fine human being who dedicated his life to the ideal of health freedom, traveling internationally to find and promote alternative cures for AIDS and cancer.”
