The "Institute for the Study of Culturogenic Disease"
(ISCD) is dedicated to discovering the lifestyles that cause disease. You cannot adequately prevent or treat a disease unless you know its cause. We identify these lifestyles that cause disease, test the appropriate lifestyle change in a preliminary study of anywhere from dozens to thousands of people, and, if it works, encourage SELF STUDIES for the general public. All the lifestyle changes proposed are harmless, and typically involve ending a bad behavior rather than starting a new one, although we do recommend some behaviors that we have found are healthful. In this way we perform further research on large numbers of people and solve their health problems at the same time.

The Institute has a unique place in the field of medicine. As Applied Medical Anthropologists we employ the fields of biochemistry, anthropology, and medicine in our efforts to identify culturogenic, or culture-caused, disease. The Institute is a program of the Good Shepherd Foundation, a non-profit research and education foundation founded in 1949. In addition to performing original research, we educate health care professionals and the public on the nature of lifestyle-caused diseases and how to prevent and treat them with lifestyle changes. We do not treat disease. We prevent or cure damaging lifestyles. This sets us apart from profit-oriented medicine, which focuses on disease treatment, rather than on prevention.

In addition to research into disease-causing lifestyles, The Institute conducts research into healthful, natural lifestyles on its 67-acre SELF STUDY Retreat Center in Hawaii. Here the culturally “brainwashed” can become “nature washed”, affording them an opportunity to try new lifestyle practices in an unthreatening, culturally free, healthy environment. This also enables us to identify those natural lifestyles that promote health, offering an alternative to the self-destructive lifestyles taught by our culture.