My Story

My mother had a mercury amalgam dental filling when she was a teenager that seeped into her body for many years.  By the time she married my father and became pregnant with me, she had mercury poisoning.  The mercury also was transferred to me in the womb.

As a child I was very sickly, with chronic strep throat infections, an enlarged spleen, joint pains, and trouble coping.  Going on birth control pills when I got older, to regulate my menstrual cycles, and because I was getting married, did not help me one bit.  I’d never had a weight problem in my whole life, but starting the pill was putting the weight on me, and fast.  It was also sending my emotional well being for a wild ride, making me weepy and inexplicably frustrated and angry all the time.  I decided to stop the birth control pill and try to lose weight and get healthy.  Had I known then just how dangerous the pill was for me, I would never have taken it.  I would have gone through a Detox Protocol and turned to natural health back then.  It did not occur to me at that point that I could have the same health problems that my mother had.  I thought my problems were just every-day common problems we all have, and that medical doctors could fix me.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I became pregnant and went to a doctor who thought that I needed to lose weight for a healthy pregnancy and decided that it was a good idea to put me on a low-fat diet.  A good little patient I was, so I followed her advice.  And gained 70 more pounds within months, following her low-fat diet advice.  Miscarriage occurred, and divorce followed not long after that.

Eventually I learned about something called a low-carb diet.  I bought the book, quickly read it from cover to cover, and decided that was what I needed to do.  I threw out all the food I had in my kitchen, and restocked with meats, chicken, fish, cheeses, vegetables, butter, and all things low-carb.  It was a much healthier diet than the processed foods I had been consuming.  And it worked!  I lost 120 pounds over the next year and a half by following this diet religiously, gradually increasing my carb consumption over time, just like the book told me to do, and I eventually wore a size 4 again, just like I had worn back in high school.  I was even wearing bikinis to public beaches!  But I made a huge mistake along the way.  I didn’t like water, so I drank lots of coffee, iced coffee, and diet soda every time I wanted to quench my thirst.  I dehydrated myself to a point of near crisis.  I also did not realize how much I needed to hydrate and detoxify my body and nourish my liver and lymphatic system.  I almost got to my goal weight, with just 7 more pounds to lose, and got to enjoy my smaller healthy size for a few weeks before disaster struck.

One day I woke up to experience severe spasms of the piriformis muscle (muscle that joins tailbone area to hip joint, a literal pain in the butt) that resulted in extreme sciatica.  It was so painful I could not stand up straight for the better part of a year, and walked almost sideways with what I thought would turn into a permanent limp.  Though I had been exposed to alternative methods of healing at a young age and knew that conventional medicine has its problems, my insurance through my employer only covered conventional medicine and doctors at that time, as do most if not all insurance companies.  So I went to the doctors my HMO insurance coverage said I could go to and received the treatments they said I could have.  It took seven doctors to finally diagnose me with a herniated disc, countless shots of cortisone and oral prednisone treatments, and from there, my decline really began.

An unfortunate side effect of the corticosteroids given to me was glaucoma.  This was treated by yet more conventional doctors who gave me beta blocker eye drops, which caused more side effects, including estrogen dominance, liver dysfunction, kidney problems, skin rashes, and Candidiasis.  Keep in mind, at this time I was still unaware that I had mercury poisoning as well.  Doctors do not test you to see if you have mercury poisoning or impaired liver or kidney function before prescribing drugs to you, and since mercury poisoning causes Candidiasis and liver dysfunction, prescription drugs can be very dangerous and have devastating side effects.  After taking the eye drops for a period of time and getting no relief from the increased intraocular pressure, I allowed a glaucoma specialist to perform laser surgery on my eyes to essentially drill holes into my eyeballs to relieve the pressure.  Steroid eye drops were then prescribed for me to reduce the post surgery inflammation.  Even this procedure did not decrease my eye pressure.

I started feeling ill and very fatigued all the time, began to gain substantial weight, over a hundred pounds in total, even though I was still following my successful low-carb diet, and my menstrual cycles began to get worse.  Very much worse.  Even to the point of having to use sick days during my menses because it was so debilitating.  Suddenly I had fibroid tumors growing off my uterus and cystic masses forming in my breasts, and eventually a gigantic endometrial cyst growing from one of my ovaries.

Though I continued on the eye drops to try to control my glaucoma, my eye pressure kept rising.  The next step the doctor wanted to take to get my eye pressure down was to perform a surgery to cut into my eyeballs to install drainage shunts.  Well I don’t know about you, but the thought of this scared me to death, and I was not going to let that happen.  This is where my path to natural health began.  I decided at that point to do some research on the side effects of my eye drops.  Looking back, I should have done this before I ever started taking them.  What I learned was that each new symptom I was experiencing was listed as a potential side effect of the eye drops I was taking, including the excessive weight gain, uterine fibroids and fibroadenoma breast cysts, which then required biopsies.  I also learned that the eye drops prevented my eye pressure from going down naturally because of liver function decreasing side effects, so when I finally decided to stop the eye drops, my eye pressure increased very suddenly and substantially, much higher than it had been before I began taking them.

This led to a stroke in one of my eyes, resulting in optic nerve damage and partial blindness.  Fortunately, through natural healing, I have been able to keep the eyesight in my other eye while controlling my intraocular pressure and even getting a little bit of sight back in my blind eye.  I worked with a naturopathic doctor who specializes in classical homeopathy, and she was able to help me to lower my eye pressure with a particular homeopathic remedy.

The medical doctor, an ophthalmologist, who was treating my eye problems decided at this point to essentially “fire” me as his patient because I refused the eye drops he tried prescribing for me, having already gone down that road and getting nowhere but worse with my previous eye doctors.  He told me I would go blind in both eyes and that he refused to sit and watch me go blind while I would not allow him to treat me.  What I asked from him was to monitor my eye pressure while I tried to heal myself naturally.  It’s most unfortunate that he would not accept that.  It would have been so exciting for him, as a doctor who wants to help people with their precious eye sight, to watch and help me to heal myself from a disease that doctors and conventional medicine do not understand the cause of and know no cure.  Natural medicine, however, understands that glaucoma and other eye problems are not diseases, but rather symptoms of liver and lymphatic system dysfunction and provides natural remedies that our bodies know what to do with, to heal the liver and lymphatic system, thus removing symptoms like glaucoma.

Bit by bit, my health declined until I was chronically tired and achy, and my back and neck would go out of alignment all the time, and I also began suffering from food sensitivities and mild to severe reactions to various chemicals in the environment, having had to leave work early when my lungs would seize up in reaction to chemical fumes coming in through the ventilation system, and having to practically run out of stores if someone passed me by wearing too much perfume or cologne.  Getting up in the mornings became such a burden on my body that I would become depressed at night, unwilling to go to bed, regardless of how tired I was, because that meant that morning would come, and I would have to put my body through the process of waking up again and having to go to work, where I would just keep getting sick.  People would look at me as if I had two heads and ask why didn’t I go to a doctor.  It was all I could do not to laugh, or cry, in response to that question.

It’s important to remember that doctors, for the most part, want to help you.  It’s not their fault that the medicine they learn to practice is based on a flawed foundation or that medical schools don’t teach natural healing.  Everything they learn in medical school is based on symptoms and what pharmaceutical drugs are made to treat them.  They sometimes don’t even know the side effects of the drugs they prescribe their patients.  So often, their misguided efforts to help you end up doing more harm than good, because natural body function is ignored, and synthetic substances are looked to as the answer to health problems.  Think about it though.  If you have a headache, conventional medicine says you are deficient in Tylenol or aspirin.  That just makes no sense.  Natural medicine would look at a headache and say there is an imbalance in your body that needs to be addressed, such as dehydration or inflammation from decreased liver function or candida overgrowth, etc.  Natural medicine does not look to treat symptoms, but rather to get to the root cause of the symptoms by addressing and correcting the imbalance that’s responsible for your symptoms in the first place.

It’s important not to become angry at conventional medicine or doctors, and just as important not to blame yourself for your health problems or your trust in conventional medicine though, as anger and self-blame only worsen your symptoms because of the detrimental effect of anger and self-blame on the liver.  Just understand this, and realize that no matter how much you may like and even trust your doctor, and no matter how much your doctor may want to and try to help you, you are ultimately the only one who lives in your body.  Your doctor will go home in his or her own body, while you are the one living in your body.  Ultimately, you are the one suffering from health problems that need to be fixed, not your doctor.  Only you have the power over your own healing.  This is accomplished through a real education on how your body works, commitment to yourself and your health, and application of what you learn.  Your body has the power to heal itself from just about any health condition, as long as you give your body what it needs, including proper nourishment, hydration, and unconditional love, and stay away from anything that would harm it.

It’s easy to indulge in self-pity and ask “why is this happening to me?”  Know that you’re not alone.  I’ve come to the realization that my own experiences have brought me knowledge and understanding I would never have otherwise come to, and that what I’ve learned has helped my own health and can help others to get through these same problems.  I’ve come to realize how precious our health freedom is, that that is our first and ultimate freedom – the choice to eat healthy foods, access to clean water, the power over our own bodies and ability to make our own decisions about how to heal our own bodies.  I’ve written countless letters to Congress expressing my passion about health reform, beginning with education, and health freedom.  My dedication to sharing my knowledge with others is the reason I have built this website.  I hope that you find the answers here that you are looking for and that my personal journey to health has helped you to wellness as well.