»»»
And though not yet adolescent, I had to function as a responsible
adult in our household. Stressed by anger over her situation and the
difficulties of earning our living as a country school teacher
(usually in remote one-room schools), my mother's health
deteriorated rapidly. As she steadily lost energy and became less
able to take care of the home, I took over more and more of the
cleaning, cooking, and learned how to manage her--a person who feels
terrible but must work to survive.

During school hours my mother was able to present a positive
attitude, and was truly a gifted teacher. However, she had a
personality quirk. She obstinately preferred to help the most able
students become even more able, but she had little desire to help
those with marginal mentalities. This predilection got her into no
end of trouble with local school boards; inevitably it seemed the
District Chairman would have a stupid, badly-behaved child that my
mother refused to cater to. Several times we had to move in the
middle of the school year when she was dismissed without notice for
"insubordination." This would inevitably happen on the frigid
Canadian Prairies during mid-winter.

At night, exhausted by the day's efforts, my mother's positiveness
dissipated and she allowed her mind to drift into negative thoughts,
complaining endlessly about my irresponsible father and about how
much she disliked him for treating her so badly. These emotions and
their irresponsible expression were very difficult for me to deal
with as a child, but it taught me to work on diverting someone's
negative thoughts, and to avoid getting dragged into them myself,
skills I had to use continually much later on when I began to manage
mentally and physically ill clients on a residential basis.

My own personal health problems had their genesis long before my own
birth. Our diet was awful, with very little fresh fruit or
vegetables. We normally had canned, evaporated milk, though there
were a few rare times when raw milk and free-range fertile farm eggs
were available from neighbors. Most of my foods were heavily salted
or sugared, and we atë a great deal of fat in the form of lard. My
mother had little money but she had no idea that some of the most
nutritious foods are also the least expensive.

It is no surprise to me that considering her nutrient-poor,
fat-laden diet and stressful life, my mother eventually developed
severe gall bladder problems. Her degeneration caused progressively
more and more severe pain until she had a cholecystectomy. The
gallbladder's profound deterioration had damaged her liver as well,
seeming to her surgeon to require the removal of half her liver.
After this surgical insult she had to stop working and never
regained her health. Fortunately, by this time all her children were
independent.

»»»
At the start of my nurses training I was intensely curious about
everything in the hospital: birth, death, surgery, illness, etc. I
found most births to be joyful, at least when everything çame out
all right. Most people died very alone in the hospital, terrified if
they were conscious, and all seemed totally unprepared for death,
emotionally or spiritually. None of the hospital staff wanted to be
with a dying person except me; most hospital staff were unable to
confront death any more bravely than those who were dying. So I made
it a point of being at the death bed. The doctors and nurses found
it extremely unpleasant to have to deal with the preparation of the
dead body for the morgue; this chore usually fell to me also. I did
not mind dead bodies. They certainly did not mind me!

I had the most difficulty accepting surgery. There were times when
surgery was clearly a life saving intervention, particularly when
the person had incurred a traumatic injury, but there were many
other cases when, though the knife was the treatment of choice, the
results were disastrous.

Whenever I think of surgery, my recollections always go to a man
with cancer of the larynx. At that time the University of Alberta
had the most respected surgeons and cancer specialists in the
country. To treat cancer they invariably did surgery, plus radiation
and chemotherapy to eradicate all traces of cancerous tissue in the
body, but they seemed to forget there also was a human being
residing in that very same cancerous body. This particularly
unfortunate man çame into our hospital as a whole human being,
though sick with cancer. He could still speak, eat, swallow, and
looked normal. But after surgery he had no larynx, nor esophagus,
nor tongue, and no lower jaw.

The head surgeon, who, by the way, was considered to be a virtual
god amongst gods, çame back from the operating room smiling from ear
to ear, announcing proudly that he had 'got all the cancer'. But
when I saw the result I thought he'd done a butcher's job. The
victim couldn't speak at all, nor eat except through a tube, and he
looked grotesque. Worst, he had lost all will to live. I thought the
man would have been much better off to keep his body parts as long
as he could, and die a whole person able to speak, eating if he felt
like it, being with friends and family without inspiring a gasp of
horror.

I was sure there must be better ways of dealing with degenerative
conditions such as cancer, but I had no idea what they might be or
how to find out. There was no literature on medical alternatives in
the university library, and no one in the medical school ever hinted
at the possibility except when the doctors took jabs at
chiropractors. Since no one else viewed the situation as I did I
started to think I might be in the wrong profession.

»»»
Though hospital life had already become distasteful to me I was
young and poor when I graduated. So after nursing school I buckled
down and worked just long enough to save enough money to obtain a
masters degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of British
Columbia. Then I started working at Riverview Hospital in Vancouver,
B.C., doing diagnostic testing, and group therapy, mostly with
psychotic people. At Riverview I had a three-year-long opportunity
to observe the results of conventional psychiatric treatment.

The first thing I noticed was the 'revolving door' phenomena. That
is, people go out, and then they're back in, over and over again,
demonstrating that standard treatment--drugs, electroshock and group
therapy--had been ineffective. Worse, the treatments given at
Riverside were dangerous, often with long term side effects that
were more damaging than the disease being treated. It felt like
nursing school all over again; in the core of my being I somehow
knew there was a better way, a more effective way of helping people
to regain their mental health. Feeling like an outsider, I started
investigating the hospital's nooks and crannies. Much to my
surprise, in a back ward, one not open to the public, I noticed a
number of people with bright purple skins.

I asked the staff about this and every one of the psychiatrists
denied these patients existed. This outright and widely-agreed-upon
lie really raised my curiosity. Finally after pouring through the
journals in the hospital library I found an article describing
psycho tropic-drug-induced disruptions of melanin (the dark skin
pigment). Thorazine, a commonly used psychiatric drug, when taken in
high doses over a long period of time would do this. Excess melanin
eventually was deposited in vital organs such as the heart and the
liver, causing death.

I found it especially upsetting to see patients receive electroshock
treatments. These violent, physician-induced traumas did seem to
disrupt dysfunctional thought patterns such as an impulse to commit
suicide, but afterwards the victim couldn't remember huge parts of
their life or even recall who they were. Like many other dangerous
medical treatments, electroshock can save life but it can also take
life away by obliterating identity.

According the Hippocratic Oath, the first criteria of a treatment is
that it should do no harm. Once again I found myself trapped in a
system that made me feel severe protest. Yet none of these
specialists or university professors, or academic libraries had any
information about alternatives. Worse, none of these mind-doctor-gods
were even looking for better treatments.

Though unpleasant and profoundly disappointing, my experience as a
mental hospital psychologist was, like being in nursing school, also
very valuable. Not only did I learn how to diagnose, and evaluate
the severity of mental illness and assess the dangerousness of the
mentally ill, I learned to understand them, to feel comfortable with
them, and found that I was never afraid of them. Fearlessness is a
huge advantage. The mentally ill seem to have a heightened ability
to spot fear in others. If they sense that you are afraid they
frequently enjoy terrorizing you. When psychotic people know you
feel comfortable with them, and probably understand a great deal of
what they are experiencing, when they know that you can and intend
to control them, they experience a huge sense of relief. I could
always get mentally ill people to tell me what was really going on
in their heads when no one else could get them to communicate.

»»»
This book had a profound effect on me. I instantly recognized that
it was Truth with a capital "T", although the orthomolecular
approach was clearly in opposition to the established medical model
and contradicted everything I had ever learned as a student or
professional. Here at last was the exciting alternative approach to
treating mental disorders I had so long sought. I filed this
information away, waiting for an opportunity to use it. And I began
to study all the references in The Orthomolecular Approach to Mental
Disorders dealing with correcting the perceptual functioning of
psychotic people using natural substances.

In the course of delving through libraries and book stores, I also
çame across the Mokelumne Hill Publishing Company (now defunct).
This obscure publisher reprinted many unusual and generally crudely
reproduced out-of-print books about raw foods diets, hygienic
medicine, fruitarianism, fasting, breathairianism, plus some works
discussing spiritual aspects of living that were far more esoteric
than I had ever thought existed. I decided that weird or not, I
might as well find out everything potentially useful. So I spent a
lot of money ordering their books. Some of Mokelumne Hill's material
really expanded my thoughts. Though much of it seemed totally
outrageous, in every book there usually was one line, one paragraph,
or if I was lucky one whole chapter that rang true for me.

Recognizing capital "T" Truth when one sees it is one of the most
important abilities a person can have. Unfortunately, every aspect
of our mass educational system attempts to invalidate this skill.
Students are repeatedly told that derivation from recognized
authority and/or the scientific method are the only valid means to
assess the validity of data. But there is another parallel method to
determine the truth or falsehood of information: Knowing. We Know by
the simple method of looking at something and recognizing its
correctness. It is a spiritual ability. I believe we all have it.
But in my case, I never lost the ability to Know because I almost
never attended school.

Thus it is that I am absolutely certain How and When to Be Your Own
Doctor will be recognized as Truth by some of my readers and
rejected as unscientific, unsubstantiated, or anecdotal information
by others. I accept this limitation on my ability to teach. If what
you read in the following pages seems True for you, great! If it
doesn't, there is little or nothing I could do to further convince.

I return now to the time of my first pregnancy. In the face of all
these new Truths I was discovering concerning health and nutrition,
I made immediate changes in my diet. I severely reduced my animal
protein intake and limited cooked food in general. I began taking
vitamin and mineral supplements. I also choose a highly atypical
Ph.D. dissertation topic, "The Orthomolecular Treatment of Mental
Disorders." This fifty cent word, orthomolecular, basically means
readjusting the body chemistry by providing unusually largë amounts
of specific nutrient substances normally found in the human body
(vitamins and minerals). Orthomolecular therapy for mental disorders
is supported by good diet, by removal of allergy-producing
substances, by control of hypoglycemia, plus counseling, and
provision of a therapeutic environment.

»»»
Christine's healing process is quite typical and demonstrates why
orthomolecular treatment is not popular. As a psychotic genuinely
improves, their aberrated behavior often becomes more aggressive
initially and thus, harder to control. It seems far more convenient
for all concerned to suppress psychotic behavior with stupefying
drugs. A drugged person can be controlled when they're in a sort of
perpetual sedation but then, they never get genuinely well, either.

Another early patient, Elizabeth, gave me a particularly valuable
lesson, one that changed the direction of my career away from curing
insanity and toward regular medicine. Elizabeth was a catatonic
schizophrenic who did not speak or move, except for some waxy
posturing. She had to be fed, dressed and pottied. Elizabeth was a
pretty little brunette who got through a couple of years of college
and then spent several years in a state mental hospital. She had
recently run away from a hospital, and had been found wandering
aimlessly or standing rigidly, apparently staring fixedly at
nothing. The emergency mental health facility in a small city nearby
called me up and asked if I would take her. I said I would, and
drove into town to pick her up. I found Elizabeth in someone's back
yard staring at a bush. It took me three hours to persuade her to
get in my car, but that effort turned out to be the easiest part of
the next months.

Elizabeth would do nothing for herself, including going to the
bathroom. I managed to get some nutrition into her, and change her
clothes, but that was about all I could do. Eventually she wore me
down; I drifted off for an hour's nap instead of watching her all
night. Elizabeth slipped away in the autumn darkness and vanished.
Needless to say, when daylight çame I desperately searched the
buildings, the yard, gardens, woods, and even the nearby river. I
called in a missing person report and the police looked as well. We
stopped searching after a week because there just wasn't any place
else to look. Then, into my kitchen, right in front of our round
eyes and gaping mouths, walked a smiling, pleasant, talkative young
woman who was quite sane.

She said, "Hello I'm Elizabeth! I'm sorry I was such a hassle last
week, and thank you for trying to take care of me so well. I was too
sick to know any better." She said she had gone out our back door
the week before and crawled under a pile of fallen leaves on the
ground in our back yard with a black tarp over them. We had looked
under the tarp at least fifty times during the days past, but never
thought to look under the leaves as well.

This amazing occurrence made my head go bong to say the least; it
was obvious that Elizabeth had not been 'schizophrenic' because of
her genetics, nor because of stress, nor malnutrition, nor
hypoglycemia, nor because of any of the causes of mental illness I
had previously learned to identify and rectify, but because of food
allergies. Elizabeth was spontaneously cured because she'd had
nothing to eat for a week. The composting pile of leaves hiding her
had produced enough heat to keep her warm at night and the heap
contained sufficient moisture to keep her from getting too
dehydrated. She looked wonderful, with clear shiny blue eyes, clear
skin with good color, though she was slightly slimmer than when I
had last seen her.

»»»
From this experiment I painfully learned how important it is to
break a fast properly. Those eggs just didn't feel right, like I had
an indigestible stone in my belly. I felt very tired after the
omelet, not energized one bit by the food. I immediately cut back my
intake to raw fruits and vegetables while the eggs cleared out of my
system. After a few days on raw food I felt okay, but I never did
regain the shine I had achieved just before I resumed eating.

This is one of the many fine things about fasting, it allows you to
get in much better communication with your own body, so that you can
hear it when it objects to something you're putting in it or doing
to it. It is not easy to acquire this degree of sensitivity to your
body unless you remove all food for a sufficiently long period; this
allows the body to get a word in edgewise that we are willing and
able to listen to. Even when we do hear the body protesting, we
frequently decide to turn a deaf ear, at least until the body starts
producing severe pain or some other symptom that we can't ignore.

Within a few years after Elizabeth's cure I had handily repaired
quite a few mentally ill people in a harmless way no one had heard
of; many new people were knocking at my door wanting to be admitted
to my drug free, home-based treatment program. So many in fact that
my ability to accommodate them was overwhelmed. I decided that it
was necessary to move to a larger facility and we bought an old,
somewhat run-down estate that I called Great Oaks School of Health
because of the magnificent oak trees growing in the front yard.

At Great Oaks initially I continued working with psychotics,
employing fasting as a tool, especially in those cases with obvious
food allergies as identified by Coca's Pulse Test, because it only
takes five days for a fasting body to eliminate all traces of an
allergic food substance and return to normal functioning. If the
person was so severely hypoglycemic that they were unable to
tolerate a water fast, an elimination diet (to be described in
detail later) was employed, while stringently avoiding all foods
usually found to be allergy producing.

I also decided that if I was going to employ fasting as my primary
medicine, it was important for me to have a more intense personal
experience with it, because in the process of reviewing the
literature on fasting I saw that there were many different
approaches, each one staunchly defended by highly partisan
advocates. For example, the capital "N" Natural, capital "H"
Hygienists, such a Herbert Shelton, aggressively assert that only a
pure water fast can be called a fast. Sheltonites contend that juice
fasting as advocated by Paavo Airola, for example, is not a fast but
rather a modified diet without the benefits of real fasting. Colon
cleansing was another area of profound disagreement among the
authorities. Shelton strongly insisted that enemas and colonics
should not be employed; the juice advocates tënd to strongly
recommend intestinal cleansing.

»»»
After my own rigorous fasting experience I felt capable of
supervising extended fasts on very ill or very overweight people.
Great Oaks was gradually shifting from being a place that mentally
ill people çame to regain their sanity to being a spa where anyone
who wanted to improve their health could come for a few days, some
weeks or even a few months. It had been my observation from the
beginning that the mentally ill people in my program also improved
remarkably in physical health; it was obvious that my method was
good for anyone. Even people with good health could feel better.

By this time I'd also had enough of psychotic people anyway, and
longed for sane, responsible company.

So people started to come to Great Oaks School of Health to rest up
from a demanding job, to drop some excess weight, and generally to
eliminate the adverse effects of destructive living and eating
habits. I also began to get cancer patients, ranging from those who
had just been diagnosed and did not wish to go the AMA-approved
medical route of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, to those with
well-advanced cancer who had been sent home to die after receiving
all of the above treatments and were now ready to give alternative
therapies a try since they expected to die anyway. I also had a few
people who were beyond help because their vital organs had been so
badly damaged that they knew they were dying, and they wanted to die
in peace without medical intervention, in a supportive hospice cared
for by people who could confront death.

Great Oaks School was intentionally named a "school" of health
partially to deflect the attentions of the AMA. It is, after all,
entirely legal to teach about how to maintain health, about how to
prevent illness, and how to go about making yourself well once you
were sick. Education could not be called "practicing medicine
without a license." Great Oaks was also structured as a school
because I wanted to both learn and teach. Toward this end we started
putting out a holistic health newsletter and offering classes and
seminars to the public on various aspects of holistic health. From
the early 1970s through the early 1980s I invited a succession of
holistic specialists to reside at GOSH, or to teach at Great Oaks
while living elsewhere. These teachers not only provided a service
to the community, but they all became my teachers as well. I
apprenticed myself to each one in turn.

There çame and went a steady parade of alternative practitioners of
the healing arts and assorted forms of metapsychology:
acupuncturists, acupressurists, reflexologists, polarity therapists,
massage therapists, postural integrationists, Rolfers, Feldenkries
therapists, neurolinguistic programmers, biokinesiologists,
iridologists, psychic healers, laying on of handsers, past life
readers, crystal therapists, toning therapists in the person of
Patricia Sun, color therapy with lamps and different colored lenses
a la Stanley Bourroughs, Bach Flower therapists, aroma therapists,
herbalists, homeopaths, Tai Chi classes, yoga classes, Arica
classes, Guergieff and Ouspensky fourth-way study groups, EST
workshops, Zen Meditation classes. Refugee Lamas from Tibet gave
lectures on The Book of the Dead and led meditation and chanting
sessions, and we held communication classes using Scientology
techniques. There were anatomy and physiology classes, classes on
nutrition and the orthomolecular approach to treating mental
disorders (given by me of course); there were chiropractors teaching
adjustment techniques, even first aid classes. And we even had a few
medical doctors of the alternative ilk who were interested in life
style changes as an approach to maintaining health.

Classes were also offered on colon health including herbs, clays,
enemas, and colonics. So many of my client at Great Oaks were
demanding colonics in conjunction with their cleansing programs,
that I took time out to go to Indio, Calif. to take a course in
colon therapy from a chiropractor, and purchase a state of the art
colonic machine featuring all the gauges, electric water solenoids
and stainless steel knobs one could ask for.