How and When to Be Your Own Doctor Part 1

How and When to Be Your Own Doctor.

by Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon.

Forward

_Tis a gift to be simple Tis a gift to be free, Tis a gift to come down Where we ought to be.

And when we find ourselves In a place just right, It will be in the valley Of love and delight._

Old Shaker Hymn

Favorite of Dr. Isabelle Moser

I was a physically tough, happy-go-lucky fellow until I reached my late thirties. Then I began to experience more and more off days when I did not feel quite right. I thought I possessed an iron const.i.tution. Although I grew a big food garden and ate mostly "vegetablitarian" I thought I could eat anything with impunity. I had been fond of drinking beer with my friends while nibbling on salty snacks or heavy foods late into the night. And until my health began to weaken I could still get up the next morning after several homebrewed beers, feeling good, and would put in a solid day's work.

When my health began to slip I went looking for a cure. Up to that time the only use I'd had for doctors was to fix a few traumatic injuries. The only preventative health care I concerned myself with was to take a multivitamin pill during those rare spells when I felt a bit run down and to eat lots of vegetables. So I'd not learned much about alternative health care.

Naturally, my first stop was a local general pract.i.tioner/MD. He gave me his usual half-hour get-acquainted checkout and opined that there almost certainly was nothing wrong with me. I suspect I had the good fortune to encounter an honest doctor, because he also said if it were my wish he could send me around for numerous tests but most likely these would not reveal anything either. More than likely, all that was wrong was that I was approaching 40; with the onset of middle age I would naturally have more aches and pains.

'Take some aspirin and get used to it,' was his advice. 'It'll only get worse.'

Not satisfied with his dismal prognosis I asked an energetic old guy I knew named Paul, an '80-something homesteader who was renowned for his organic garden and his good health. Paul referred me to his doctor, Isabelle Moser, who at that time was running the Great Oaks School of Health, a residential and out-patient spa nearby at Creswell, Oregon.

Dr. Moser had very different methods of a.n.a.lysis than the medicos, was warmly personal and seemed very safe to talk to. She looked me over, did some strange magical thing she called muscle testing and concluded that I still had a very strong const.i.tution. If I would eliminate certain "bad" foods from my diet, eliminate some generally healthful foods that, unfortunately, I was allergic to, if I would reduce my alcohol intake greatly and take some food supplements, then gradually my symptoms would abate. With the persistent application of a little self-discipline over several months, maybe six months, I could feel really well again almost all the time and would probably continue that way for many years to come. This was good news, though the need to apply personal responsibility toward the solution of my problem seemed a little sobering.

But I could also see that Dr. Moser was obviously not telling me something. So I gently pressed her for the rest. A little shyly, reluctantly, as though she were used to being rebuffed for making such suggestions, Isabelle asked me if I had ever heard of fasting?

"Yes," I said. "I had. Once when I was about twenty and staying at a farm in Missouri, during a bad flu I actually did fast, mainly because I was too sick to take anything but water for nearly one week."

"Why do you ask?" I demanded.

"If you would fast, you will start feeling really good as soon as the fast is over." she said.

"Fast? How long?"

"Some have fasted for a month or even longer," she said. Then she observed my crestfallen expression and added, "Even a couple of weeks would make an enormous difference."

It just so happened that I was in between set-up stages for a new mail-order business I was starting and right then I did have a couple of weeks when I was virtually free of responsibility. I could also face the idea of not eating for a couple of weeks. "Okay!" I said somewhat impulsively. "I could fast for two weeks. If I start right now maybe even three weeks, depending on how my schedule works out."

So in short order I was given several small books about fasting to read at home and was mentally preparing myself for several weeks of severe privation, my only sustenance to be water and herb tea without sweetener. And then came the clinker.

"Have you ever heard of colonics?" she asked sweetly.

"Yes. Weird practice, akin to a.n.a.l s.e.x or something?"

"Not at all," she responded. "Colonics are essential during fasting or you will have spells when you'll feel terrible. Only colonics make water fasting comfortable and safe."

Then followed some explanation about bowel cleansing (and another little book to take home) and soon I was agreeing to get my body over to her place for a colonic every two or three days during the fasting period, the first colonic scheduled for the next afternoon.

I'll spare you a detailed description of my first fast with colonics; you'll read about others shortly. In the end I withstood the boredom of water fasting for 17 days. During the fast I had about 7 colonics. I ended up feeling great, much trimmer, with an enormous rebirth of energy. And when I resumed eating it turned out to be slightly easier to control my dietary habits and appet.i.tes.

Thus began my practice of an annual health-building water fast. Once a year, at whatever season it seemed propitious, I'd set aside a couple of weeks to heal my body. While fasting I'd slowly drive myself over to Great Oaks School for colonics every other day. By the end of my third annual fast in 1981, Isabelle and I had become great friends. About this same time Isabelle's relations.h.i.+p with her first husband, Douglas Moser, had disintegrated. Some months later, Isabelle and I became partners. And then we married.

My regular fasts continued through 1984, by which time I had recovered my fundamental organic vigor and had retrained my dietary habits. About 1983 Isabelle and I also began using Life Extension megavitamins as a therapy against the aging process. Feeling so much better I began to find the incredibly boring weeks of prophylactic fasting too difficult to motivate myself to do, and I stopped. Since that time I fast only when acutely ill. Generally less than one week on water handles any non-optimum health condition I've had since '84. I am only 54 years old as I write these words, so I hope it will be many, many years before I find myself in the position where I have to fast for an extended period to deal with a serious or life-threatening condition.

I am a kind of person the Spanish call _autodidactico,_ meaning that I prefer to teach myself. I had already learned the fine art of self-employment and general small-business practice that way, as well as radio and electronic theory, typography and graphic design, the garden seed business, horticulture, and agronomy. When Isabelle moved in with me she also brought most of Great Oak's extensive library, including very hard to obtain copies of the works of the early hygienic doctors. Naturally I studied her books intensely.

Isabelle also brought her medical practice into our house. At first it was only a few loyal local clients who continued to consult with her on an out-patient basis, but after a few years, the demands for residential care from people who were seriously and sometimes life-threateningly sick grew irresistibly, and I found myself sharing our family house with a parade of really sick people. True, I was not their doctor, but because her residential clients became temporary parts of our family, I helped support and encourage our residents through their fasting process. I'm a natural teacher (and how-to-do-it writer), so I found myself explaining many aspects of hygienic medicine to Isabelle's clients, while having a first-hand opportunity to observe for myself the healing process at work. Thus it was that I became the doctor's a.s.sistant and came to practice second-hand hygienic medicine.

In 1994, when Isabelle had reached the age of 54, she began to think about pa.s.sing on her life's acc.u.mulation of healing wisdom by writing a book. She had no experience at writing for the popular market, her only major writing being a Ph.D. dissertation. I on the other hand had published seven books about vegetable gardening. And I grasped the essentials of her wisdom as well as any non-pract.i.tioner could. So we took a summer off and rented a house in rural Costa Rica, where I helped Isabelle put down her thoughts on a cheap word-processing typewriter. When we returned to the States, I fired-up my "big-mac" and composed this ma.n.u.script into a rough book format that was given to some of her clients to get what is trendily called these days, "feedback."

But before we could completely finish her book, Isabelle became dangerously ill and after a long, painful struggle with abdominal cancer, she died. After I resurfaced from the worst of my grief and loss, I decided to finish her book. Fortunately, the ma.n.u.script needed little more than polis.h.i.+ng. I am telling the reader these things because many ghost-written books end up having little direct connection with the originator of the thoughts. Not so in this case.

And unlike many ghost writers, I had a long and loving apprentices.h.i.+p with the author. At every step of our colaboration on this book I have made every effort to communicate Isabelle's viewpoints in the way she would speak, not my own. Dr. Isabelle Moser was for many years my dearest friend. I have worked on this book to help her pa.s.s her understanding on.

Many people consider death to be a complete invalidation of a healing arts pract.i.tioner. I don't. Coping with her own dicey health had been a major motivator for Isabelle's interest in healing others. She will tell you more about it in the chapters to come.

Isabelle had been fending off cancer since its first blow up when she was 26 years old. I view that 30 plus years of defeating Death as a great success rather than consider her ultimate defeat as a failure.

Isabelle Moser was born in 1940 and died in 1996. I think the greatest accomplishment of her 56 years was to meld virtually all available knowledge about health and healing into a workable and most importantly, a simple model that allowed her to have amazing success. Her "system" is simple enough that even a generally well-educated non-medico like me can grasp it. And use it without consulting a doctor every time a symptom appears.

Finally, I should mention that over the years since this book was written I have discovered contains some significant errors of anatomical or psysiological detail. Most of these happened because the book was written "off the top of Isabelle's head," without any reference materials at hand, not even an anatomy text. I have not fixed these goofs as I am not even qualified to find them all. Thus, when the reader reads such as 'the pancreas secreates enzymes into the stomach,' (actually and correctly, the duodenum) I hope they will understand and not invalidate the entire book.

Chapter One

How I Became a Hygienist

From The Hygienic Dictionary

Doctors. [1] In the matter of disease and healing, the people have been treated as serfs. The doctor is a dictator who knows it all, and the people are stupid, dumb, driven cattle, fit for nothing except to be herded together, bucked and gagged when necessary to force medical opinion down their throats or under their skins. I found that professional dignity was more often pomposity, sordid bigotry and gilded ignorance. The average physician is a fear-monger, if he is anything. He goes about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may scare to death. _Dr. John. H. Tilden, Impaired Health: Its Cause and Cure, Vol. 1, 1921._ [2] Today we are not only in the Nuclear Age but also the Antibiotic Age. Unhappily, too, this is the Dark Age of Medicine--an age in which many of my colleagues, when confronted with a patient, consult a volume which rivals the Manhattan telephone directory in size. This book contains the names of thousands upon thousands of drugs used to alleviate the distressing symptoms of a host of diseased states of the body. The doctor then decides which pink or purple or baby-blue pill to prescribe for the patient. This is not, in my opinion, the practice of medicine. Far too many of these new "miracle" drugs are introduced with fanfare and then reveled as lethal in character, to be silently discarded for newer and more powerful drugs. _Dr. Henry Bieler: Food is Your Best Medicine; 1965._

I have two reasons for writing this book. One, to help educate the general public about the virtues of natural medicine. The second, to encourage the next generation of natural healers. Especially the second because it is not easy to become a natural hygienist; there is no school or college or licensing board.

Most AMA-affiliated physicians follow predictable career paths, straight well-marked roads, climbing through apprentices.h.i.+ps in established inst.i.tutions to high financial rewards and social status. Pract.i.tioners of natural medicine are not awarded equally high status, rarely do we become wealthy, and often, naturopaths arrive at their profession rather late in life after following the tangled web of their own inner light. So I think it is worth a few pages to explain how I came to practice a dangerous profession and why I have accepted the daily risks of police prosecution and civil liability without possibility of insurance.

Sometimes it seems to me that I began this lifetime powerfully predisposed to heal others. So, just for childhood warm-ups I was born into a family that would be much in need of my help. As I've always disliked an easy win, to make rendering that help even more difficult, I decided to be the youngest child, with two older brothers.

A pair of big, capable brothers might have guided and s.h.i.+elded me.

But my life did not work out that way. The younger of my two brothers, three years ahead of me, was born with many health problems. He was weak, small, always ill, and in need of protection from other children, who are generally rough and cruel. My father abandoned our family shortly after I was born; it fell to my mother to work to help support us. Before I was adolescent my older brother left home to pursue a career in the Canadian Air Force.