Dr. Dick's Story
Dr. Dick's Program
Dr. Dick vs. Dr. Danney
Eulogy by Dr. Zeff
Legacy
Constitutional Hydrotherapy
Carroll Food Test

The Legendary Healer: One Angry Man
Dr. Harold Dick, N.D., of Spokane, Washington, became one of the most successful physicians in the country, in terms of curing the "incurables." He gained on international reputation as word quietly spread and brought in patients from many countries, as well as students of naturopathy who came to observe his methods and learn from a master. This dour German healer was one angry man--one who railed against illness and disease, against health care providers who forgot the basic tenet of medicine to "first, do no harm," against the general ignorance of specialized conventional doctors who knew little of true scientific healing principles, and against the authorities who hounded him when word of his "miracle cures" spread, forcing him to tell his healed patients to "be happy you're well and BE QUIET."

He had the arrogance and self-assurance of a physician who knew what he was doing and the rightness of it, and the humility to express his stunned surprise at being given a standing ovation when introduced at a gathering of his peers...years after the event.

He was a licensed naturopath, chiropractor, & homeopath with certification in iridology and acupuncture, which he went to the Orient to learn but never used after realizing the protocols he already had were more effective and less expensive for his patients. He used the diagnostic Carroll Food Intolerance Test that alone restored health to so many people. He also used the powerful and effective Constitutional Hydrotherapy extensively in his practice, when patients needed a boost to the healing process. He had herbal combinations for digestion and eliminations, healing and drawing salves, glandular protomorphogens for gland and organ repair, tissue (mineral) salts for the all-important deficiency or imbalanced mineral states, and used the occasional homeopathic remedy. He advised against the use of vitamins as "the most processed and dangerous drugs in the world," with the exception of natural vitamin C in times of unusual stress--"Eat the whole food," he always counseled. He could be harshly criticical of naturopathic training facilities and many naturopathic colleagues and alternative medical organizations such as the National Health Federation he helped create, as becoming "too medical," in their principles and practices, which he equated with "unscientific." Yet his modest clinic was "Grand Central Station" to an endless line of students and clinicians who came to observe. I doubt he ever turned away anyone wanting to learn.

On the Shoulders of Giants
Dr. Dick was a different breed of doctor, steeped in old and almost forgotten natural healing principles, yet thoughtfully innovative and representative of what was new and best in natural medicine, by way of his mentor, Dr.Otis G. Carroll, N.D., and eventually by his own efforts. He possessed a kind of native genius, it seemed, fueled by creativity, unerring focus, self-disciplined curiosity, and careful, scientific methodology. He was always thinking, pondering, searching for answers beyond what he already knew, a born problem-solver...and fielding the questions of all around him. He didn't always answer immediately. Sometimes it took an hour, a week, or a month before that computer-like mind of his processed a response. His silences were well-known.

After giving up all the creature comforts in his life, including his growing financial security, to pursue training as a naturopathic physician after being healed by one (Dr. Carroll), he then became a licensed doctor only to put aside his traditional schooling and to postpone private practice to spend another 3 years of residency with the extraordinary natural healer who cured him and his family, Dr. Carroll, described as "one of the most significant naturopathic physicians of this century," by Dr. Deb Solocheck, who also said, "His clinic was the most famous west of the Mississippi."

A stranger (Dr. Carroll's accountant) whose car broke down and ended up at the garage business owned by Harold Dick, convinced him to take his seriously ill wife and brother from their home in Idaho 400 miles away to the office of Dr. Carroll in Spokane, Washington. This strange doctor saved the brother's life, and the wife recovered from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis in about 18 months. He restored Harold Dick's own health after years of misery from boils and other problems. Even his sister-in-law made a recovery after having been diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in the uterus. After treatment at Dr. Carroll's clinic, she passed the tumor out vaginally.

Harold Dick's life turned on a dime as he decided to "get off the merry-go-round" and see what this was all about. He abruptly headed in a direction so radically different from his original plans that his own father thought he was "crazy" to drop everything he had going for himself at the time, to face years of hardship to become a doctor himself, but his wife urged him to go ahead, willing to endure the hardship with him.

Dr. Carroll had also been ill in his youth and became a patient of one of the most famous natural healers of the time.

The origin of naturopathy can be traced back to the ancient healing arts of a variety of cultures. Still, as a formal system of medicine and healing, it was developed in the United States over one hundred years ago by Bernard Lust, who became known as the "Founder of Naturopathy". He cured Otis G. Carroll, who afterwards studied with him and became a force in his own right as he took the findings of Stanford University's Dr. Abrahms involving "constitutional" food intolerances based on digestive enzyme deficiencies and created the Carroll Food Intolerance Test for diagnosing the problem, and evolved the cold water treatment learned from Bernard Lust into Constitutional Hydrotherapy, which combined hydrotherapy with the use of electrotherapy to improve the effectiveness of the treatment.

Bernard Lust had been cured of tuberculosis by hydrotherapy at the hands of the great German healer, Father Sebastian Kneipp, who created the "water cure" still used today in both its original form and its revised form of hydrotherapy done with the scientific application of heat and cold, which in turn evolved into Constitutional Hydrotherapy, and then Advanced Constitutional Hydrotherapy, co-founded by Dr. Harold Dick.

Father Kneipp reportedly found information about curing with the stimulating effects of cold water from the writings of an unknown healer located in the archives of a monastery. The above mentioned healers all learned, mastered, and rose up into greatness "on the shoulders of giants".

Ever-Widening Circles: The Sphere of Influence Grows
Dr. O.G. Carroll took on 3 licensed naturopathic interns, Dr. Harold Dick, Dr. Leo Scott, who also gained an international following, and the famous Dr. John Bastyr, after whom Bastyr University in Seattle, Washington was named. Each spent 3 years in training, learning principles of natural healing that go far back in history, including the teachings of Hippocrates, the "Father of Medicine," to advances in naturopathic techniques far beyond the scope of the naturopathic schools at the time. They treated patients. They taught. They changed the face and future of naturopathic medicine.

In the early 1980's, at a time when Dr. Dick had yet to take on any residents himself, a very worried lay person who feared something might happen to Dr. Dick before he could pass on his healing principles to others, begged to become a student in a manner of speaking, to learn the basic principles of his practice in order to educate others. He agreed to mentor an untutored but eager lay student, and invested the next 21/2 years of time and effort doing so. That was me.

Happily, even though an initial plan to take in a married couple to intern and partner with him fell through, he did eventually train other physicians, most notably his own daughter, the much-esteemed Dr. Letitia Dick-Watrous, also of Spokane, Washington, who has become a driving force in naturopathic medicine today. While yet a young woman, in 2001 she was voted a Lifetime Achievement Award by students of the profession, has initiated the teaching of the Carroll Food Intolerance Test and Advanced Constitutional Hydrotherapy in the naturopathic colleges, teaches, lectures, and is co-authoring and overseeing work on the first textbook on naturopathic medicine ever written, besides maintaining an immensely successful private practice for her grateful patients, including me and several members of my family. I predict that Dr. Letitia Dick-Watrous will become known as the face of 21st century naturopathic medicine by the time this decade (2006) is done.

Dr. Dick-Watrous brings more to the table than any before her in the direct line of philosophical lineage from Father Kneipp and Bernard Lust on. In 1985 she graduated Magna Cum Laude from Eastern Washington University with a major in biology and a minor in chemistry. In 1990, she graduated from the National College of Naturopathic Medicine, after which she did a 3-year residency with her father, Dr. Harold Dick, at his clinic in Spokane. She uses the Carroll Test, Advanced Constitutional Hydrotherapy, iridology, reflexology, homeopathy, and ayurvedic medicine for diagnostic work and treatment, besides the herbal medicines and salves mentioned previously, which exceeds the "tools" at hand possessed by those who came before her.

For one single example, as widespread and pervasive as adrenal exhaustion is in the stressful world we live in, there are no definitive tests for anything other than Addison's Disease, which is a 90% or more loss of adrenal function, at which point medical doctors put their patients on cortisone for the rest of their miserable, shortened lives. There is some kind of cortisol test that few know about, but otherwise, adrenal function tests just do not do the job for anyone until they are past the point of recovery. Dr. Watrous looked at a couple of drops of blood under a microscope and was able to instantly diagnose what medical tests miss.

Naturopathic medicine: See Naturopathy Today

My Own Story
Around 1979, I was so desperately ill that I gave up trying to fend for myself and went home to die. By very strange circumstances, on the very day I was packing to leave town, someone I barely knew stopped by and told me about some "nature doctor" in the city I was preparing to leave. I'd had a bellyful of futile doctoring and angrily ignored the information.

Several weeks later, 200 miles away in my home town, at my unhappy parent's home (I busted into the house while they were wintering elsewhere and they came home to find that an ill, grown kid had taken over their home), I heard about the same doctor again. Since this happened the second time just hours after unspeakable pain and fear had shoved me to my knees in a frantic prayer to either be allowed to die quickly or get fixed, some deep instinct made me listen. In fact, the internal prompting came so compellingly that I got the shakes and went on "automatic pilot" a few days later as the over-powering drive propelled me to the modest clinic of a naturopathic physician, which I vaguely associated with "herb doctor." See About Me: physical illness

I arrived back in the city I had left just a few weeks earlier with $5 cash in hand, a few donated food stamps, and the address of a church-run women's shelter to stay in. All I had in hand was a few pieces of left-over engraved fossil ivory from my free-lance scrimshaw art business. The doctor's wife and business manager, Ruby Dick, liked my work and took it in trade for my expenses. So...I paid the doctor with barter, just like in the olden days of the home-visiting country doctors. The entire diagnostic work, test results, and counseling, which takes place over two days for people who come from out of town (they rush the test results so only one overnight stay is required), cost $50. The treatments I needed to assist the healing process--Constitutional Hydrotherapy, cost $10 a day for five weeks. I paid for everything in barter.

Nowadays, most people pay for the diagnostic work at that same clinic and counseling which requires two days of appointments and whatever supplements are needed for around $250, still a far cry from conventional medical costs or some of those infamous alternative clinics that suck up people's life savings without saving their lives.

I had expected some kind of a medical history to be requested, but the doctor had his own way of determining that for himself. The examination started out with Dr. Dick looking at my eyes with this pull-down magnifying glass surrounded by a light. As he read the signs in each iris (the colored part of the eye), he told me that I had chronic ulceration in my stomach that was the source of all of my other problems. It was pre-cancerous--stage 2. (My stomach felt like it had a rat in residence, gnawing away. I feared dying slowly from stomach cancer more than anything.) Then he said I was being poisoned by a 'hot" (acute) infection in my ovaries. Ovarian cysts. I had already been diagnosed with those, but hadn't told him. He told me that was causing heart problems from the toxic load, among other things. I had a heart murmur, or "lisp" as he called it. He told me my lungs were congested (chronic bronchitis) and that I had arthritis, and put his hand on my lower spine, where it was the most painful. He also mentioned that I had an unhealed injury in my left thigh. The original injury had put me in the hospital with massive soft tissue damage, but I hadn't been aware that it was still a problem until he touched the area and I felt the tenderness there. 20+ years later, when a stress-related illness damaged my immune system, I ended up removing a painful "lump" from the area. He didn't mention the painful sciatica that tormented me night and day, but since that was a burn put on the nerves by toxins in the area, it probably didn't show as a chronic or acute infection, which is the main part of what shows in the fibers of the iris, which are actually nerve endings that connect to every tissue and organ in the body. That was my stunning introduction to IRIDOLOGY, a favorite of "quackbuster" type allopathic (conventional medical) critics, particularly those who have never been "read" by a reputable iridologist.

I had dragged myself to the clinic with precancerous stomach ulcers, ovarian cysts, chronic bronchitis that started out as acute bronchitis until a course of antibiotics brought it back in a supposedly incurable chronic form. There were times I could barely breathe.. I also had arthritis, sciatica down both legs, an unsteady heart, and tissue damage from an injury. I had been diagnosed with low thyroid and anemia years earlier, and probably still had these conditions too. On top of everything else, I had terrible hay fever-type symptoms with a runny nose that never stopped. Overall, I was in so much pain and misery that I feared both dying and not dying--just suffering indefinitely.

Dr. Dick then took a few drops of blood (painlessly) from my earlobe and put it on a card which absorbed it immediately. He looked at it through a microscope with a fancy polaroid camera attached and took a picture. He said there was a lot of congestion and debris around the cells. I was toxic. But the real test would come that night when he ran the diagnostic procedure that determined food intolerances. It was so specific that it could diagnose individual foods, food groups, and combinations of foods that did harm to the body. These were constitutional food intolerances caused by digestive enzyme deficiencies...and entirely different class of food "allergies" than all medical allergy tests determined, which are "immune-mediated" allergies unrelated to these digestive intolerances. This test was "a method of testing for foods which are not well digested or metabolized in a particular body, and thereby become a source of maldigestion, intestinal toxemia, dysboisis, and chronic irritation to body tissues."

Except in cases of life-threatening immune-type allergies (peanuts, shellfish--the type that causes extreme reactions) these constitutional food intolerances present with a far more serious, underlying pathology. In fact, once these offending foods are removed from the diet, the relief on the immune system can be so profound that immune-mediated allergies often disappear. My life-long "hay fever" allergies did exactly that. That was my introduction to the Carroll Food Intolerance Test. It was even more specific than mentioned above. With this test, the length of digestion could be determined. Food combination intolerances were foods that could be eaten along, as long as they were separated by the length of time it took for one food to digest before eating the other. Together, they formed something chemically incompatible with digestion. "Intolerance has to do with digestion and metabolism, and is an enzymatic phenomenon, genetically determined. Food intolerance means that a particular body does not digest or metabolize a particular food well. As a consequence, maldigestion occurs, and toxic metabolites are formed in the intestine and absorbed into the blood. These will affect or interfere with normal function of the body, and become part of the basis of chronic illness."

Most people have one food or food group intolerance, and one food combination. No one knows why it occurs in this kind of pattern, or even why it occurs in the first place, other than that it appears to be constitutional and permanent, determined by genetic factors. I had two combination intolerances--fruit+sugar and eggs+cereal. My main food intolerance was the entire group of dairy foods. (Sorry, with dairy you don't get to eliminate milk while eating cheese and ice cream. It's the whole food group.) But it's different for everyone. Some might have the same food intolerances with entirely different symptoms, or different foods with the same symptoms. The course that illness and disease takes depends on the constitution of the body. Strong tissues resist toxins the blood attempts to rid itself of. Weak tissues become depositories of this toxic overload. These weaknesses can be genetic or acquired. Stress of any kind affects different organs and tissues, which become enervated (a loss of nerve energy) as a result. Enervation precedes a condition of toxemia, the underlying cause of all disease. In this toxic terrain, germs feed and take on the characteristics of their environment, thereby explaining the tragic misinformation provided by the faulty "germ theory of disease." Germs don't create the environment any more than flies create the pile of dung they inhabit. Instead, the terrain creates the nature of germs. Virulence can be passed on, but infection depends on finding a similar terrain in which to inhabit. That being present would result in "susceptibility". That lacking would be described as "immunity." (Helped along with a strong constitution nurtured by healthy living habits, a hospitable rather than toxic environment, and good genes.)

With food allergies one can observe immune system activity in the body. Food intolerances are something different--a digestive enzyme deficiency resulting in improperly or incompletely digested food. When a person eats foods to which he is intolerant, if these foods are high in carbohydrates, fermentation occurs; if they are high in proteins, putrefaction occurs; if they are high in fats, rancidification occurs. All lead to a slow poisoning of the intestinal tract and eventually of all the body systems. "Each unique, individual person will respond differently to eating his food intolerance, depending on his constitutional strength. A person with a weak constitution is more susceptible to developing early symptoms of toxemia such as intestinal discomfort, asthma, skin eruptions, fatigue or mental confusion with ingestion of even minute amounts of the irritating food."

"We are what we eat, digest, absorb, and eliminate. We assimilate nutritional information to make who we are, and eliminate information that is harmful to our body. One of the most important functions of healthful nutrition is to prevent intoxication by removing the foods which cause intoxication of the body. Health must at all times come from and be maintained by digested foods." Dr.Carroll's Test For an example of toxic food effects: Autism-Food Intolerance

Dr. Dick treated my own mother with a homeopathic remedy that cured her of terrible pain from a shingles outbreak in a matter of hours after 6 months of conventional medical treatment and pain killers failed to give her any relief.

The Carroll test can also diagnose a primary tissue salt deficiency. There are 12 tissue salts, also called "mineral salts" or "cell salts." A deficiency in even one throws the body out of balance, although excess causes problems also. For the importance of mineral salt balance read the page on metabolic imbalance. The primary deficiency is addressed with homeopathic tissue salts which are absorbed sublingually, bypassing any problem of digestion and absorption which may have given rise to the imbalance in the first place, unless it was entirely a dietary deficiency. Then, domino-like, the other mineral salts more or less fall into place for a corrected balance brought on by the wisdom of the body as it rights itself. Trying to second guess nature is a risky business. Better to give nature what it needs and allow it to assert itself in its own time and manner. My deficiency turned out to be Ferrum phosphate (iron phosphate) which carries oxygen around the body and strengthens blood vessel walls. When I recovered, my previous conditions of thyroid deficiency and iron-deficiency anemia appeared to be cured along with everything else. Years later, blood testing showed no sign of either. That was my introduction to the "magic" of mineral salt supplementation for deficiency states.

As part of their treatment, many people get glandular protomorphogens to support the healing and normalization of under or overactive glands and organs. When my grandmother became a one-time patient, she needed 3 different types. She probably had a tissue salt remedy (a big bag of tiny homeopathic pills), but I don't recall which one. With nothing more than the elimination of bad foods, tissue salt correction and 3 glandulars, she soon went into a major detoxification event--a body cleansing in which toxic metals (cadmium and aluminum) and drug residues along with congested tissues unloaded, the first two with distinctly recognizable smells, after which she recovered from a profoundly disturbed mental condition that initially resulted in institutionalization and then constant care due to unspeakable mental anxiety and anguish. She transformed from a violently mentally ill person to a quiet, placid, peaceful person in the space of 2 weeks. My grandmother's simple treatment was my real introduction to the power of glandular healing.

I can't imagine any recovery without food intolerance diagnosis along with tissue salt supplementation & glandulars when needed, but the "big gun"--therapeutically speaking--was yet to come.

Soon after my 2-session appointment with Dr. Dick (to be examined and tested, and then to go over the test results and nutritional counseling the next day), I returned to his modest clinic for treatment-- Constitutional Hydrotherapy --which the doctor explained I needed because of the weakened condition of my heart from the toxic overload I harbored. I knew my heart was affected because of the fluttering and irregular beats I often felt, so that galvanized me into action.

The term "hydrotherapy" brings to mind whirlpool baths or something similar, but this was instead a scientific, timed application of alternating hot and cold packs front and back. "The most common form of hydrotherapy is called the 'constitutional,' where two towels dipped in hot water, then squeezed, are placed on the front of the patient for five minutes. The hot towels are replaced with one cold towel for ten minutes. The same procedure is done on the back of the patient. During the hot portion of the hydrotherapy, the upper blood vessels are dilated while the deeper ones constrict. The cold portion of the treatment constricts the outer blood vessels but dilates the internal ones. The combination drives more blood to both the inner and outer systems, allowing the body to bring more healing nutrients to its organs and to carry away toxins," --© Michael Alan Morton Ph.D., Mary Morton (Excerpted from Five Steps to Selecting the Best Alternative Medicine, New World Library, 1997).

"Bernard Lust, considered the founder of naturopathic medicine, was cured of tuberculosis through hydrotherapy. According to Jared Zeff, N.D., L.Ac., former academic dean of the National College of Naturopathic Medicine, hydrotherapy is often used to treat terminal illnesses, such as cancer, as well as simple colds and infections." --Naturopathic Medicine

Dr. O.G. Carroll was also an electrician who became fascinated by the emerging field of electrotherapy as introduced by John Harvey Kellogg, M.D.(yes, of Kellogg's cornflakes fame, the natural therapist). He decided to combine the original form of hot and cold hydrotherapy with electrical stimulation. According to Dr. Carroll, adding the electrotherapy made the treatment twice as effective in a much shorter time, since the old way of doing hydrotherapy alone could take up to 4 hours to complete.

He called it "Constitutional" Hydrotherapy because "in his view, it changed the very constitution of the cells of the body. It was his theory that this therapy increases cellular metabolism, oxygenation, digestion and assimilation of nutrition, and elimination of toxins from the body. Clinically, an increase in the white blood cell count is seen. The increase boosts the immune system function to attack infection agents or decrease inflammatory reactions." --Dr. Letitia Dick-Watrous.

Dr. Dick studied the therapy during his residency with Dr. Carroll, and from there taught and trained many others in the field, and in effect, brought constitutional hydrotherapy to the world, which led many to consider Dr. Dick a co-founder of this powerful and important treatment modality.

My own experience with the clinical application of the therapy became a memorable and life-altering experience. It felt wonderful--hot towels packs followed by a cold towel pack front and back. The cold made a person jump momentarily, but the whole process involved being covered by a blanket, so the cold was stimulating, not chilling. Still, it brought on a relaxation so deeply felt that I often cat-napped during the treatment. But that as only part of it. The electrotherapy that made the hydrotherapy "constitutional" involved putting pads hooked to a sine wave machine on at certain locations that stimulated muscle groups. The electrical current felt like a deep, tingling, vibrating massage. During part of the treatment the patient controlled the dials and just turned it up as much as was tolerable. I always turned it up as high as I could stand. It's hard to explain, but the surging electrical impulses felt good somehow. After the treatment, I felt like I'd been transported to some other place or mental state. There was always a sense of being "brought back" when the treatment ended.

Two or three weeks into the treatment, I went into a "healing crisis", also known as a "reaction", "cleansing crisis", "detoxification" and other names all meaning the same thing: the immune system had recovered to bring on a thorough house-cleaning. I must have eliminated toxins and wastes from every channel of elimination in the human body. Dr. Dick had seen a badly congested condition in my blood sample, meaning it was systemic. My lungs filled up and my sinuses drained. I coughed, hacked, and dripped from my eyes, nose, and ears. My skin stunk from eliminations there. I had diarrhea, fevers, shakes, and muscle pain. It was like the worst flu I ever had and it lasted for over two weeks. Even the doctor was concerned. I wanted to shoot him, but he just kept saying, "Hang in there. Hang in there." I did, and one day I just woke up and realized that the pain was gone. Bronchitis, arthritis, stomach ulcers, ovarian cysts, sciatica...all gone. It took a while longer for my stomach tenderness to completely go away, but with stage 2 pre-cancerous ulcers, that was to be expected.

I had treatments for one day short of 5 weeks. Each day, Dr. Dick listened to my heart sounds. On that last day, he said, "You're done. Go home." It was on a Thursday, and I offered to finish out the last day of the week, but he wouldn't hear of it. Done was done.

When one has been seriously ill and recovers so completely, sometimes its hard to remember just how bad it was. I had been following my food intolerance diet religiously, but still found it hard to believe that "just food" had made me so ill. One day, I just had to have a chocolate milkshake, french-friend onions, and something with fruit in it--combining all of my allergies (food intolerances) in one foolhardy meal. It not only made me violently ill right away, to the point of vomiting as though I had food poisoning, but I was sick as a dog for over 3 days with flu-like symptoms, swollen joints and the fearful sciatica, which I can only liken to an abscessed tooth. I thereby learned another principle of food intolerance. When you eat it every day, your stress-coping mechanism wears down and you can only react so much to the poisoning. The response becomes chronic, rather than acute. It's just another drop in the bucket that becomes chronic-degenerative disease, or something similar. But once the offending foods are removed, and the immune system makes some recovery, the next exposure is met with an acute reaction, as though you'd taken a dose of rat poison or the like. It was a good lesson and one I never repeated intentionally again.

I left, got on with my life, got married, went to Alaska, had a baby, built a growing reputation as a free-lance artist right up until Alaska Magazine contacted me for an interview. All along I'd been talking to people, trying to get them to go see my doctor in Spokane, and a few had. An acquaintance in Alaska had a brain tumor diagnosed at three top lower 48 clinics, but it was too close to the optic nerve to operate without grave danger of going blind. At our urging, he flew to Spokane. With the diet and treatments, he tumor simply disappeared, as verified by one of the same clinics that first found it. After that success, he flew his daughter to the clinic. He back was twisted with scoliosis, and she had some other health issue that I don't recall. At last word, she was making a remarkable recovery. A few other experiences like that had put me in a quandary. I knew if the magazine did a story on me, my career would go through the roof!--but I was so deeply compelled by some other force to pursue the study--as a lay person--of Dr. Dick's kind of unusual naturopathy so that I could write and inform others, that a choice had to be made.

About the same time my friend and mentor, CC Clark, a gallery owner and artist of some renown in Alaska, became ill and went into surgery for something. She was given a blood transfusion during the procedure, and all seemed to go well except that when she came to, her brains were "scrambled." She thought I was her sister, didn't know where that baby of mine (her god child) came from. It turned out she had terminal bone cancer. I had tried to get her to Spokane before the surgery, but she kept putting it off. Afterwards, it was too late because her husband had no interest, and in fact had me banned from her hospital room. I suspect he had some concerns about where her sizable estate would end up, and made certain we were excluded from her life. That was the last nudge. We headed back to Spokane.

I spent 2 1/2 years at the clinic between 1981 and 1984, watching, listening, reading and in general being mentored by Dr. Dick. I finally had to return to my hometown to help care for my grandmother, who later also became a patient with a stunning reversal of symptoms that had stymied all of the specialists my grandfather took her to. I kept on researching, though, and building up material for a book about Dr. Dick and his methods.

Later on, in 1986 we headed to San Antonio, Texas, so I could co-write a book with a former classmate with an interest in alternative medicine who was stationed at Kelly Air Force base, where he ran the computer department. Unfortunately, by the time we arrived he was all tied up with some hush-hush project and couldn't work with me. I realized later that he was busy sending arms to Iran, in what became the "Iran-Contra Affair". But I became tied-up myself when my 5-year-old child was slightly injured on a military base where we went to shop, forced to submit to a tetanus shot--her first of any kind, since Dr. Dick warned of the dangers of vaccination and we decided against childhood shots--and became immediately, seriously ill with the same flesh-eating bacterial infection, complicated by staph, that has killed and maimed many in the history of vaccination. She was infected, we became infected, the state and medical authorities got in the middle of it, and we ended up fleeing the state of Texas to avoid arrest and prosecution for refusing conventional medical treatment for the child. Dr. Dick intervened by phone with Col. Mark Danney, M.D., the head of pediatrics at Wilford Hall, at the famous base hospital. Dr. Danney couldn't save us from the authorities, but he allowed us to make a "getaway" after my daughter recovered using naturopathic principles instead of medical treatment. In the end, he admitted that he would be "a better doctor" thanks to his long-distance conversations with the tenacious Dr. Harold Dick, and that allopathic (conventional) medicine needed to go in the direction of naturopathic medicine, but that "change comes slowly" to allopathy.

That led to an indepth study of vaccination, followed by an equally detailed study of AIDS, due to the vaccine connection to the HIV virus, and co-factors. I researched, I wrote, and I mainly got a lot of outraged, angry responses to a 40-page report I sent out all over the country detailing the origin, development, and treatment of AIDS--a much different story than the one spoon-fed to an unsuspecting public--obtained from a body of work from other researchers who shared with me, and what I could put together on my own. Both 60 Minutes and the Oprah Winfrey Show expressed interest in the material. However, I had provided only a Post Office Box number to respond to, and got behind in payments so it was closed for a while before I even discovered the oversight. It didn't occur to me to put in a change of address, and I was far too shy and reticent (in those days) to pursue any contact myself, so whether or not they ever tried to contact me after that will forever remain a mystery.

Soon after, around 1990, I sent a package of material to former First Lady, Rosalyn Carter. At the time she was spokesperson for the national advertising campaign, "Every Child By Two." Most of it was vaccine-related, along with some of the AIDS material. Her "camp" put the U.S. Secret Service on my tail. They harassed me from Plains, Georgia to the area Spokane office without even being told what my "crime" was. Afterwards, I developed a traumatic mental block and had to go into intense hypnotherapy with a psychologist to become functional again, after which I started teaching part time, always talking about naturopathy, and writing, writing, writing.

I was working on a couple of books when the internet came along. It took a while for me to get in the groove, and it wasn't until 1999 that I got my first computer and learned to use it, but this format of public access seemed the way to go, so the book plan became the website plan. Now the website is in progress, and an article related to natural healing has been accepted for publication by Nexus Magazine out of Australia, which has an international readership (date unknown).

Dr. Dick's legacy spreads. Books and websites on natural healing cover constitutional hydrotherapy and naturopathic principles almost forgotten until Dr. Dick started spreading the word. In the 2004-5 school year, one of the naturopathic colleges started teaching the Carroll Food Intolerance Test and Advanced Constitutional Hydrotherapy. Dr. Watrous teaches, lectures and trains while working on the first textbook of naturopathy. The torch is passed.