D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February
2008
Good for What Ails You
Do dietary changes, herbal treatments and other such cures really work? One man's testimonial.
By Larry Lightner
It was 1995, if I remember correctly, when I discovered one of the ongoing nutritional quirks that drastically changed my health.
I can't remember exactly the year when I first contracted diverticulitis, a disease of the large intestine brought about by stress that results in the pouches of the intestine becoming inflamed and very painful as food lodges in these open recesses. At least, that is what medical people have told me in very simple terms so that I can understand them.
All that I really know is that one day I got a severe pain down low, right above my crotch and slightly to the left of center, and when I pushed on the spot, it hurt a lot! In fact, it hurt so bad that I would lie down on my bed in a fetal position for hours and pray to the Lord to just kill me.
In the ensuing years the attacks would come on suddenly and last for five to seven days; this occurred approximately four times per year. The pain would be very intense the first three days then gradually subside to a dull roar accompanied with constipation most of the time.
I endured the attacks, not being the sort to go get medical help if I didn't "need" to. Then in 1995 a friend of mine and I were talking, and he just happened to be a physician, and I related to him my symptoms. He checked me out and gave me the bad news — diverticulitis.
That's when I came up with my own cure, since he said not much could be done except to change my diet. And that's what I did, sort of. I'm a visualizer when it comes to my body, and I visualized that my intestines must look like a greasy, black, cast-iron skillet — you know the kind. That meant I needed to scour my intestines just like a Brillo pad scours the grease film off of a skillet. To do that I started searching the grocery shelves for the highest-fiber cereal that I could find. I finally settled on Kellogg's All Bran with 10 grams of fiber.
To supplement it and give me a variety of taste, I also started buying other cereals with a goodly amount of fiber, such as Post Select, Lowfat Granola and Sunbelt Granola.
Using the Kellogg's as the main staple, I take an empty drinking glass and fill it half full of the cereal, then add a quarter-glass more of one of the others, then top off the affair with raw walnuts and raw pumpkin seeds (more on these later).
Now comes the catch: I never put milk or liquid on this concoction, but eat it dry. My reasoning is that I don't want to pre-soften the scouring quality of the mixture, even though I know it will be partially softened anyway in my stomach.
I usually eat the glassful in the morning for my breakfast, and top it off with a banana. I do this for five days of the week.
That first year my attacks went from five to seven days' duration down to four days and I had only three bouts that year. By the third year of the diet, the attacks occurred only twice; duration lowered to three days and stayed that way for several years. The severe pain usually lasted only one to two days, if that.
It's now been 12 years since I started this experiment and this year I had only one slight attack that lasted a day and a half with no severity. To be truthful, I don't even remember when the last attack occurred in the year. All I do know is that the diet worked and is working!
Could other fiber diets work? Maybe, but I know only about mine. Let me add here that for all of my so-called remedies, I follow the same procedure: I pray first, then decide what I will try, believing that He will always steer me in the right direction. So far, this hasn't failed!
Along about the age of 50, I developed another malady that probably is the dread of every man over that age — an enlarged prostate (not "prostrate," as so many wanna call it!). I was getting up three to four times per night to go to the bathroom.
In that first year of annoyance I again happened to be telling a friend, who is 10 years older than I am, about it, and he related that he took saw palmetto for it. That got me to cogitating about what I could do to improve on that herb as a base, so I went to see the then-owner of Bear Creek Herbs to find out what kind of concoction we could use to end my nightly misery.
That led to this formula: 70 parts saw palmetto, 15 parts wild oats, 25 parts ocotillo cactus and 10 parts ginger. She recommended that I add a dropperful of this concoction to whatever beverage I was drinking, four times per day. So whether it be cranberry juice, soda, green tea or water, I do just that.
Would you believe that in just two days the frequency of urination dropped to twice per night?
When I turned the age of 56, a customer of mine at the time was conversing over a cup of hot tea and the subject came up somehow (probably because I've discovered that all old people talk about their maladies to each other!) of my problem and what I did to alleviate it. The customer related that her late husband, while living in Europe, had a doctor tell him that if he ate one to two ounces of raw pumpkin seeds every day, he wouldn't have prostate problems.
So off I went to the local Silver City Food Co-op and bought a pound of pumpkin seeds. My problem decreased down to once to zero nightly pit stops, and an added benefit was my PSA (prostate-specific antigen) readings. Before the pumpkin-seed diet, the PSA reading was borderline high and slightly increasing. My doctor at the time was worried and wanted me to go for more intense exams. I told her about starting the pumpkin seeds and she scoffed at the idea, but I asked her to give me six months, then test me again.
We did just that and the test showed my PSA had dropped slightly! She wasn't convinced, but since there was no other reason, she agreed to let me keep doing what I was doing. Since then, my PSA count has stabilized and is in the high-normal range.
I have a new doctor and he too just shakes his head but he doesn't scoff! He just says, "Whatever works!"
Let me say here that a friend tried my two remedies for the prostate and he says they don't work for him. But this gets back to what I said earlier and why I said it. I pray first to the Lord. Now, if I do that, then when He gives me an answer, I gotta choose to believe that the remedy will work! My friend is a natural-born skeptic; he never believes anything until he has absolute proof. Therefore, the remedies didn't work for him. Food for thought.
My third discovery came this past year. I developed chronic back pain and for the six weeks it wouldn't go away no matter what I did or what I took. On top of that, the ibuprofen and aspirin were starting to give me an upset stomach. Once again, I was relating this to another friend and he told me that he took some kind of herb for inflammation, but he didn't have the foggiest idea what it was.
That got my old thinker going again, so off I went to Bear Creek Herbs and told owner Naava Koenigsberg my plight. She said she had just the right cure, so I scarfed up a bottle. It appears to be equal parts of devil's claw, yerba mansa, Aspen bark, feverfew, burdock, chamomille, prickly poppy, skullcap, betony and ginger.
It adds quite a tangy taste to the beverages I have tried it with. Naava recommended that I take a dropperful again four times a day until the pain subsides. Once that happens, then I was to drop the dosage down to once every three days for maintenance.