In 1991 I was a 35-year-old district manager for the State Department of Human Resources. I had good medical insurance, so I went to see a doctor about headaches that were really only a minor annoyance.
The doctor prescribed pain pills for my headache. The headache went away but other problems began to surface.
During the next 12 months I was diagnosed with TMJ, sinusitis and even depression. I was given more pills for those symptoms as well. The next year, my doctor told me that I now suffered from "chronic fatigue" and prescribed more pills.
By 1993 another term was added to my list of ailments-something called "fibromyalgia." Now I had a name for the new pains I'd begun to feel all over my body. What a relief it was when I was prescribed more pills for fibromyalgia.
1994 brought a new round of symptoms and extensive testing with nuclear medicine, injections, magnetic waves and, of course, new prescriptions for more drugs. The term "multiple sclerosis" was added to my vocabulary and my doctor told me I had three to five years left to live.
I had five young children and there had to be a better solution than three to five years of more suffering and an early death. It occurred to me that I may be suffering from the adverse effects of prescribed drugs.
I began researching and discovered how the human body works. I also discovered a wonderful mentor: Barney Folger.
We began to realize that all diseases are merely different levels or degrees of degeneration of the body caused by elemental deficiencies which compromise the body's ability to repair and regenerate at the cellular level.
We knew we were on the right track as our efforts to teach people about how their bodies work have been rewarded every step of the way: When we needed a source for certain substances, we found them; when we needed people with specific skills and training, they appeared; when we needed more information, it came; when we needed proof that orthomolecular nutrition works, another person would report that their chronic symptoms had reversed.
The last several years of study and experience have proven to the founders and members of ASH that God created for us a perfect body. All it requires to be healthy are a few vitamins and minerals.
I am thankful to the scientific community, particularly to doctors Warburg, Brewer, Pauling and Klenner. They have provided us with the indisputable facts of how our bodies work, what causes them to get sick and how to help them heal.
"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge" ~Hosea 4:6
I suspect that excellent health insurance, coupled with ignorance of how the body works, is the number one killer of Americans. That combination nearly killed me-but it didn't-and now my life is dedicated to showing others how to heal themselves easily and inexpensively through orthomolecular nutrition.