How I Got Into Natural Healing

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How I Got Into Natural Healing

 

It was either the shots or the blood.

 

Since the earliest I can remember, going to the doctor meant getting a needle in

the rear end. When I was a preschooler, our family doctor seemed genuinely old.

He had been a general practitioner for thirty years or so before I went to him.

As soon as I could read, I noticed that his ancient medical degree dated from

the 1920's. His methods were not refined. He gave me what he thought was a

smile, had my parents forcibly flip me upside down onto his worn, paper-covered

black leather examination table, and jab me in the keester. I couldn't have

been thinking too deeply at that age, but evidently the impression those

hypodermic needles made on me were deep in more ways than one. Somewhere in the

back of my mind it seemed that there must be more to medicine than

silver-colored instruments and pain.

While in high school, I looked, and occasionally acted, like the type of kid who

would someday be a doctor. Combine skinniness, eyeglasses, honor society, and

graduating two or three years ahead of my class, and you might just expect that.

I was the kid who could cut up anything in biology class and dissect toads,

bullheads and fetal pigs at home on Saturdays. I turned my bedroom into a

chemistry lab. I started a science club at school and attended future

physicians' seminars. Once, at a meeting of the local medical society, we

watched a movie showing some surgical operations. From the first foot-long

incision, I knew I had a problem. During small group discussions, I lightly

asked if anyone had ever become a doctor who could not stand the sight of

(human) blood. The responding doctor said, politely smiling, that rather few

had done so.

During my second and third years in college I arranged to observe surgery at

various hospitals. This seemed like a good way to overcome my aversion to

slicing into a live person. It took over two hours by bus to get to see my

first operation at the then small hospital in Dansville, New York. I was the

first gowned-up non-nurse in the operating room when they wheeled in the

patient. She was old enough to be my great-grandmother, and in for a breast

biopsy. As she turned towards me she could not have missed seeing that I was as

white as my mask. Perhaps she noticed the cold sweat on my forehead.

She quietly said, " You're not the doctor, are you? "

" No, ma'am, " I answered.

" Oh, good! " she said, and closed her eyes, smiling.

I had brought comfort on my very first day.

When they gave her anesthetic, she was asked to count backwards from one

hundred. She never made it to 99. I managed the opening incision, saw that fat

was bright orange, and the lump proved benign. Afterwards, I was offered coffee

by every single person in the doctors' lounge. Maybe that was out of courtesy,

but I think word got around and they thought I needed the caffeine.

I knew now that I could handle an inch-long incision without passing out. From

there, I watched more extensive operations at larger hospitals. One procedure

is particularly memorable. Another elderly woman was in for an adrenalectomy.

I was told that this was to help relieve her severe arthritis pain. Having by

now seen enough abdomens opened up, I watched with well concealed surprise as

the operating team turned her over and made really generous cuts at the level of

the lowest rib. It then occurred to me that, of course, this was the shortest

route to the kidneys on which the adrenal glands are perched. The kidneys are

each protected by ribs. I waited for the rib-spreaders next. In a

stainless-steel flash, the chief surgeon instead produced the largest pair of

tin snips I have ever seen. By " tin snips " I mean those massive metal-cutting

scissors that would cut through a Buick.

Oh, no, he's not really going to...

" CRUNCH! "

Yes, as a matter of fact he was.

" CRUNCH! " Those were the genuinely loud sounds of human ribs being cut. The

lady's body shook with each cut. Oh well, I thought, they'll put them back when

they're done. They didn't. The ribs were removed, casually placed in a pan,

and that was the last of them. The adrenals were easily removed after that.

You might think that right then and there I'd immediately begin a passionate

search for a painless, natural cure for arthritis. No, for I could now better

stand the incisions and the blood, and I wanted to be a doctor.

It was Professor John I. Mosher at the State University of New York College at

Brockport who first asked me to reconsider what " being a doctor " actually meant.

Was it about being the M.D. in the white coat, or was it about really helping

people get well? It was a good point, and I largely ignored it. After all, I

already assumed that it was essential to be a medical doctor in order to do

healing. Weren't chiropractors, dentists, optometrists and other professionals

just helpers? I wanted to be one of the guys at the TOP of the health heap!

Dr. Mosher told me to read a book, The Pattern of Health (now out of print), by

an English physician named Aubrey T. Westlake, M.D. It changed everything. Dr.

Westlake wrote of his long experience as a practitioner. He said that during

his professional life, he had mostly been engaged in " bailing out leaking

boats. " I followed Dr. Westlake's narrative with increasing fascination as he

described his search for real healing. He ended up WAY outside of conventional

medicine. Herbology, homeopathy, naturopathy... these approaches were utterly

new to me. Yet Dr. Westlake, a fully qualified doctor of medicine, saw value

in these unorthodox treatments. I could not simply disregard them. This man

just did not seem to be a complete idiot.

I began to think that there was something to these natural healing methods after

all.

That, of course, was only the beginning. The really subversive thing about

reading books is that each good one leads to many others. So it was with me.

If there wasn't yet a medical blacklist or " Index " listing all health heresy in

print, I think I came reasonably close to creating one during college and

graduate school. I read Medical Nemesis, by Dr. Ivan Illich, Who is Your

Doctor and Why, by Alonzo J. Shadman, M.D., and dozens of research papers

reprinted by the former Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research. Works of Dr.

Linus Pauling, Dr. Abram Hoffer, Drs. Wilfred and Evan Shute, Dr. Paavo Airola,

Dr. Ewan Cameron, Dr. Richard Passwater, Dr. Robert Mendelssohn, Dr. Roger J.

Williams, Dr. Edward Bach and many other respected scientists eventually

persuaded me that natural healing was not only valid but was generally superior

to conventional drug-and-surgery medicine.

As an undergraduate, I spent a year studying at the Australian National

University. While there, a friend and I calculated that a person would have to

eat something in the neighborhood of 7,000 oranges a day to get the amount of

vitamin C recommended by Dr. Linus Pauling. Seemed like a lot to me, but I soon

began to take a daily vitamin C supplement. While doing graduate work as a

bachelor, I began vegetarianism. To tell you the truth, I did this mostly to

have fewer dishes to wash. It also seemed to me that vegetarian meals were

cheaper and took less time to prepare. I avoided a lot of greasy pots and pans

and, as a side benefit, began to feel better as well.

Around this time I tried fasting. Not on myself, of course, but on my dog. It

happened that the dog developed quite a fever and curled up in a corner of the

dining room all day and night. I checked with the vet, and he said that it was

not dangerous to leave the dog to itself, so I did. That dog stayed curled up

in that corner for three days. It moved only for water and to go outside for

bathroom purposes. The dog ate nothing at all during those three days. It

slept, and I watched. On the fourth day, the dog got up and was its own doggy

self again. The fever was gone, and it was generally as if nothing was ever

wrong.

This got me thinking.

Not long afterwards I got sick. Real sick. Sick enough that neighbors stopped

by to check on me. I began to fast, basically duplicating what my dog had done

with the exception that I did not sleep in the corner. (I also did not use the

outdoors for excretory purposes). To my dull-headed surprise, I was comfortable

eating nothing. All I wanted were liquids and sleep. The illness was over

quickly, without any medicines. The result was good, but it was the PROCESS by

which I'd gotten better that really intrigued me. This sounds odd, but while

fasting I'd felt the best I had ever felt while feeling bad. Certainly I had

been very ill, yet this simple cure was completely satisfactory. Hmm.

I continued with my informal postgraduate study in naturopathy. This kept me

reading more and more books on natural healing written by experienced doctors.

These physicians treated extremely serious diseases with fasting, diet, herbs,

homeopathy, minerals and vitamins. I finally began taking a natural multiple

vitamin every day, and continued to live alone, work and further my education.

From reading we can soak up many facts but it is having children that really

tests our knowledge. Exams and theses on one hand, babies on the other.

Raising a family provides plenty of opportunity to see whether an idea is any

good or not. Marriage and kids showed me that nature-cure works. It is simple,

safe, economical, and effective. Of course, we've all been told that anything

easy, cheap and harmless cannot possibly be any good.

That's what I had thought, too. Ever since those first injections in the rump.

It turns out that the natural therapeutics are as good or better than allopathic

(drug-based) medicine. During my bouts with pneumonia, experience showed me

that Erythromycin will not cure it as fast as high-dose vitamin C therapy will.

My father once had angina and an irregular heartbeat. He now has none of those

symptoms, because he takes quite a lot of vitamin E each day. He found that the

vitamin works better than the prescriptions he'd been taking, and doesn't have

the side effects, either.

Outside my family, I have seen " hopeless " cases turn around with natural

therapy: impending blindness reversed, multiple sclerosis improved, mental

illness ended, hips rebuilt without surgery, malignancies shrunken, immune

systems restored, severe arthritis eliminated, all these and many more; all

cured without drugs.

After you see this happen again and again it begins to reach you: these truly

ARE simple, safe, economical, and effective natural treatments. And, they work

on the REAL diseases.

Does health have to hurt and cost a fortune? Are blood and drugs prerequisites

for healing? Is a hospital really the best place for getting better? Have

medical doctors cornered the market on healing knowledge? Is nature-cure a lot

of hooey?

Don't you believe it. Instead, see for yourself. Read a few of those books at

the health food store. Change your diet. Next time you are sick, try a natural

alternative instead. Find out for yourself. That's what I did, and it has

worked.

And that is how I got into natural healing.

Copyright C 1999 and prior years Andrew W. Saul. From the books QUACK DOCTOR

and PAPERBACK CLINIC, available from Dr. Andrew Saul, Number 8 Van Buren

Street, Holley, New York 14470.

 

 

 

 

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[Guest guest]

-

" Frank " <califpacific

<gettingwell >

Wednesday, January 15, 2003 7:05 PM

How I Got Into Natural Healing

 

 

>

> http://doctoryourself.com/howstart.html

>

> How I Got Into Natural Healing

> Dr. Mosher told me to read a book, The Pattern of Health

> (now out of print), by an English physician named Aubrey

> T. Westlake, M.D. It changed everything.

 

I did a brief web search & found the book mentioned is now

back in print.

http://www.minimum.com/p7/engine/book.asp?n=2304

 

Alobar