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An Herbal Tea That is Both a Blood Cleanser and Lymph Cleanser

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Stop the Medicine by Dr. Cynthia Foster, M.D.

Intro and Chapter 1

See Table of Contents
See Book Description Again
Hear the Beautiful Song Written About Stop the Medicine

Introduction: Thousands of Years of Natural Healing

Healing with herbs and foods is not a new concept. Chemical medicines are - they’ve only been in existence since the 1940’s. The concept of poisoning bodies to make symptoms go away has only been in existence for a short while and has continued to grow because of ignorance - ignorance that the disappearance of symptoms means that the health problem has gone away. The symptoms are the warning signals; they are signs that the body is not functioning properly.  They are not the disease.  Getting rid of the warning signals does not get rid of the disease.

Chemicals are very popular nowadays because when a person has a symptom such as a headache, they want the pain to go away right now. Pain killers work very well for that and are very easy to take; just swallow a couple of pills. When a person has a symptom such as indigestion, they want the discomfort to go away right now. Antacids do a great job of making the discomfort go away; just swallow a couple of pills - very convenient for the average American who doesn’t have the knowledge to deal with it any other way. Our drugstores are full of chemical remedies that stop most common symptoms - allergies, sinus problems, coughs, colds, flu’s, indigestion, insomnia, drowsiness, asthma, constipation, diarrhea, and even pep pills to control our appetite and give us more energy. 

Because of the misunderstanding that the disappearance of symptoms means they are healed, people are allowing toxic material to stay in their bodies. When the body is not allowed to cleanse itself through symptoms like coughing, a fever, colds, etc., those poisonous waste products remain in the body leading to another episode of sickness. Eventually, if the healing process is interrupted enough times over the years, so much morbid and rotting material is left in the body that a person will develop a serious disease.  It doesn’t say on the remedy container that the medicine is made from coal tar and other toxic chemicals. Later, when people have twenty years of toxic buildup in their bodies, they wonder why they have a deadly disease. 

I don’t have to wonder; I know exactly why. If people only knew how to support and augment their body’s own natural healing defenses and stop fighting their body’s attempts to heal itself, they would find themselves truly healed. They would find that no serious or chronic disease would ever strike them. They would be safe, healthy and happy.

The use of herbs dates back thousands of years, and since that time have been used successfully, safely and effectively for conditions ranging in severity from the common cold to cancer. We find herbs mentioned throughout history in religious books including the Koran, the Book of Mormon, the Bible and many more books of religious reference that I just don’t know about yet. For example, in the Christian Bible, in Ezekiel 47:12 : “Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither, nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing.” (emphasis added)

Genesis 1:29 states “Then God said ,’I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground-everything that has the breath of life in it-I give every green plant for food.’" It is food that nourishes, strengthens and heals us.

One of the greatest natural healers and herbalists of modern times was John R. Christopher, ND. His herbal remedies were successful for diseases such as anemia, blood poisoning, lack of circulation, heart disease, strokes, cancer, blindness, deafness, diabetes, life-threatening infections such as tetanus, and many more diseases too numerous to mention. Dr. Christopher used to say that there was no such thing as an incurable disease, only incurable people. There are only people who are not willing to take the steps to heal their disease. He has been quoted as saying: “The time is coming (and not far away) when, as our early Church leaders said, the practitioners of medical science will throw up their hands and walk off and say, ‘There’s nothing more we can do; we are baffled!’  And then we’ll all go back to the old forms of healing - in the natural manner as the Lord intended.” 

Dr. Christopher always used to look at the whole body for a healing. He didn’t just give a single herb for a particular problem; he was emphatic that the toxic condition of the bowels and other elimination organs were responsible for the particular problem, (the ear infection, the fungal infection, the headache, etc.)  Dr. Christopher did not know about the different chemicals in the body - the neurotransmitters like acetylcholine, serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, etc., but he did know how to heal any disease with herbs, foods, fasting, exercise, fresh air, water therapies, and other completely natural healing routines.

When I traveled to Germany to learn the water therapies of the famous Father Sebastian Kneipp, I was able to read old manuscripts from the 1800’s  that were only available in the Kneipp library. In those books, Father Kneipp described exactly how he healed people of smallpox without the least trace of a scar. He described how people would come from all over Europe on their last hope because no doctor had been able to help them. He dealt with severe fractures, cancers, parasites, infections, exhaustion, gangrene, heart failure, and many other serious diseases - all with natural remedies. Father Kneipp took simple bathtubs, watering cans, and garden hoses and effected cures with water of what would seem to most Americans to be of miraculous proportions. 

And yet, Father Kneipp was not a doctor; he was a simple priest. He knew how to stimulate the circulation with water, and to use a few herbs, and change the food people put in their mouths to get all of his miraculous healings. I’m sure he had no idea what a retrovirus was, and if he did, it wouldn’t have mattered to him; the treatment and cure would be the same. Father Kneipp knew that the real healing power lay dormant inside the body and if only the body were fed properly and supported naturally, the body would go about healing itself. He knew that poisoning a disease out of the body had its price - that of poisoning the body. He knew that a poisoned body can’t fight to heal itself. Therefore, no matter what the particular problem was, he used water to stimulate the circulation and call upon the body’s own miraculous wisdom and power to heal itself. And heal it always did.

By contrast, modern medicine sees the body as an array of chemical reactions. It  sees that the body is made up of different chemicals, hormones, neurotransmitters, etc. These chemicals govern life. The secret to healing, according this theory, and I say theory, is to get all the chemicals in the body to the right level. If only we could get the insulin levels balanced, the prostaglandins balanced, the growth hormones, the pituitary hormones, the adrenal hormones, the sex hormones, the thyroid hormones, the leukotrienes, the platelet aggregating factors, the clotting factors, the dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, interferon, interleukins, stomach acid, and the enzymes, then no one would get sick. Medicine seeks to crutch the body when it’s not performing. It will replace what’s missing and try to suppress chemicals that are made in excess. The only problem with this theory is WHY ARE THE CHEMICALS OUT OF BALANCE IN THE FIRST PLACE? 

Do we have a scientific explanation for love? Do we have a scientific explanation for God? Can we with all of our best scientific teams accurately predict or even control the weather?  Can we stop earthquakes from happening?  Then how is it that we think we can control the human body - to dissect it, and give its many parts different names and think that we really have it all figured out?  What do these scientific names of body parts and physiology have to do with life?  What does our description of life have to do with life itself?  Life goes as it goes despite our description or interpretation of its meaning.  It just keeps going on.  Is not life a mystery incapable of being understood?  Maybe it is too daunting - too terrifying to think that after thousands of years of trying to dissect and analyze the human body and constructing complicated theories about it to admit that we really have no idea why people get sick and why they die when they do.  Despite the best philosophers and spiritual teachers, do we really know what life is all about?

As I have been exposed now to both methods of treating the body - natural and chemical, and the theories behind each, this book will attempt (I said attempt) to answer that very question that has all of the medical professionals stumped. This book will answer the question “How did I get sick and why is it that what my doctor gave me for it didn’t work?”
 
 

Chapter 1: Nothing Stops Love

Nothing could stop this story from coming into being.  Nothing stops love - not violence, not fraud, not threats, not lies, not money or the lack of it, not failure, not disease, not contradictory opinions, not cynicism, not indifference, not disbelief and not even lack of faith. Love accepts all of these conditions and keeps on going.  Love waits, love is patient, and love keeps on trying until it gets through.  It keeps knocking at our door until we let it in. Love waits for its opportunity to love more.  It waits for us to recognize that it is without limits.  Love loves despite our weaknesses, despite our faults, despite our repeated mistakes and our hopeless shortcomings. I had no idea what love was until I faced my own death.  Until this experience I had never felt God, and I had never known health. Natural healing gave me health and it gave me the ability to really love.

I knew nothing about natural healing when I entered my first year of medical school, but I began to learn very quickly as the situation in my life demanded it. As we are ever changing and learning more as we go through this life journey, my philosophy of healing continues to grow and I continue to accumulate knowledge and experience.  Sometimes, I want to tell everyone that I know it all, and so many times, I realize that I’m not the real doctor - the real doctor resides within each one of us, its awesome power ready to be harnessed at any moment if we only allow it. 

As I began to develop the foundation of my medical knowledge during the first two years of school, the facts I learned about the human body seemed to fit together so perfectly, like the proverbial pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Everything had a reason or a cause. Anatomic structures are, after all, fairly straightforward. Bacteria, viruses, and fungi infect their hosts. However, as I made my way through the third year of my training, struggling for my own life, while at the same time trying to save the lives of others, frantically trying to gather seemingly constantly changing data, and trying to fit diseases into their nice, neat little slots, I was struck with the realization that there are no slots - there are only people. 

People are all different, and they are all affected differently by their afflictions. A patient is not just a constellation of symptoms or a list of differential diagnoses. Each is a living, breathing miracle packaged into a human form - a form which we doctors have so casually dissected and analyzed, in our futile attempts to make order out of the chaos of disease. It’s not just disease that’s chaotic; it’s life - or so it appears to us.

I was so wrong and so arrogant to think that my medical training allowed me to unlock the mysteries of  a human body. I was wrong to think that I or any other scientist had the answers as to what ULTIMATELY causes diseases and how to heal them (only our Creator can know these things)  So, as I make sure to take care of their bodies, their symptoms, and their pains, I most of all take care to treat each patient with respect and understanding. I accept them no matter what method of healing they choose, and no matter what character flaw I think they have (I have enough of my own). I try to see and expect the very best in them, and to acknowledge that we will all get through the suffering and the discomfort of our ailments by bonding together and serving each other out of love. This is the way it was meant to be.  If my own relatives never take a single herb in their lives and they die one by one from a disease because they don’t believe in natural healing, this is ok.  I still love them so very much, and who they are is always ok with me. 

Sometimes, events happen that test my beliefs.  I begin to realize how important my freedom is.  I realize how much I want that same freedom for other people - the freedom to have any treatment - natural or otherwise - without fear of breaking the law, without fear of having their children taken away because they refused some horrible, invasive organ transplant surgery that would’ve turned their child’s life and theirs into a living nightmare.  I want all of us to have that most basic and precious freedom - to be able to decide what to do with our own bodies to heal them.

So, I’m driving along in the rental car, the one I’m driving since the car accident. I had sold my totaled car for scrap and got a mere $100 for it.  They were supposed to save my things for me to pick up.  When I get there, everything is gone - it feels as if I had been robbed.  I take a long look at my halfway dismantled car - a dead skeleton.  Overwhelmed by my loss, I leave.  I get in the rental car, and now I’m driving back home wondering why is it that I’m still here in such a large city where people run red lights and total my car, wierdos have tried to attack me and where I can barely make enough money to feed myself, much less make any of the necessary payments on my medical school loans?  Not only that, but how do I find the money to heal myself as I have a serious whiplash from my neck to my tailbone, and movement causes me such pain. 

It’s OK - I know I can fast, and take herbs and everything else I teach my patients, and it will be OK.  But this pain really hurts!  Why now?  As the tears come again, I wonder, why don’t I just give up?  I’m in a strange city where no one seems to care if they run right over you, or if they destroy the very last thing of value that you own. My 8-year-old car wasn’t much, but at least it was paid for.  I remember that the purpose for moving here was to get my message out - that people can heal themselves.  But, I always knew that if it didn’t work out, I had my car, and I could always drive away. 

Now, I can’t drive away.  What do I do?  I’m crying because I’m realizing that no matter what else happens, I’m never going to give up. And, I’m never going back to medicine.   I won’t give up even if I have to sell everything I own - even if I have to offend people - even if I have to work a 2-bit job where people think I’m nuts because I think everything can be healed naturally.  I won’t ever give up my desire to have everyone around me be happy and healed of their diseases - I can’t stop that love.  I wanted things to be a certain way; I don’t like to admit that I had financial aspirations when I entered medical school and now I realize I might always be struggling for my last dollar because I decided not to be a doctor who practices drug medicine. 

That car housed my possessions when there was nowhere else to put them.  It housed patient files for several months as I had no place of my own.  At least I had friends and I had a car. No one asked me why my address was a P.O. Box or why they could only reach me by my voicemail.  I didn’t have a staff, a receptionist or use billing codes, and all my files were handwritten. I was told to use waiver forms so that in case there was a dispute, I wouldn’t get thrown in jail. I took this risk daily.  I never advertised, nor did I ever get up enough money to do that, but I worked by word of mouth.  I drove sometimes for hours to see a patient if they sounded desperate. 

The thing is, all I was doing was teaching people what to eat, what not to eat, how to take herbs, and heal themselves with water, but in the United States, it has not been acceptable to heal serious diseases naturally.  Many of my friends and teachers who practice natural healing have been raided by the FDA or even arrested for healing people.  It’s considered too much of a threat to the medical establishment.  It’s too much of a multi-million dollar industry for the public to know that they can heal themselves with food, water, and the herbs that grow in their own backyards.  It’s been postulated that the entire U.S. economy would collapse if we stopped supporting the industries that cause cancer - the tobacco, alcohol, the chemical manufacturing plants, and the medical industry.

I never had a prescription pad or even used an I.V.  To help people the way I was doing it was evidently considered “Practicing medicine without a license” - a license I didn’t have and I never wanted.  But I preferred that sort of existence over a sterile one in which I inject liquid death into people while I lie to them about the drug’s benefits and collect enough money from seeing 100 patients in a day to make myself very comfortable living in a penthouse suite.

People try to be helpful and they think for some reason that if you have a medical license, then you can do what you want.  They think that a license gives you free reign to practice whatever sort of medicine that you want.  They don’t realize that a medical license allows you to do only one thing - practice drug medicine exactly the way that you are told to do so.  There is no leeway.  The licensing boards reprimand and take away licenses from medical doctors who use unconventional methods.  I personally know people to whom this has happened, and they were only helping, not harming. So, this thinking that I should get my medical license because I could then have “the best of both worlds” is purely erroneous and wishful thinking. 

I’ve even heard of stories where a natural healer who was getting miraculous results with cancer was forced to move out of the country.  There are many cancer clinics using alternative healing methods across the border in Mexico, especially in Tijuana, because they have not been able to practice in the United States without harassment from the government.  This natural healer moved across the border into Mexico, and the U.S. officials even came across the border and still arrested him and threw him in jail (I am sure it was for practicing medicine without a license) This is the risk we take when we attempt to heal people naturally.  So, when people suggest that I go ahead and practice murder medicine for another year to get my license, I figure they have no idea how precious life is, how medicine kills it, but how natural healing saved mine and so many others.

It’s not a pretty story.  At times, it’s downright shocking, and sometimes I don’t even want to admit the things that are true that I found out about medicine. But I have to. At first, I didn’t want to tell the details of the story that caused me, the medical doctor, to completely turn to alternative medicine. It was much too painful and way too personal. But, as time has passed, I have come to acknowledge the importance of this experience and that it might give hope to so many people who have none. I want people to know that no matter how sick or hopeless or terminal they may be, that there is hope. There is always hope and there is always love and forgiveness.  I also want people to know that if they would only try natural healing first, their diseases would not continue to get worse and worse to the point where they’re considered terminal. 

People do not have to go through the pain of getting their hopes up because the medication suppressed the signs and symptoms of a disease only to have that disease return with a vengeance, because the real causes were not addressed. What I really want for people to realize is that it is infinitely easier to heal oneself early on before the disease gets to be severe. Early on, when there are mild symptoms, there is not that much to do to heal it; it’s infinitely easier than waiting until you’ve had those minor symptoms for twenty years which eventually turned into a terminal disease.  I want to tell the story of how I went up to the very edge of a hopeless and near fatal existence and came back to share the gifts of natural healing. To do this was very difficult, as you will read, but it is always possible. Our human will is that strong. 

The only reason I have a story to tell is because I and everyone else went to the medical doctors first, got ourselves filled with chemicals and drugs to the point where we were almost dead, and had to reverse all of that drug toxicity along with the sicknesses we began with, with the help of a natural healer. The only reason we waited that long was because we were led to believe that the herbalists and other natural healers were quacks. So, the only reason I have stories to tell about reversing life-threatening diseases with natural healing is because people waited so long to try it. If they would have tried it sooner, (and some have) I’d have more stories about how I and other people cured their indigestion, sinus problems, constipation, headaches, and other minor complaints.  These are easy complaints to heal with natural healing.

I’m not going to blame anyone for my ill health during medical school except myself. No doctor ever forced me to eat junk food, have bad relationships, have a bad attitude, or take too many over the counter medications. The doctor was never there at my house force-feeding me baloney and cheese sandwiches, cake and ice cream, or other foods filled with toxic chemicals, cholesterol, saturated fat,  pesticides and hormone residues.  I got myself sick enough with my diet and lifestyle that I HAD to go to the doctors. The doctors never forced me to live in the big city where I would be exposed to toxic air pollution and other environmental contaminants on a daily basis. Then again, most people never realized that those things were causing diseases - the very same diseases that we call incurable. 

The doctors did diagnose me incorrectly; they did give the wrong medication  But, so what? They did not realize they were doing it. The doctors were only trying to help. They were merely using the only methods they had been taught, and using the attitudes they subconsciously picked up during their training. 

I was the one ultimately responsible for my body; I was the one who made the decision to follow the doctors’ advice against my own better judgment. I’m not the only one who’s done that, am I?  I don’t believe we go about our lives intentionally trying to hurt others, so I cannot believe that doctors are out there to hurt us, even though I recognize that many medications, procedures, tests, and surgeries do more harm than good. To split hairs, although I accept total responsibility for my health at all times, I cannot accept the blame, either. Blaming makes someone the victor and the other a victim. It’s when we live our lives in a position of having always to blame someone or something for things that go wrong, that we give away our true power. At that point we become victims, helplessly tied to circumstances beyond our control - the actions of other people. The only thing we can control is ourselves, our interpretations, and our reactions to this world. We have to find some way to be at peace with exactly what we’ve been given, with whatever cards we were dealt in this life.

Nothing is anyone’s fault. Maybe we can accept that events sometimes happen for good reason, and that even painful experiences are benefiting us emotionally, physically, and, most of all, spiritually. Perhaps these events sometimes happen for reasons beyond our ability to comprehend them. Many people have told me that surviving a life-threatening disease is the best thing that ever happened to them, because afterwards, they learned how to live their life freely and without reservation. They weren’t as tied to their fears. They realized the wonderful preciousness of life and that it was to be lived to the fullest. The experience finally liberated them to do just that. I’ve heard the same thing from people who cared for someone close to them who died.  They saw death firsthand, and knew they had better start living.  Perhaps a disease is a call to spirit to wake up - to throw off our petty worries and get on with appreciating this very beautiful opportunity we call life.

And death is not failure.  It merely is.  We are supposed to die, and our relatives are supposed to die.  It is that pain of watching our relatives and loved ones die, the fear of death that many times motivates us and gives us the courage to go on and accomplish great things.  Death is not the enemy that we imagine it to be.  It all happens so wonderfully and mysteriously, the workings of life and death, both of them intertwined throughout our lives - the rosebuds blooming, the large oak tree dying, the pure rain falling, the eggs hatching, the grass growing, the sand forming from eroded rocks.  How could we be without either?  What we can hope for is a peaceful, painless death, and natural healing offers this to us in our last days.  When it is our time, we go.  There is no negotiating.  I’m reminded of a man who was a patient of my former nutritionist who had pancreatic cancer.  He did all of the natural healing programs and got rid of his pancreatic cancer.  Then, suddenly he died, and the doctors could not determine the cause of death because there was no pancreatic cancer left in his body.  It was his time to go.  Natural healing offers us healing from disease, but not necessarily from death.  Death always comes at exactly the right time, and new life springs up out of its remains.