How and When to Be Your Own Doctor Part 22

I never did find out why I awakened from general anesthetic with two b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but I have since supposed that due to my tender age the surgeon was reluctant to disfigure me without at least asking me for permission, or giving me some time to prepare psychologically. When I came out of anesthesia he told me that the lump was malignant, and that he had removed it, and that he needed to do a radical mastectomy to improve my prognosis over the next few years. He asked me to think it over, but he signed me up on his surgery list for the following Monday.

I did think it over and found I was profoundly annoyed at the idea of being treated like I was just a statistic, so I decided that I would be unique. I made a firm decision that I would be well and stay well--and I was for the next fifteen years. The decision healed me.

When I was 37 I had a recurrence. At the time I had in residence Ethyl and Marge, the two far-gone breast cancer cases I already told you about. I also had in residence a young woman with a breast tumor who had not undergone any medical treatment, not even a lumpectomy.

(I will relate her case in detail shortly.) I was too identified emotionally with helping these three, overly-empathetic due to my own history. I found myself taking on their symptoms and their pain.

I went so far into sympathy as to grow back my tumor--just as it had the first time--a lump mushroomed from nothing to the size of a goose egg in only three weeks in exactly the same place as the first one.

Just out of curiosity I went in for a needle biopsy. Once again it was judged to be malignant, and I got the same pressure from the surgeon for immediate surgery. This time, however, I had an alternative system of healing that I believed in. So I went home, continued to care for my very sick residents, and began to work on myself.

The first thing I had to confront about myself was that I was being a compa.s.sionate fool. I needed to learn how to maintain my own personal boundaries, and clearly delineate what stuff in my mind and my body was really mine and what was another's. I needed to apply certain mental techniques of self-protection known to and practiced by many healers. I knew beyond doubt that I had developed sympathetic breast cancer because a similar phenomena had happened to me before. Once, when I had previously been working on a person with very severe back pain with hands-on techniques, I suddenly had the pain, and the client was totally free of it. So I protected myself when working with sick people. I would wash my hands and arms thoroughly with cold water, or with water and vinegar after contact.

I would shake off their "energy," have a cold shower, walk bare foot on the gra.s.s, and visualize myself well with intact boundaries.

These prophylaxes had been working for me, but I was particularly vulnerable to people with breast cancer.

I also began detoxification dieting, took more supplements, and used acupressure and reflexology as my main lines of attack. My healing diet consisted of raw food exclusively. I allowed myself fruits (not sweet fruits) and vegetables (including a lot of raw cabbage because vegetables in the cabbage family such as cauliflower and broccoli are known to have a healing effect on cancer), raw almonds, raw apricot kernels, and some sprouted grains and legumes. I drank diluted carrot juice, and a chlorophyll drink made up of wheat gra.s.s and barley green and aloe vera juice. I took echinaechia, red clover, and fenugreek seeds. I worked all the acupuncture points on my body that strengthen the immune system, including the thymus gland, lymph nodes, and spleen. I also worked the meridians, and reflex points for the liver, and large intestine. I ma.s.saged the breast along the natural lines of lymphatic drainage from the area.

Last, and of great importance, I knew that the treatment would work, and that the tumor would quickly disappear. It did vanish totally in three months. It would have gone away quicker if I had water fasted, but I was unable to do this because I needed physical strength to care for my resident patients and family.

Eighteen years have pa.s.sed since that episode, and I have had no further reappearance of breast tumors. At age 55 I still have all my body parts, and have had no surgery except the original lumpectomy.

Many, viewing my muscles and athletic performance, would say my health is exceptional but I know my own frailties and make sure I do not aggravate them. I still have exactly the same organ deficiencies as other cancer patients and must keep a very short leash on my lifestyle.

If for some reason I wanted to make my life very short, all I would have to do would be to abandon my diet, stop taking supplements, eat red meat and ice cream every day and be unhappy about something.

Incidentally, I have had many residential clients with breast cancer since then, and have not taken on their symptoms, so I can a.s.sume that I have safely pa.s.sed that hurdle.

I've helped dozens of cases of simple breast cancer where my treatment began before the cancer broadly spread. Kelly's case was not the easiest of this group, nor the hardest. Sometimes there was lymphatic involvement that the medical doctors had not yet treated in any way. All but one of my early-onset breast cancer cases recovered. I believe those are far better results than achieved by AMA treatment.

Before I crow too much, let me stress that every one of these women was a good candidate for recovery--under 40 years old, ambulatory and did not feel very sick. And most importantly, every one of them had received no other debilitating medical treatment except a needle biopsy or simple lumpectomy. None of these women had old tumors (known about for more than six months) and none of the tumors were enormous (nothing larger than a walnut).

Clearly, this group is not representative of the average breast cancer case. Hygienic therapy for cancer is a radical idea these days and tends to attract younger people, or older, desperate people who have already been through the works. In every one of my simple cases the tumors were reabsorbed by the body during the thirty days of water fasting and the client left happy.

Except one. I think I should describe this unsuccessful case, this "dirty case," so my readers get a more balanced idea of how fearsome cancer really isn't if the sick person can clearly resolve to get better and has no problem about achieving wellness.

Marie was an artisan and musician from Seattle who grew up back East in an upper-middle cla.s.s dysfunctional family. She was in her late twenties. She had been s.e.xually abused by an older brother, was highly reactive, and had never been able to communicate honestly with anyone except her lesbian lover (maybe, about some things).

Three years prior to coming to see me Marie had been medically diagnosed as having breast cancer and had been advised to have immediate surgery. She ignored this advice; Marie never told her friends, said nothing to her family and tried to conceal it from her lover because she did not want to disrupt their life together.

On her own, she did begin eating a Macrobiotic diet. In spite of this diet, the tumor grew, but grew very slowly. After two years the tumor was discovered by her lover, who after a year of exhausting and upsetting arguments, forced Marie to seek treatment. Since Marie adamantly refused to go the conventional medical route, she ended up on my doorstep as a compromise.

By this time the tumor was the size of a fist and had broken through the skin of the left breast. It was very ugly, very hard.

Biokinesiology showed the usual deadly triangle and other a.s.sociated organ weakneses typical of cancer. Marie began fasting on water with colonics and poultices and bodywork and counseling and supplements.

At the end of the water fast, Marie looked much healthier, with clear eyes and clear skin and had a sort of s.h.i.+ne about her, but the tumor had only receded enough for the skin to close over it; it was still large, and very hard. To fully heal, Marie probably needed at least two more water fasts of equal length interspersed with a few months on a raw food diet. But she lacked the personal toughness to confront another fast in the near future. Nor was she emotionally up to what she regarded as the deprivation of a long-term raw foods healing diet.

So I advised her to seek other treatment. Still unwilling to accept standard medical management of her case, Marie chose to go to the Philippines to have "psychic surgery." She was excited and optimistic about this; I was interested myself because I was dubious about this magical procedure; if Marie went I would have a chance to see the results (if any) on a person I was very familiar with. Marie had her tickets and was due to leave in days when her lover, against Marie's directly-stated wishes, called her parents and informed them of what was happening.

The parents had known nothing of Marie's cancer and were shocked, upset, outraged! They had not known Marie was a lesbian, much less that their daughter was flirting with (from their view) obvious quackery. Their daughter needed immediate saving and her parents and brother (the one who had abused her) flew to Oregon and surprisingly appeared the next day in a state of violent rage. They threatened lawsuits, police, incarceration, they threatened to have their daughter civilly committed as unable to take care of herself. They thought everything Marie had done for the last three years was my fault. I was lucky to stay out of jail. Of course, all of this was why Marie had not told them in the first place; she had wanted to avoid this kind of a scene.

Marie did not have enough personal integrity to withstand the domination of her immediate family. They put her in a hospital, where Marie had a radical mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation.

a.s.sured that they had done everything that should have been done, the self-righteous parents went back home. Marie never recovered from chemotherapy and radiation. She died in the hospital surrounded by her lesbian friends who took dedicated, ever-so-sympathetic turns maintaining an emotional round-the-clock vigil.

Marie's death was partly my fault. She was an early case of mine. At the time I did not yet understand the total effect of lack of ethics and irresponsibility on illness. Had Marie really wanted to live in the first place, she would have sought treatment three years earlier. In our counseling sessions she always evaded this question and I had not been wise enough to pin her down with my knee on her chest and make her answer up. Marie had too many secrets from everybody and was never fully honest in any of her relations.h.i.+ps, including with me. I think she only came to Great Oaks at her lover's insistence and to the day she died was trying to pretend that nothing was wrong.

All Marie really wanted from her life was to be loved and have a lot of loving attention. In the end, her dramatic death scene gave her that, which is probably why she manifested cancer and kept it and eventually, died from it.

The name for this game is "secondary gain." A lot of sick people are playing it. Their illness lets them win their deepest desire; they get love, attention, revenge, sympathy, complete service, pampering, create guilt in others. When sick people receive too much secondary gain they never get well.

One of the hardest things about being a healer is that one acc.u.mulates an ever-enlarging series of dirty, failed cases like this one. It is depressing and makes a person want to quit doctoring. Whenever I get involved with a case I really want them to get better. My life is put entirely out of joint for several months dealing with a residential faster. My schedule is disrupted; my family life suffers; my personal health suffers. No amount of mere money could pay for this. And then some of these people go and waste all my help to accomplish some discreditable secret agenda that they have never really admitted to themselves or others.

Constant Complaints

Alice was a middle-aged woman who couldn't understand why she had always felt tired, even when she was young. Her life had been this way ever since she could remember. Most puzzling to her was why her life was so Job-like. She did everything the proper way. Doing things correctly was important to her, and fitted her Puritan background. Alice supported all the right causes, did good works, was active in a Unitarian church and bought all her food at the healthfood store--and made sure it was organically grown.

But in spite of Alice's righteous living, her existence was a treadmill of constant, minor complaints. She was constantly exhausted, so much so she had difficulty getting up in the morning and feared she might have chronic fatigue syndrome (whatever that is). Alice suffered bouts of depression over thoughts like these, and had many acute illnesses like colds that hung on interminably and would not go away. She had a constant post-nasal drip. Though she enjoyed life, her body was a millstone around her neck.

I've had a lot of clients exactly like Alice. Sometimes they complain of headaches; sometimes constant yeast or bladder infections. Whatever the complaints, the symptoms are rarely severe enough to cla.s.sify themselves as someone who is seriously ill, but their symptoms rarely go away and they almost never feel good.

Medical doctors rarely find anything wrong with them, though they will frequently prescribe an antibiotic to treat a somewhat constant infection, or an antihistamine for sinus symptoms. Getting a new prescription drug makes the complaint go away for a short time until their resistance is lowered again and the very same complaint returns. These people frequently depend on over the counter pills and are routinely prescribed sleeping remedies and antidepressants.

If instead of this route they will but take my medicine they are usually easy to fix and afterwards are amazed that it was all that simple and that so much of their life has been less than it could have been.

Alice had been through the medical doctor route. She had become quite familiar with antibiotics for her colds and flu, and also took synthetic thyroid hormone--the doctor had diagnosed her fatigue as being caused by an underactive thyroid, which was partly correct--but the thyroid medication didn't give her much more energy. Alice had been supporting this medical doctor in grand style for over thirty years but never obtained the relief she sought.

I put Alice through my usual two hour first-time-visit thorough a.n.a.lysis. For two weeks before coming to see me she had saved tiny samples of everything she ate, wrapped them in plastic film, carefully labeled, and put them in the freezer. Along with these food samples and a typed list of all these foods, she brought a big box full of her condiments, herb teas, vitamins, spices, prescription medications, over the counter drugs, oils, grains, breads, crackers and small samples of her usual fresh vegetables and fruits. Even her water. Her entire kitchen! By biokinesiology we proceeded to test all of her foods for allergic reactions. I also tested the integrity of her organs and glands and in the process, got a detailed medical history and list of her complaints.

Alice had exhausted adrenals, and they probably had been that way for thirty years. Her pancreas was now too weak to digest the legumes that made up a large part of her vegetarian diet. She was allergic to wheat, soy, and dairy products and had especially been eating dairy in the mistaken notion that it was necessary to keep up her protein intake. Really very typical. So many health food store shoppers these days mistakenly believe that, because they are vegetarian and do not eat meat, they especially need to boost their protein intake with dairy and soy. Unfortunately, so many North Americans are highly allergic to dairy and unfortunately, soy products are as hard or harder to digest than cooked meats.

Alice was especially shocked to discover that she was allergic to such foods as cabbage family vegetables, alfalfa sprouts and citrus.

Most people don't think that anyone could be allergic to something as healthy as alfalfa sprouts. The doctor was right about one thing; her thyroid was underperforming. He had not noticed that her heart was weak.

Medical doctors rarely discover an organ weakness until that organ actually begins to catastrophically fail. A busy honest doctor will usually tell the complaining patient there is nothing wrong with them: go home, take two aspirin, accept the fact that your body is not perfect and don't worry about it. A hungry doctor will be delighted to perform countless lab tests, seeking any possible reason for the complaint. This can go on as long as the patient has money or as long as the insurance company will pay. They rarely find anything "wrong" and the patient is far better off if the doctor doesn't discover something "serious" to treat because their treatment may carry with it consequences far more severe than the complaint. For example, I have seen dozens of people whose lives were virtually ruined after surgical treatment for chronic back pain.

Biokinesiology is actually a far more sensitive system of a.n.a.lysis than lab tests. It picks up weaknesses at a very early stage so total organ failure can be prevented. Rarely will any of the organ weaknesses I discover be confirmed by a medical doctor. First I put Alice on a six week cleanse. She did one week on fresh, raw food; one week on dilute carrot juice with some green leafy vegetables juice too; one week on water fasting; and then she repeated the series. After six weeks of detoxification, I gave Alice a life extension megavitamin formula, discovered she could not handle the acid form of vitamin C (that she had already been taking) and had her start on protomorphogens to rebuild her weakened endocrine system, her exhausted adrenals and weak pancreas. She also began taking pancreatic enzymes when she ate vegetable protein. She was put on a maintenance diet that eliminated foods she was allergic to; the diet primarily consisted of whole grains, nuts, cooked and raw vegetables, and raw fruits. On her maintenance diet Alice had a profound resurgence of energy and rediscovered a sense of well-being she had not known for decades. She began to feel like she had when she was a child. Her constant sinus drip was gone. She was able to stop taking synthetic thyroid hormones and instead, supported her endocrine system with protomorphogens.

A Rampaging Infection

At the age of 40, John, an old bohemian client of mine, came into a moderate inheritance and went "native" in the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific. He spent about four months hanging out with the locals. Life there was so much fun that John completely forgot that his body was actually rather delicate, that many of his organs were weak, and that to feel good, he had to live a fairly simon-pure life.

But the jovial, accepting, devil-may-care Fijians enjoyed a constant party, even more so because John's money allowed the Fijians to manifest powerful, tropical, home-grown strains of recreational herbs to smoke in abundance, beer and rum and worse, the Fijians (and John) constantly used a very toxic though only mildly-euphoric narcotic called kava, something Europeans usually have no genetic resistance to. The Fijians (and John) also ate a lot of freshly-caught fish fried in grease, well-salted, and huge, brain-numbing bowls of greasy starches, foods that they call i'coi, or "real food" as opposed to things like fruit and vegetables that aren't real food because they don't knock you to the floor for hours trying to digest them in a somnambulant doze.

John miraculously kept up with this party for a few months and then, while scuba diving, got some small coral scratches on his leg. These got infected. The infections got worse. Soon he had several huge, suppurating, ulcerous sores on his legs and worse, the infections became systemic and began spreading rapidly. He was running a fever and was in considerable pain. So John booked an emergency ticket home and fled to find Doctor Isabelle. When I met his plane he was rolled out in a wheelchair, unable to walk because of pain and swelling in his legs.

John was violently opposed to ordinary medical treatment; he especially would not have taken antibiotics even if he had died without them because previous courses of antibiotics had been the precipitant of life-threatening conditions that first brought John to my care. John used his last strength to get to me because he knew that had a hospital gotten its clutches on him the medical doctors would have done exactly as they pleased.

I gave John a colonic, a gentle, mental spanking, and put him to bed without any supper. He started water fasting and did colonics every day. He began gobbling vitamin C (as calcium as...o...b..te) a few grams every hour. I put huge poultices on his sores made of clay and chopped lawn gra.s.s (we needed a week or so before a tray of wheat gra.s.s would be ready). John's sores were amazing. Every day a new one seemed to appear on a different part of the body. The old ones kept getting bigger and deeper. The largest original ones were about three inches in diameter, smelled horribly and had almost eaten the flesh down to the bone. His pain was severe; there was no position John could a.s.sume that didn't irritate one sore or another, and it was a good thing my house was remote because John frequently relieved his pain by screaming. John was never delirious, but he was always original. He did not have to scream, but enjoyed its relief and howled quite dramatically. I wore earplugs.

After about two weeks of water fasting, John counted up the total of his sores. There were forty three. Seven or eight of them were enormous, two or three inches in diameter and well into the flesh, but the last ones to appear were shallow, small and stayed small.

After that point no more new ones showed up and the body began to make visible headway against the infection. Very slowly and then more and more rapidly, the sores began to close up and heal from the edges. John's fever began to drop. And he had less pain. I should mention that John brought an extremely virulent and aggressive pathogenic organism into our house to which we Americans had no resistance. Both my husband and I were attacked where the skin had been broken. However, unlike John, in our cases, our healthy bodies immediately walled-off the organism and the small, reddened pustules, though painful, did not grow and within a week, had been conquered by our immune systems. And after that we had an immunity.

After about three weeks of his fasting we were thoroughly tired of hearing John's cathartic howls, tired of nursing a sick person. We needed a break. John at this point could walk a bit and was feeling a lot better. John had previously water fasted for 30 days and knew the drill very well. So we stocked up the vitamin C bottle by his bed and went to town for the weekend to stay in a motel and see a movie. As they say in the Canadian backwoods, we were bushed.

John had promised to be good. But as soon as we left he decided that since he felt so very much better, he could break his fast. He knew how to do this and fortunately for him, (it was very much premature for John to eat) did it more or less correctly, only eating small quant.i.ties of raw fruits and vegetables. But by the time we got back home three days later, John had relapsed. The pain was rapidly getting much worse; the sores were growing again and a few small new ones appeared. Dr. Isabelle again took away his food and gave him another verbal spanking a little more severe than the one he'd had a few weeks earlier and put him to bed again without his supper.

After two more weeks on water, John had gained a great deal on the sores. They were filling in and weren't oozing pus, looked clean and the new forming meat looked a healthy pink instead of purple-black.