B-6 and chromium.
“Once Jan brings these mineral levels back to normal, her Graves’ disease disappears. Within thirty days, her heart and thyroid return to normal. Jan must maintain a high acid level in her stomach, however, in order to digest her food, her vitamins, and her nutrient intake. After more than thirty years of eating alkaline foods such as white flour and margarine products, Jan’s acidic level within her stomach is too alkaline. After meals, she now takes a digestive enzyme rich in papaya or eats a raw lemon, drinks a rich red wine, or takes a betaine hydrochloride supplement to aid in the digestion of her food, especially if she chooses to eat red meat or a meal heavy in fake oils. To support the stomach lining, she eats raw cabbage at least three times a week to keep the mucin cells lining the stomach walls thick and healthy. Research supports the theory that stomach ulcers disappear when raw cabbage is eaten to rebuild the stomach lining.
“Jan eats 75% raw food with each meal, including high fiber grains, eats little or no red meat, drinks an abundance of water, and maintains a regular supplementary program of the following vitamins and minerals: chromium (picolinate and glucose tolerance formula [GTF chromium]), zinc picolinate, PABA, pantothenic acid, vitamin C, liver tablets, selenium, manganese, calcium-magnesium, primrose oil, B-complex and extra B-6, along with a natural multivitamin.”
I hugged Steve in appreciation of all he’d done for me and made a promise to myself that if I ever had the chance to help people who were ingesting sweet poison to regain their health and attain a healthy lifestyle, I would.
Each week as I had promised, I got a blood test at the ER doctor’s office. We looked at the tests differently. I gauged the results of my personal efforts not to irradiate my thyroid gland at the same time as the doctor continued to make plans to irradiate my thyroid.
At my weekly examination one month after leaving the hospital, my astonished doctor announced somewhat sheepishly, “Your thyroid levels have returned to normal.”
“Doctor,” I said as he shook his head, “what do you think? Am I getting rid of this Graves’ disease?”
“Well,” he sputtered, “it’s too early to tell. We might not have to destroy your thyroid,” he said grudgingly. “But let me warn you,” he went on as if looking for something wrong, “your thyroid levels will not remain normal. Absolutely not! No one has ever cured Graves’ disease,” he proclaimed with authority.
I refrained from comment. We’ll see, I thought.
As my body continued to stabilize, I graduated to having blood tests every two weeks instead of once a week. I felt stronger physically and emotionally. “I am defeating this disease,” I told myself hopefully, but I still had some concerns that the doctor’s prognosis might come true.
After a few more weeks, just when I was becoming comfortably optimistic, something did go wrong. I developed uncharacteristically dangerous reactions, worse than before my hospitalization.
My skin began to break out in grotesque acne. My hair fell out in bigger and more frightening clumps. My eyes weakened to the point that I had difficulty focusing on anything, and my night vision was completely elusive. I looked and felt worse than I did when I first got ill.
I was horrified but I tried not to panic.
Breathe deeply, Jan, you have to gain control. Time to rethink. Are the vitamins tricking me or is the medicine impairing my immune system?
I went over all I was doing to try to find the culprit. Could taking both the medication and the vitamin supplements be overloading my system? I wondered. I knew my doctor would blame the vitamins. I could hear his reprimands: How dare you go against this advice? That’s what you get! I would be penalized for displaying self-assertiveness, and I would become even more sick. That’ll show me, I thought.
Nevertheless, it could be the medication, not the vitamins. After all, I was warned the medication was so strong it could destroy my immune system.
And so I decided to take another bold step. I would stop taking my medication. I eased off it slowly, cutting back my daily dosage.
I established a target goal of three months to stabilize my condition, relying solely on good nutrition and vitamin therapy for recovery. If at that point my condition was still this bad, I would have to reconsider the doctor’s treatment. I continued to supplement my diet with the vitamins in order to restore the damage caused, I was sure, by the aspartame. But I took no prescription drug, not even aspirin.
Without doubt, I was taking a chance following my instincts. I do not recommend going against a doctor’s advice, but, in my case, I felt I knew something he didn’t.
If I regained good health and maintained it for the next few months, I would know the dietary cleansing and vitamin therapy had healed my body.
I called my sister to let her know what was happening. When I told her about my Graves’ disease, she astonished me by confessing she also had the disease.
“You never told me you had Graves’ disease, Beth,” I said. Beth had left Dallas after she graduated from high school more than twenty years before. Our communication was not always the best since she moved away, but I was embarrassed I didn’t even know my own sister was diagnosed with Graves’ disease. She began relating her symptoms. Beth had a form of Graves’ disease that affects the eyes. Coincidentally at this time, President and Mrs. Bush and their dog were each diagnosed with Graves’ disease.
The media rumbled about how unusual it was that non-blood relations within the Bush household had simultaneous cases of Graves’ disease. The chances of this happening were around one in ten thousand, they reported. They also commented that thyroid problems are unusual in men and even more unusual in dogs! Men and dogs don’t have the same endocrine system as women, making it uncommon for them to contract thyroid disorders like Graves’ disease.
The trail of Graves’ sufferers I knew or heard about was growing. I found it most curious that my adopted sister and I both had Graves’ and that President and Mrs. Bush both had Graves’. Feeling like a detective I tried to follow the clues. Could the Bushes’ dog have been exposed to the same trigger that caused his owners’ disease? Table scraps, maybe? A taste of dessert, bread with jam? I knew the Bushes, especially Mrs. Bush, were very diet conscious. Did they use products with aspartame? It seemed likely. After all, didn’t most people who had a craving for something sweet and didn’t want to overindulge in that culprit—sugar—choose a substitute like aspartame?
To date, no one has discovered a cause for Graves’ disease, but at the time of the Bushes’ thyroid problems investigators suspected faulty piping in the vice-presidential home might have contaminated their drinking water, possibly overloading their thyroids with toxic metals. Investigators were on the right track in tracing the cause of the Bushes’ Graves’ to an environmental overload of chemicals deposited in the thyroid, but they stopped their investigation short of finding a specific chemical.
Like them, I was becoming more and more convinced that my Graves’ was caused by an overload
