How and When to Be Your Own Doctor by Moser and Solomon (best classic books to read .TXT) 📖

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 quantities 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.

But John had been very slender to start with and by now he was getting near the end of his food reserves. He probably couldn’t have fasted on water for more than one more week without starvation beginning. But this time, when he broke his fast, it was under close supervision. I gave him dilute juice only, introduced other sustenance very cautiously and made absolutely sure that reintroducing nourishment would not permit the organism to gain.

This time it didn’t. John’s own immune system, beefed up by fasting, had conquered a virulent organism that could have easily killed him.

Before the era of antibiotics, before immunizations to the common childhood illnesses, people frequently died of infections as virulent as the one that attacked John. They usually died because they “ate to keep up their strength.” Most of these deaths were unnecessary, caused by ignorance and poor nursing care. For example, standard medical treatment for typhoid fever used to consist of spoonfed milk—sure to kill all but the strongest constitution. Even without the assistance of massive doses of vitamin C, if people would but fast away infections they could cure themselves of almost all of them with little danger, without the side effects of antibiotics or creating mutated antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.

Dr. John Tilden, a hygienist who practiced in the ’20s, before the era of antibiotics, routinely fasted patients with infectious illnesses. Supporting the sick body with wise nursing, he routinely healed scarlet fever, whopping cough, typhoid, typhus, pneumonia, peritonitis, Rocky Mountain fever, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, cholera, and rheumatic fever. The one common infection he could not cure was diphtheria involving the throat. (Tilden, Impaired Health, Vol. II).

Recently, medical gerontologists have discovered another reason that fasting heals infections. One body function that deteriorates during the aging process is the production of growth hormone so the effects of growth hormone have been studied. This hormone also stimulates the body to heal wounds and burns, repair broken bones, generally replace any tissues that have been destroyed and, growth hormone stimulates the immune response. Growth hormone also maintains muscle tone and its presence generally slows the aging process.

Growth hormone might make a wonderful life-extension supplement; on it a middle-aged person might readily maintain the muscle tone of youth while slowing aging in general. Unfortunately, growth hormone cannot at this time be inexpensively synthesized and is still far too costly to be used therapeutically except to prevent dwarfism.

However, any technique that encourages a body to produce more of this hormone would be of great interest to life extensionists.

The body only produces growth hormone at certain times and only when certain nutrients are present in the blood. Gerontologists call these nutrients “precursors.” The precursors are two essential amino acids, argenine and ornithine and certain vitamins such as C and B6.

But having the precursors present is not enough. Growth hormone is only manufactured under certain, specific circumstances: for about one hour immediately after going to sleep and then only if the blood supply is rich with argenine and ornithine but contains few other amino acids; it is also manufactured during heavy aerobic exercise that goes on for more than thirty minutes; and growth hormone is produced at an accelerated rate when fasting. (Pearson and Shaw, 1983). I did not know this when I was fasting John, but now, I would give argenine and ornithine to someone with a serious infection as well as massive quantities of vitamin C.

Chronic Back Pain

Barry was a carpenter who couldn’t afford to lose work because he was unable to bend or twist or lift. He frequently had bouts of severe back pain that made working almost impossible. Upon analysis by biokinesiology I found that he had a major problem with large intestine weakness and secondarily, adrenal weakness.

Constipation frequently causes back pain. The muscles of the back have nerve pathway connections to the large intestines; weakness in the intestine causes weakness of the back and makes it prone to injury. But the problem is the intestine, not the back. And the only way to make the back stay better is to heal the intestine. Many athletes have very similar problems. For example, they get knee injuries and think there is something wrong with their knee. Or they get shoulder injuries and think their shoulder is weak. These people are only half right. Yes, their knee or their shoulder is weak. But it could become strong and almost uninjurable if the underlying cause of the weakness is corrected.

The knee for example, has nerve pathway connections to the adrenal glands and kidneys. The shoulder has similar connections to the thyroid. The foot is weakened by the bladder. The treatment should first be on the weakened gland or organ and secondarily, on the damaged muscle tissue. I have solved numerous sports-related knee problems with protomorphogens for the adrenals and elimination of food allergies that make the adrenals work overtime. I have fixed bad shoulders by rebuilding the thyroid.

In Barry’s case, it was the intestine. I asked him about his bowel function and he said that he was never constipated, had “a daily bowel movement without a lot of straining.” But having given some 6,000 colonics, I knew better. There should have been no straining; Barry was trying very hard to be regular—he should not have had to effort. Fortunately, it struck him as true that he needed to detoxify and I managed to convince him to water fast. He probably figured, why not since he couldn’t work anyway. Barry was a tall, skinny man to start with and you would think he hardly carried any fat at all, but he fasted on water for 30 days, receiving a colonic every day, while I did bodywork on his damaged back. He sure was constipated and couldn’t deny the evidence that floated by through the sight tube of the colonic machine. By the end of the fast his colon was fairly repaired and free of old fecal material. And Barry had become a tall, gaunt-looking guy who had lost about 20 pounds you wouldn’t think he had to spare.

After a few weeks of careful weaning back on to food, Barry felt pretty good, terrific even. He had no back pain and found out for the first time what not being constipated meant. It no longer took “not very much effort” to move his bowels; they moved themselves.

That was ten years ago. A few months ago, Barry looked me up, just to say thanks and to let me know that he had not had any more back problems and had generally felt good because he had more or less stayed on the improved diet I had instructed him about during his fast.

Painful Menstruation

Elsie was twenty. She came to see me because I had helped Elsie’s mother overcome breast cancer many years earlier. Elsie began to have very painful periods with profuse bleeding and abdominal pain.

Her nutrition had been generally good because her mother couldn’t survive on the average American diet and had long ago converted her family to vegetarianism. And like her mother, Elsie had been taking vitamins for many years.

A medical doctor diagnosed Elsie as having endometriosis, meaning, the lining of her uterus had migrated to the fallopian tubes, where it continued to bleed regularly into the abdominal cavity, following the same hormonal cycle as the endometritial tissue that lines the uterus. The doctor offered to try hormonal manipulation and if this proved unsuccessful, offered a hysterectomy. That would certainly eliminate the symptoms!

But Elsie did not wish to eliminate her ability to have children and preferred not to risk throwing her hormones off balance. So she came to me. My analysis showed that she had weak ovaries and weak uterus.

These were secondary to a toxic colon, toxic because she had a weak gall bladder and weak pancreas that reduced her digestive capacity and turned her improperly combined Organic, vegetarian legume-rich diet into toxemia. Checking her foods for allergies I discovered the normal pattern: Elsie was intolerant to dairy, wheat, eggs, corn, soy and concentrated sugars.

Being no stranger to fasting (her mother had fasted at length ten years previously) Elsie undertook a 30 day cleanse on vegetable juice with daily enemas, taking vitamins in powdered form. After the fast I put her on protomorphogens for her reproductive organs and pancreas. The gall bladder had healed by itself during fasting—gall bladders usually heal easily. Her maintenance diet included using pancreatic enzyme supplements when eating vegetable proteins and Elsie eliminated most fats so her gall bladder would not be stressed. The fasting also overcame her allergic reactions to corn and wheat but she was still unable to handle soy products, eggs or dairy. After six months Elsie no longer needed protomorphogens, had no abdominal pain and her periods were normal.

You may well be wondering how or why detoxification of the bowels allowed the body to repair the uterus. The large intestine is a sort of nest that cradles the reproductive organs, including the ovaries, uterus, and in the case of the male, the prostate gland. A toxic colon is like having one rotten apple in a basket, it contaminates the whole batch. Many problems in the abdominal area are caused by a toxic colon, including chronic back pain, ovarian cysts, infertility, birth abnormalities, bladder infections and bladder cancer, painful menstruation, fibroids and other benign growths as well as malignant ones, and prostatitis or prostate cancer. Detoxing the body and cleaning out the colon should be a part of the healing of all of these conditions.

Irritable Bowels

Some peoples’ lives don’t run smoothly. Jeanne’s certainly didn’t.

She was abandoned to raise three little kids on welfare. Her college diploma turned out to be useless. Jeanne used to help me at Great Oaks in exchange for treatment. During those early years she had done a 30 day juice fast with colonics. Twenty years later at age 60, having survived three children’s growing up, surviving the profound, enduring loss of one who died as an adult, after starting up and running a small business that for many years barely paid its way, and experiencing an uninsured fire that took her house, she began to develop abdominal pains the doctors named “irritable bowel syndrome” or “colitis.” The MD offered antibiotics and antispasmodics but Jeanne had no insurance, the remedies were unaffordable. She also retained considerable affinity for natural medicine.

Prior to these symptoms her diet had been vegetarian, and had included large quantities of raw fruits and vegetables and whole grains. But the bran in bread was irritating to her bowels, she could no longer digest raw vegetables or most raw fruit.

Jeanne’s vital force was low; her healing took time.