How and When to Be Your Own Doctor Part 24

However, as much as I lack respect for conventional medical cancer therapies, I do think surgery can have a useful place in cancer treatment along with hygienic methods. Some people just cannot confront the lump(s). Or they are so terrified of having a cancer in their body that their emotions suppresses their own immune function.

Even though surgery prompts a cancer to spread more rapidly, without their lumps some cancer patients feel more positive. If surgery is done in conjunction with rebuilding the immune system, the body will prevent new cancers from forming.

Removal of a large ma.s.s of cancer cells can also lighten the immune system's task. Not having to kill off and reabsorb all those cells one-by-one from a huge cancer ma.s.s, the body can better conquer smaller groups of cancer cells. And the die-off of large cancers produces a lot of toxins, burdening the organs of elimination. This is an argument for the potential benefit of a lumpectomy. However, I do not support mastectomies, or the type of surgery that cause ma.s.sive damage to the body in a foolish attempt to remove every last cancer cell, as though the cells themselves were the disease.

Sometimes cancer tumors are well-encapsulated, walled off and can be easily removed without prompting metastasis. This type of tumor may not be completely reabsorbed by the body in any case; though the immune system may have killed it, an empty sh.e.l.l remains, like a peanut sh.e.l.l. Sometimes the judgment calls about surgery can get dicey. When surgery involves removing an organ. I oppose the loss of useful body parts.

I have also known and helped people who believed they couldn't recover without radiation and chemotherapy. What people believe is, is. The emotions generated when a personal reality is suppressed, ignored or invalidated will overwhelm an immune system. I always tell those people who sincerely believe in it to go ahead with standard medical treatment (while I'm privately praying the doctors won't cause too much damage). However, when I am supporting a body with supplements and dietary reform, have put that body on a raw-food cleansing diet or even a raw food diet with nuts and grains that hardly detoxifies, and then the person has had chemotherapy and radiation, the medical doctors in attendance are inevitably amazed that the side effects are much milder than antic.i.p.ated, or non-existent. And fewer courses of chemotherapy are needed than the doctors expected.

For example, I worked with a little boy with leukemia. His mother brought him to me while trying to resolve a conflict with her ex-husband about the boy's treatment. The father demanded the standard medical route; the mother was for natural therapy.

Eventually the father won in court, but I had the boy on my program for three months before the doctors got their hands on him. Even during chemotherapy and radiation the mother kept the boy on my program. Throughout the doctors' treatment he had so few bad side effects that he was able to continue in school and play with the other children; he did not lose his hair (which would have made him feel like a freak). He recovered. I don't mind that the medical doctors took credit, but to my thinking, he recovered despite their therapy.

Onion Cases

All too many of my cases are what I privately refer to as onion cases. By this I mean the opposite of a simple case. There are multiple complaints. I call them onion cases because these people get better in layers, like pealing an onion. As each skin comes off, the next becomes visible. Sometimes when the patient overcomes an existing complaint, another appears that was not there in the beginning, probably this new one is a complaint that they had at an earlier point in their life, one that had gone away. Onion cases take a long time to completely heal, sometimes years. There frequently are psychological aspects to the case that surface with different physical problems. If I were not an effective psychologist I could not succeed with most of them. The average medical doctor probably considers onion cases to be hypochondriacs, but they usually are not.

Almost always the first symptoms that demand attention are the most life-threatening, like immune system failures, liver failures, pancreatic failures, nervous system failures and heart failures.

With these eliminated, new complaints appear. Often these are endocrine system imbalances or weak endocrine glands, anemias, mild heart conditions. Then it gets down to eye or ear infections, muscular or skeletal weaknesses, mild skin problems, sinusitis, teeth problems; things that aren't serious but that do degrade the quality of life. Each one of these layers also carries with it a psychological component; each of these layers can take three to six months to resolve.

I had a pretty good idea from the first visit that Daniel, not yet 30, was going to take some time to get well. He already had a degenerative condition not usually seen until middle age--crippling gout and arthritis. He had badly distorted joints, walked with considerable pain, lacked a full range of movement, had enormous fatigue and consequently, a well-justified depression. Daniel was about to give up working as no longer possible, but he liked his job. And he certainly needed it.

Daniel's a.n.a.lysis showed ma.s.sive allergies to foods, a systemic yeast and multiple virus infections and multiple organ weaknesses: a life-threateningly weak immune system, weak pancreas, weak adrenals, weak large intestine. Because he could hardly accept anything he wasn't allergic to and because he could not afford to quit working even for a few weeks (though he was about to be forced into complete disability) I put him on a Bieler fast. This is a monodiet of fairly substantial quant.i.ties of either well-cooked green beans or well-cooked zucchini, the choice between these two foods depending on the acid-base balance of the blood. (Henry Bieler, 1965) In Daniel's case my choice was zucchini, one pint of plain zucchini puree with a little kelp and garlic added (no salt, no b.u.t.ter, no nothing else) every few hours. I also put him on heavy vitamin support and protomorphogens for his desperate immune system. While on the Bieler fast he did daily enemas at home. Had colonics been available to him, Daniel couldn't have afforded them.

Within three weeks he was far more comfortable, had less pain, more energy even though he was still eating nothing but zucchini, had less swelling in his joints. During the first month he lost about ten pounds and had been skinny to start with. I then added other cooked nonstarchy vegetables to his diet and we continued the same protomorphogen and supplement program for another month.

Once each month Daniel came to see me. Each time he had slightly improved organ strength and was able to tolerate a few more foods.

By the third month he stopped losing weight because we added small quant.i.ties of cooked rice and millet to his diet. However, to continue his detox, I had him water fast one day a week, staying in bed and resting all day. At the start and end of the fasting day he also took an enema. He continued a weekly one-day fast for many months. By the fourth month, his immune system testing stronger, a new problem appeared. Daniel had intestinal parasites. So I also put him on a six month program to eliminate those.

Daniel required monthly dietary adjustments because he quickly became allergic if he ate very much of anything very often--broccoli or rice for example. During this time he became aware of many negative emotions a.s.sociated with childhood, of young adult frustrations and disappointments. He was really very angry about many things in his life, even though he had for many years maintained an invariably pleasant social veneer. But now he began expressing some of these feelings to me and to his a.s.sociates.

Daniel had an abusive girlfriend, but as he improved this relations.h.i.+p became insufferable. So he broke off with this woman and found a new relations.h.i.+p that was much more positive, one based on mutual respect and admiration. There are frequently strong connections between repressed anger and depository diseases like arthritis and gout. Daniel could not permit himself to constantly be made angry and still get well.

His next layer of symptoms did not appear until nearly eighteen months after he had first come to see me. By this time he had good energy, had returned to hiking and skiing, camping and canoeing. He had worked as a printer but was now bootstrapping his own print shop on a shoestring, and became entirely self-employed. He had a good romantic relations.h.i.+p. The parasites were gone; his gout and arthritis was virtually gone; many of his food allergies were gone.

Now his body was demanding that its acid/base balance be adjusted and he began to pay attention to the minor back problems he had all along. Daniel had also developed a new problem--inflammation of the eye. It was so severe that he went to an opthamologist seeking immediate relief because he could hardly see. I put him on ma.s.sive doses of vitamin C and protomorphogens for the eye and we attacked the other problems.

Now I still see Daniel every three months for minor dietary and supplement adjustments. His emotional s.p.a.ce is very positive. His business is doing well. His love life is doing well. He has developed no new problems and all the old ones are under control.

His organ systems, though better, will never tolerate many insults, physical or mental, but if he lives within his limits, he has every chance of a long and happy life.

Daniel has become a friend of mine by now and I like to see him but I expect I won't see Daniel very much at all any more. He has learned what he needs to know to take care of himself. This is a typical onion case that resolved successfully. However this case might not have worked out so well had Daniel not possessed a high degree of personal integrity and bravery, had he not faced and resolved his emotional conflicts. Fortunately, Daniel had always conducted an ethical life, without dishonesty or a secret collection of disreputable acts. Bodies are easy to fix; they are carbon oxygen engines that work on chemistry and respond unfailingly to physical measures. But the ent.i.ty that runs the body is not so simple. The thoughts and emotions of the spirit impinge on a body as powerfully or more powerfully than all the vitamins, dietary reform or protomorphogens I can provide. The mind, and the spirit behind that mind, can make a body sick or can prevent it from getting well or staying well despite everything I do.

Unethical Illness

I see a lot of spiritually-induced physical illness in my practice.

Maybe more than my share. Maybe its karmic; it tends to find me because I understand it. And it comes up my driveway because people who have it often become doctor shoppers, and seek out a naturopath as a last resort after exhausting everything that modern medical science has to offer. I have had large numbers of undiagnosable people that suffer greatly but who medical doctors can find nothing wrong with and label psychosomatic. I have also repaired people given specific medical diagnoses that standard physical remedies cannot make better.

In most of these cases, the physical illness is secondary to, is an overlay of a more fundamental spiritual cause. On this type of case there are inevitably severe problems connected with close friends, relatives and business a.s.sociates. The sick person inevitably blames the friends, relatives and business a.s.sociates and takes no responsibility. The problems seem unresolvable. When I probe deeply enough into these problems, I begin to discover the real infection below. The sick person, so fond of complaining about all the terrible things done to them by the people they have or have had problems with, or sometimes, so proud of not complaining about all the terrible things done to them. Actually, almost inevitably this person has committed a huge ma.s.s of secret crimes, viciousness and betrayals, rarely indictable felonious acts, but crimes none the less, disreputable deeds that must be kept secret.

These deeds are always completely justified; the sick person always claims to have been right for having done them and it is next to impossible for me as a therapist to get them to take responsibility for their sins. But at the deep, center of almost all people is an honest, decent soul that knows what it has really done and feels guilty and judges itself. That is why it says in the Bible, 'judge not, lest you be judged'. It is not the judgment of the Deity we have so much to fear; we are own worst judge, jury, and executioner, and eventually extract from ourselves full payment with compound interest for all harmful acts.

People frequently punish themselves with severe, incapacitating illness or even death. A spiritual illness will not respond very well to physical treatment until the spiritual malaise's is resolved. This case has to find enough courage to become honest with themselves, to admit their deeds in all their disgusting detail and then to make amends, or if amends are not possible, to at least cease and desist. They have to take personal responsibly for what they really are being and what they have really done and most importantly, accept that they are responsible for creating their own illness. It is not a virus, a cancer cell or something that just fell out of the universe and struck them, innocent victims that they are. They have made their illness and only they can uncreate it.

Unfortunately, few people who have spent a lifetime indulging themselves in this degree of irresponsibility have the integrity to change. This is a tough case. Especially so because they think they are physically ill, they did not come to me to be defined as a "mental" case and tend to reject such approaches.

There is no shortage of additional degenerative conditions that I could describe. There are eating disorders, s.h.i.+ngles, skin problems, kidney disease, Alzheimer's, senility, mental illness, addictions, chronic fatigue syndrome, aids. There's macular degeneration, carpal tunnel syndrome, chronic ear infections (especially in children), tonsillitis, bronchitis, pancreat.i.tis, cyst.i.tis, urethritis, prostat.i.tis, colitis, sinusitis, osteomyelitis and a dozen other itises, including appendicitis. There's algias (itises of the nerves): neuralgia, fibromyalgia. There's ism's (really itises of the muscles). There are 'onias like pneumonia; omas like carcinoma, melanoma and lymphoma.

I could (but won't) write a page or two on every one of these conditions and turn this book into an encyclopedia. After twenty five years of practice, there is little I have not seen. Or helped a body repair. Generally, everyone of those following pages I'm not going to bother to write would repeat the same message. That the medical profession has little understanding of the real causes or cures of disease; that the world is full of unnecessary suffering; that there are simple, painless, effective, harmless approaches to eliminating most of the ailments of mankind except the ultimate ailment, old age, the thing that takes us all eventually; that essentially all the diseases resolve from the same approach.

But I have already explained the theoretical basis of natural hygiene, the key role of toxemia, enervation, constipation, the essentials of good diet, fasting and colon cleansing, the importance of regular exercise, and the rational for vitamin supplementation. I have revealed a lot of the secrets in my bag of tricks, like my favorite herbs, poultices and wheat gra.s.s.

What concerns me most about medicine today is that there seems to be ever fewer hygienists practicing. The young holistic pract.i.tioner is overwhelmed with confusing data and approaches and is increasingly less able to discern what is really important and what is distraction, and is increasingly intimidated by the AMA, made fearful of accepting people with serious conditions. Too many young pract.i.tioners become ideologues, clinging to the rightness of a single rigid discipline, missing the truths that exist in other approaches and worse, missing the limitations that exist in their own personal healing methods.

The current concern about the cost of medical care and resorting to government-run insurance programs and regulations will do little or nothing to reverse the trend to more and more sickness that costs more and more to treat. The root causes of our current crisis are two fold. One, our food, just as it comes off the farm, is getting ever worse. This is not even recognized as a problem. After we process it for an industrial food distribution system, much nutrition is lost too. This is barely recognized as a problem. Until we are better nourished, we will be ever sicker and each generation will become a degeneration. Secondly, our society is suffering from all the evils of monopoly medicine. This is barely recognized. The AMA has a stranglehold on the sick. There is no effective compet.i.tion for its methods. Alternatives are suppressed. In my version of a better world, if anyone that wanted to could hang out a s.h.i.+ngle and offer to diagnose, treat and cure disease, a few quacks would really hurt a few people. But many genuine therapies would appear and the public would be exposed to workable alternatives. If anyone that wanted to market it could put a label on a bottle of pills, power or tincture that said its contents would heal or cure disease, yes, a few people would be poisoned. And a few would die needlessly by failing to get the right treatment. But on the positive side, all this liberty would result in countless new therapies being rediscovered and many new uses for existing substances would appear.

Fundamentally, this is the issue of liberty. I believe it is better to allow choice and options, to permit the dangers that go with liberty to exist. And to allow unfortunate outcomes to occur without intervention into individual lack of intelligence and irresponsibilities. The opposite is our current path--an attempt to regulate and control away all dangers. But this overcontrol results in inst.i.tutionalized violence and cruelty, inefficiency that is not checked or exposed by the bright light of a better way. As Churchill said, 'democracy is the worst form of government there is--except for all the others.' What he meant is that we must accept that this is an imperfect world. The best this planet can be is when it is at its freest, when restrictions are minimized and when people are allowed to make their own choices, be responsible for their own outcomes and experience the consequences of their own stupidities.

Appendix

Pulse Testing For Allergies

Coca's Pulse Tests are extraordinarily useful and simple tools for at-home allergy detection. My clients have succeeded at using this approach without supervision. Coca's test works on this simple principle: pulse elevations are caused by any allergic reaction. If you know what your normal range of pulse rates are, you can isolate an offending food or substance and eliminate it. Success with Coca's Pulse Test requires only motivation and a little perseverance, because in order to test for food allergies, the diet must be restricted for a few days and your pulse must be accurately taken at specific intervals during the testing period.

The test is based on measurement of the resting pulse rate, something most people have no difficulty learning how to do. The resting rate is how fast the heart beats after a person has been sitting still, comfortably relaxing for three to five minutes. When a person is active the heart beats faster than the resting rate. One measure of aerobic fitness is how quickly the heart is able to return to its resting rate. Well-trained athletes' hearts can adjust from working very hard to a resting rate in only a minute or so; those who are deconditioned can take three to five minutes for their heart to slow from even mild exertion to its stable, resting pace.

Those who cannot readily find their own pulse on their wrist or throat can inexpensively purchase a digital watch that gives a pulse reading; this kind of watch is used by athletes to make sure their training pulse is in an acceptable range.

Preparatory to doing Coca's Pulse Test it is necessary to as much as possible eliminate allergic food reactions. This requires the application of discipline for a few days before testing begins.

Allergic reactions can go on for several days after a food has been eaten and if you are having a reaction to something eaten many hours or several days previously, it may obscure a reaction to a food just eaten.

1. Stop smoking entirely for at least five days before you do a cigarette test; allergies to cigarettes can take five days to clear.

Besides, you shouldn't smoke, anyway!

2. For the first three days, count your resting pulse immediately after awakening in the morning (for one entire minute), and record the reading.

3. During the first three days, take your resting pulse half an hour and again one hour after each meal. It if has elevated more than 12 beats above the resting rate you found upon arising that morning, you may a.s.sume that some food at the meal you just ate was an allergen. Temporarily, eliminate from your diet all the foods eaten at the previous meal until you can check them one-by-one a few days later. At the end of these first three days you may not have many foods left that you can eat. That is okay and to be expected; it is time to begin adding foods back to the diet.

4. Most people who are allergic to foods are allergic to one or more of the following: corn, wheat, milk and cheese, yogurt, meat, alcohol, tobacco. It would be very wise to eliminate these foods too for the first three days, until they are tested.

After three days on this regimen, you can a.s.sume that many of your usual allergic food reactions have ceased or at least diminished significantly and that you probably can get reasonably accurate testing results on individual foods. A good indicator of having problems with food allergies in general can also show up during these initial days. If you have eliminated a large number of foods and your resting pulse upon awakening has slowed down by several beats, you can a.s.sume you are allergic to foods you were eating.

I would not be at all surprised that by the end of the third day you were only eating a very few fruits and vegetables and had eliminated everything else. A more effective variant of the testing procedure calls for a three or four day water fast to clear all allergies with absolute certainty, and then to introduce foods one at a time as described below.