Do you have a chronic illness that conventional medicine can’t solve? Don’t be surprised.
Medicine is detective work – especially when it comes to curing chronic illnesses. That’s one of the reasons why conventional medicine is such a failure in the area of chronic disease.
It takes time to do good detective work. Time to ask questions. Time to do some digging. And time to listen to the answers.
So if you want to cure your chronic illness, don’t expect your doctor to do that in 15 minutes.
Instead, learn from Carol...
Carol is a very attractive 49-year-old woman who sees me every year as part of her efforts to slow down the effects of aging. In order to do this, she gets a Bio-Energy Test (www.bioenergytesting.com) once a year, and then we go over the results.
As long as her Bio-Energy scores are good, I know that she’s in good health. But her visit last year had a new twist — a red hot twist.
Carol had developed a rash. But it wasn’t your normal, everyday rash. Her rash was limited to her lips. Her lips were inflamed, hot, and swollen. They had become that way a few weeks before in the first week of May, and the problem wouldn’t go away.
I took one look at the rash and was sure that it was a case of “contact dermatitis.” Contact dermatitis is a ten-dollar phrase for “something is touching your lips that you’re allergic to.” But what was causing it?
Carol is a cosmetologist. For those of you who think this has something to do with stars (as I did when she first told me), let me set you straight. A cosmetologist works with makeup, i.e. cosmetics.
She and her husband own and operate a wedding chapel. He does the ceremonies, and she handles the makeup.
So my first guess was that she was inadvertently getting some of the makeup products on her lips, and this was causing the rash. But she had been using the same products for several years. If she were allergic to one of them, it should have shown up long ago. But that still didn’t rule the possibility out.
What You Don’t Know About Cosmetics
What many women don’t appreciate is that the makers of cosmetics often change some of the ingredients in their products without any indication of the change on the label. This can happen if they find a better ingredient, or a less expensive one.
So I asked Carol to call the manufacturers of her products and ask them if they had changed any of the ingredients. She did, and the answer was no. Back to the drawing board.
Was she using a new lip balm? No. How about lipstick? “I don’t use lipstick but every now and then. So if I was allergic to it, it would be pretty obvious.”
OK, let’s try a new tactic. What if the rash on her lips was due to a systemic reaction, and for reasons that were unexplained, just decided to show up on her lips? For example, what if she had developed a food allergy?
When I first started practicing natural medicine almost 30 years ago, allergies were not nearly as common as they are today. One of the reasons has to do with the introduction of foods with genetically modified organisms (GMO). For example, genetically altered soy (which is what is in almost all non-organic soy products) contains several allergic ingredients that are not in natural soy.
Carol loves the convenience of processed foods. Almost all processed foods (unless they are labeled organic) contain GMOs. So I asked her to avoid all processed foods for six weeks. This she did. But it did nothing to stop the rash. And I was starting to run out of ideas.
So I asked her again if she had started taking any medication, herb, or nutritional supplement — anything? The answer was no.
So I Tried Something Else
I reasoned that, even though it did not look like a yeast rash, maybe that’s what it was. Maybe she was having an allergic reaction to yeast that was not your ordinary type of reaction.
What could it hurt if I gave her an anti-yeast remedy? After all, yeast reactions are one of the most common causes of allergies.
So I gave her a prescription for an anti-yeast cream called Mycolog cream that I have always had great success with. And low and behold, about three weeks later (it’s now October) the rash was gone.
What’s more, when she stopped using the cream, it never came back. This was enough evidence to me that the yeast diagnosis was the solution. It took us all summer to figure it out, but at last we knew. Or did we?
Long about May of the next year, the rash came back — just like before. Now what were the odds of a yeast infection coming about in two consecutive Mays? Not very likely. There had to be something else going on.
And so I figured it out, right? Wrong. Carol figured it out one day in her stable.
It was May, and the flies were coming out, so she had just applied a fly repellent to her horse. And then she did something that I forgot to ask her about in my history. She kissed her horse.
On the way back to her house she started to notice some tingling in her lips, and sure enough, next morning she had the rash again. The mystery was solved. The reason the rash had disappeared the previous October was not because of my anti-yeast therapy.
It was because in October, the flies were not a problem, and even though she routinely kissed her horse, she had stopped using the repellent.
In 1969, my old medical professor at the University of Maryland had been practicing medicine for over 60 years. He used to pound it into our heads, “If you just let your patients talk long enough, they will tell you two things — what caused the condition, and what will cure it.”
In this age of CT scans and other modern day miracles, his words still stand.