Truthquest2: My Story

Story beginning from the home page: by Dianne Jacobs Thompson

Around January, 1979, I went home to die. My parents traveled during the winter so I knew their house would be empty, quiet, warm, with food in the freezer and supplies in the cupboards. I lived 300 miles away, with no more rent money, out of food, freezing with only a kitchen stove for heat, and in so much pain it took 24 hours to finish an hour or two worth of work engraving fossil ivory to sell as a freelance scrimshaw artist in Spokane, WA. During those last few nightmarish days I huddled over a work table beside the stove with a blanket over me, just head and hands exposed, living on margaritas to dull the pain and eating my new addiction, egg omlets, and nothing else. The pain in my stomach felt like rats gnawing away, dull, constant, and relentless. The words "stomach cancer" came to mind. My bones ached from the neck down to my feet from widespread arthritis. The vice-like grip of chronic bronchitis made breathing painful, and the beginning of asthma made it choppy and difficult. Every time I bent down over the ivory my nose dripped on to the surface, not from a cold but from some kind of constant sinus congestion like an allergy. If I moved wrong, pain stabbed my lower abdomen from previously diagnosed ovarian cysts a doctor said needed to be surgically removed, as though I had money or any kind of medical coverage. My work sold well, but the money went to middlemen and retailers, not to me. The worst misery--although the least serious-- came from the sciatica in my hips and down my legs. I read once that sciatica, like abscessed teeth, was the kind of pain that made sailors at sea jump overboard. Alcohol didn't cut through that very deeply. Somehow, I discovered temporary relief came only from taking long hot showers, followed by cold. In a freezing cold house the cure was almost worse than the disease, but not quite.

On that last day in Spokane, the end came quickly. I couldn't work, couldn't sleep, couldn't get warm, and it was suddenly over. I started packing up my old Volkswagen bus with all I could stuff in it, ready to leave everything else behind. As I finished with the car and prepared to leave, a fellow scrimshaw artist stopped by. She had never been to my house before, we didn't know each other well, and I never found out why she came by in the first place. She was a gifted artist, but lived on a commune with a life partner selected by some kind of cult leader for her, and their finances and work output were micro managed by a financial director. That was too bizarre for me.

I told her I was leaving and why, after which she proceeded to tell me about her health issues she had that this "nature doctor" had cured. I thought, "herb doctor". Right. I'd had a belly full of doctoring and wanted no more. It was nothing but drugs to mask pain. Drugs to dry up sinuses. Surgery and treatment I couldn't pay for. In fact, my "treatment" for acute bronchitis (antibiotics) made it come back in a drug-resistant chronic form. No Thanks. Dr. Harold Dick, N.D. was not someone I planned to hook up with, medically speaking. I didn't say that, but instead thanked her politely and went on my way, with no inkling that the UNIVERSE had firmly planted that strange little person in my path for a reason.

...I had enough money left for gas home. The farm was shrouded in snow, the house like a silent cocoon, and so I spent the days and nights in a recliner, benefiting from sensory deprivation to remain in a meditative state somewhere belying the pain. I expected the slow deterioration of chronic/degenerative disease, but instead felt better. More peaceful. Less pain.

My unhappy parents arrived home less than thrilled to find their adult and estranged daughter hunkered down, immoveable and ill, in their home. My health worsened. One morning I stole everything I could find in cupboards relating to pain from old prescription bottles that hadn't been discarded and spent the day too stoned to move. Nobody noticed. That night, at the end of my rope I dropped to my knees in complete surrender, mentally threatening, screaming, pleading to a higher power, "Let me die or make me live." Peace came over me and I slept through the night for the first time I could remember in recent history.

The next day, I overheard my mother's end of a phone conversation. Her closest friend was talking about a daughter scheduled for exploratory surgery for an undiagnosed, extended illness who was spared at the 11th hour by some other doctor who found the cause of the problems. Chills ran down my spine. When she hung up, I asked her to call the woman back and get the name of that miracle doc. Of course, it was the naturopath, Dr. Harold Dick, back in Spokane. The hippie chick's "herb" doctor. I could only lean my head on my fist, smile to myself and nod. "Okay. I get it."

I headed back with gas in the tank, $5 in cash and some food stamps donated by a friend. What happened after that is another story, but it did lead to the doctor's office in time. Out in the waiting room of his small, modest clinic I fell into conversation with another patient. She explained that she had first come in a wheelchair in the last stages of multiple sclerosis a few years earlier. Now she came for treatment once a year from Canada. She had one remaining thigh muscle still affected, but otherwise lived a healthy, active life. That brought me right out of my pain-induced, self-absorbed fog. Something was going on here.

Dr. Dick's story unfolds far more dramatically than mine, even in how he came to medicine. He had to go through traditional naturopathic training which is nearly identical to that of a medical doctor in the basic sciences. They diverge higher up in the schooling as it evolves into diagnosis and treatment, but the naturopathic boards are more rigidly standardized and difficult than the medical, which would surprise most people. After that, to learn what he really wanted to do, he had to do a private residency with another naturopathic physician who had developed new diagnostic and treatment modalities, and therein lay the differences which set Dr. Dick apart from his colleagues, other than one other doctor (Leo Scott) who also studied with the great O.G. Carroll, N.D. whose legacy continues to change the face of natural healing. A third naturopathic physician also did a residency with Dr. Carroll. Dr. John Bastyr, after whom the naturopathic college in Seattle, Washington was named trained with Dr. Carroll, but his parents were pharmacists and so his orientation to treatment later followed a different path more orientated to a wider range of medicines than Dr. Carroll believed in.

A Different Kind of Naturopathic Treatment

I didn't know how different Dr. Dick was from other naturopathic physicians because he was my first experience with naturopathic medicine. Dr. Dick and his brother were almost literally drug to a famous naturopath when he was a young family man with a successful garage and related business. The experience became so extraordinary and unsettling that he walked away from his old life and went to medical school. That only lasted a semester, because they weren't doing what Dr. Carroll did for him and his family. He learned that he had to go to naturopathic college, not a conventional medical school, and that was only the beginning for the basics and to get licensed, after which he had to do a 3 year private residency with Dr. Carroll to learn what wasn't being taught in the schools, primarily about how to diagnose digestive enzyme deficiency food intolerances which are the basis of or contribute to many conditions and diseases, to learn more about the heart for diagnosis, and learn a new form of hydrotherapy practiced for centuries, now called "Constitutional Hydrotherapy" after Dr. Carroll added electrotherapy to the healing protocol to stimulate blood circulation and immune function which speeded up the healing process by bringing on a "reaction" --also known as a "healing crisis" and by other names, but which boils down to a systemic detoxification process needed for healing. Cleaning house, so to speak.

The discovery of food intolerances of a digestive origin came in relatively recently in historical terms. Around 1900, a Dr. Abrams described a new kind of food problem sometimes referred to as food allergy, but in fact was NOT an immune-mediated condition like true food allergy and was somehow different from the less-well-understood food sensitivity. This problem instead involved an inability to properly digest or assimilate certain foods, food groups, or food combinations, resulting in toxic metabolites from the putrefaction, fermentation, or rancidity of foods entering into the general blood circulation and if not completely eliminated, then ending up being dumped in tissue depositories according to individual weaknesses. More simply put, if you have a weakened or susceptible liver, then your liver becomes a target of toxic waste. If weak lungs run in the family, a sickness and later a disease of the lungs becomes a possibility. There is reportedly some information about Dr. Abram's work kept at the naturopathic college in Portland, Oregon, but otherwise not much is known about how or why this apparently widespread problem became known.

Dr. Carroll developed a method of testing for this type of enzyme deficiency --the Carroll test is the only one known and as it requires a complex analysis and the use of VOLL type of electrical testing on the effects of different foods on blood cells, it takes training. I once asked Dr. Dick to explain it to me. His response was, "take 10 years of chemistry and then ask me again." The test requires only a tiny amount of blood taken from an ear lobe (the least painful area to prick) absorbed into a paper product and tested dry, so a sample can actually be sent through the mail and examined. Dr. Carroll had someone build the equipment for him under his direction. It is so specific that individual foods like potatoes or eggs, food groups like dairy or fruit, or combinations of foods that form something chemically incompatible with that person's body chemistry can be identified. For example, I can't combine any kind of fruit with any kind of processed sugar within 4 hours of each other or I get sick. My husband has the same intolerance, but he has to separate these foods by 12 hours, which indicates the rate of digestion. We both get sick from this combination, but in different ways. This particular combination, which is very common, runs through both sides of my family, although my daughter has a rare second combined intolerance which is cereal grain and dairy. So, no pizza or nachos for her but she could eat dairy in the morning and grains in the afternoon. There is no medical test in the world of "conventional" medicine that can determine an intolerance to food combinations.

http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag99/apr99-cover.html --some basic online info on enzyme deficiency

The Carroll test also shows primary tissue salt deficiency, so that is almost always part of treatment with homeopathic tissue salts (there are 12), as this kind of deficiency can have a serious effect on health. Dr. Dick also was expert in diagnosing glandular imbalances and deficiencies, which he treated with glandular protomorphogens made only by one company in the world. These are different from regular "glandulars" made from desiccated organs. Protomorphogens are the part of a hormone secreted by the gland that contain a healthy blueprint for the reproduction of healthy glandular cells. They heal a gland where glandulars have a much weaker effect and hormone replacement can cause the gland to atrophy and create a lifelong dependence on hormone therapy.

His other primary contribution to naturopathic medicine--Constitutional Hydrotherapy--took the ancient practice of stimulating blood circulation and immune response with cold water applications, and later alternating heat and cold (not unlike the old Indian practice of going to the sweat lodge and then jumping into a cold river or lake for healing or maintaining good health) and adding electrotherapy to it to pump up the effects of water. World-renowned Loma Linda hospital, where the first heart transplant was done, has a fact sheet on the effects of alternating hot and cold hydrotherapy.

Electrotherapy involved stimulating muscle groups and vital organs. Hospitals used it to speed up the healing of bad bone fractures, unaware that it had a much wider application. It's probably far more complex than just a method of stimulating cells. All matter is made up of energy. Energy vibrates. Every vibration has it's own frequency, which is how we perceive different colors, shapes, sizes, etc. The LAW OF ATTRACTION dictates that "like attracts like" meaning one frequency is drawn to a similar frequency.

That is the basis of homeopathic medicine. A specific poison causes specific symptoms in a healthy person, although there is always some variation due to the individual makeup of that person. What a homeopath looks for is a group of disease symptoms that are similar or alike, even though from a different cause. The medicine begins with the poison, but all physical material of that poison is removed through a process of dilution and only it's vibratory nature is taken up by the inert fluid it is mixed with, which explains why scientists run chemical tests on homeopathic remedies and find nothing, because they were looking for the wrong thing in the first place. No chemical substance remains, only it's vibrational frequency which is attracted to the same frequencies emitted by the diseased cells. The medicine neutralizes the disease frequencies, if the right match is made. I saw this work on my mother's intractable pain and lesions from shingles which caused pain so deep that the strongest drugs they would prescribe failed to reach it. Dr. Dick included homeopathy as a treatment for people unable to stay around for Constitutional Hydrotherapy which normally took 3-5 weeks of weekday sessions. At that time, he had the homeopathic analysis, that typically would take hours of interview and observation, set up with a computer questionnaire that included over 500 questions and took all morning to answer. He then fed it into the computer, which kicked out 5 suggested remedies that matched all of her symptoms and characteristics. 500 symptoms sounds abnormal, but homeopathic analysis looks at everything describing a person's individual idiosyncrasies-- things like positions of sleep, the color, texture and consistency of "snot" just to name a couple. Out of the five suggested remedies, as the closest match to her symptomology, he chose "Sepia" which is the brown fluid squirted out defensively by a class of sea creatures like squid, octopus and cuttlefish. I saw her look at the 5 tiny homeopathic pills put in the palm of her hand, and the unmistakable doubt on her face read like an open book. But ...by that night the pain was gone and the next day her lesions were scabbing over. She healed up completely and permanently.

So, without knowing too much about electrotherapy, I suspect that it's effects are more than vibratory stimulation and that it may effectively change bad disease frequencies. By the way, electrotherapy doesn't provide shocks like one thinks of "shock therapy" (shades of "One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest"). The effect is like a deep vibratory massage. It put me to sleep more often than not.

Dr. Dick graduated with degrees in naturopathy combined with chiropractic, so he was both a naturopathic physician and a chiropractor by license. He added a homeopathic degree to that, certification in iridology (which blew my mind when I first saw it applied) and he even went to the Orient to study acupuncture, but never used the chiropractic to my knowledge and abandoned acupuncture when he realized his own treatments were more effective, faster and cheaper for his patients, not that the effectiveness of acupuncture by a master should be minimized. He saw one thing that no other treatment has yet accomplished, and described spinal cord injuries causing paralysis that could be treated--if soon enough--and the paralysis reversed. Acupuncture possesses the potential to be powerful medicine.

Back Story: One which may offend many:

Long before I was guided to the naturopathic physician who would save my life, and then become my mentor, and even before I became so desperately ill with physical disease, I suffered from a higher (or one may say, deeper) level of illness--of the mind and spirit.

At the age of 8, I was molested for an entire school year, mentally and physically, by a high school senior who rode my school bus. When I finally told something, nothing was done. At the very least, the pervert raped a close friend who was also neighbor. I know, because she told me. We were powerless, children unable to tell because of the seemingly forbidden sexual conversation and climate of the 50's, or defend ourselves. The family was neighboring farmers, and it can be assumed my parents were more interested in keeping the peace than protecting children. We think of things very different today, But shame, horror, and embarrassment still commands silence in many victims, and that silence supports perversion and abuse to this day. The situation has changed legally, but many people still loath dealing with these matters, particularly within families, and "don't tell" rings through the air whether spoken or not. On the other hand, many do tell and so do many make possibly false accusations, particularly when there is bitterness between them, and the intention is to harm or destroy an adversary, which serves to cloud issues in general when real abuse occurs.

I knew things at the age of 8 that should be beyond the understanding of young children. Something about how the world works, and about how alone I was. Too soon I understood something more about my family. My father refused to expose a monster, possibly for many reasons, but also because of his own monstrous nature. Without going into lurid detail, the hidden sick and perverse character of this man who came to live a double life affected everyone around him. My mother was an innocent, she really didn't know or understand such things. she was completely dependent on him, obedient to him, a nice Christian lady, and either she never saw or refused to see the signs other than the physical violence he inflicted on me when I became his victim and then began fighting all contact, all authority from him at the age of 11. Whippings and beating and other forms of cruelty made me tough and strong in one way, more isolated, but it broke something at the same time. I lacked the words for it, but looking back I know I felt "tainted"-- my basic self-esteem lay shattered and ground down. Low self-esteem attracts other victims, victimizers and increases victimhood. 'Like attracts like."

Many events followed. An ill-advised marriage to a blind man at 18, after a couple of quarters of college. After all, he couldn't see me (as though the "taint" only shows on the surface). I didn't know how to say no to a blind man. In reality, one with so little self worth sacrifices oneself so easily. What I really sacrificed was the man I loved because I felt unworthy of him, and he later married someone else. There was separation within 6 months, back to college where I worked my way through for a degree in art, my great passion in life. Then, the death of a cousin who was also my closest friend and companion left me staggering. His murder (he was run down by the estranged husband of a neighbor he had just become involved with--the husband killed them both that night) destroyed my sense of direction. I joined the army, and then discovered my recruiter lied to get me to sign up, claiming I could apply to Officer's Candidate School because of my degree, when in fact I was 6 months over the age limit when I joined in 1986.

That devastation doubled when they informed me my job would be "Petroleum Storage Specialist". Briefly, I thought "All is not lost! I get to drive trucks." But no, it meant doing secretarial work in that office. My heart sank. I went to great lengths to avoid office work and now landed in the thick of it, potentially. I wanted out but they weren't having it with the only college graduate in the company. Then something unexpected happened. Weapons training for women--I got dragged into the first cohort of female trainees for combat. I loved my M16 rifle--I learned to take it apart, clean and reassemble it with the best of them. And then came the firing range. In those days, most of the female recruits were from Harlem and Watts--black girls found jobs and training in the military largely unavailable to them on the outside. I suffered a terrible trauma and ran away to join the American version of the French Foreign Legion, so to speak but they were running to something, not away, very understandably, but the specter of many tough gang-bangers and repressed souls wielding weapons of war with such glee (I grew up around hunters and just liked weapons that made loud noises and blew up small things, although not the animal killing part) gave one pause, and even more so when I found out that "weapons training" lasted three days and involved cheating on scores to make it look good. It was all window dressing--lip service to women's right advocates and the illusion of equality.

The first moment I took aim at a human shaped target, the full effect of having experienced someone's violent death hit me and I laid my weapon down. The "voluntary" program turned out to be less voluntary than one imagines. The brass ordered me to stand apart with my back to the troops, at parade rest (a hard-to-maintain, hands-behind-the-back stance) but only after being stripped of helmet, gloves, and other cold-weather clothing. Hours later in the freezing cold morning, someone higher up riding by in a jeep to observe the troops saw me stagger and fall, nearly unconscious from hypothermia. He rescued me, revived me, and then released me, apparently deciding that someone so decidedly stubborn and opinionated about the army disrespecting women and weapons training that way might not make a good, obedient soldier. And honorable discharge but a sad one. I missed the army and regretted walking away from a commitment, even though it seemed right for all concerned.

One thing led to another. I eventually ended up back home, unwanted and unwanting, but without a job or alternative income, no other choice presented itself. The family exploded soon enough, and my mother dumped me off at a cheap flophouse apartment, paid $75 for a month's rent and left. No job, no prospects and suffering from clinical depression that had tortured me for years, left me at rock bottom. I decided to commit suicide--rather uniquely. I'd dabbled with hypnosis and believed I could will myself to die. I prayed for death, demanded it, pleaded for it. Soon enough, terrible physical pain began. The vice-grip like pain in my head made it feel close to bursting, and I believe I was close to having a blow-out, like an aneurism. I began vomiting convulsively. At some point, the emotional and physical pain became so overwhelming without changing that I called a suicide hotline, spoke to a counselor and she convinced me to walk to the health department nearby, which she opened on a Saturday to meet with me. I gave her a summary of my tale of woe. Shockingly, she told me I'd had a bad lot in life, and that I had a right to be angry, but to push it outward and own the anger rather than internalizing it and turning it in on myself. Three years of counseling during high school, and when I finally told the social worker the underlying problem behind my unstable behavior at home and all of the violence, he apparently didn't believe me and told my parents that my problem was "inconsistent discipline", meaning I needed more punishment. This different opinion and advice came as a revelation.

I returned to the room in a different frame of mind, but the head pain and vomiting resumed. Overall, it continued for 3 days and nights until I was so weak I lay on the dirty, smelly rug dry-heaving on the floor, unable to rise. Finally, I prayed another kind of prayer, asking to either be allowed to die without this prolonged torture, or to live and be healed.

In his book, "The Power of Positive Thinking", Dr. Normal Vincent Peale related a conversation with a black woman who served as a cook to his friends, who lived a positive, successful life and had this to say about how she so completely mastered her troubles. "When a big trouble comes along, you have to pray deep prayers." Along the same line, a spiritual advisor told him, "To get anywhere with faith, learn to pray big prayers. God will rate you according to the size of your prayers." Another man told him, "The trouble with lots of prayers is they ain't got no suction." Dr. Peale agreed, citing Matthew 9:29: "According to your faith be it unto you." Be advises us to "Drive your prayers deep into your doubts, fears, inferiorities. Pray deep, big prayers that have plenty of suction and you will come up with powerful and vital faith." There isn't much bigger problem than a matter of life and death, real or imagined. That's how I prayed. Complete surrender--a prayer with plenty of "suction".

Something happened. Call it an "out of body" experience, near-death experience, a vision, vivid imagination or whatever. I went somewhere else in mind or spirit, with no physical sensation of my body. My description misses the mark, but some things defy words. No bright light, no darkness, just a sensation of being surrounded and embraced by a feeling of such immense love that no one in their right mind would leave it by choice. I knew things. Earthly things and spiritual things, all coming at once. I knew about the birth of my first niece that night, that she had a health issue but would be all right. (All turned out to be true.) I understood the nature of the God and of the indivisible relationship between creator and creation. And I instantly knew how man finds heaven. It's already there, just buried in the swamp of diversions we create to lose ourselves in. At the same time, it was like a glowing light came into my dark mind, illuminating every part of it, driving out the shadows, instantly healing the killer mental and emotional pain, not just then but permanently so far over the last 30 some years. No more clinical depression. Highs and lows, but never again like that.

To find heaven, mankind must let go of the earth. "W.E.A.N." himself from his addictions, disappointments, losses, unfulfilled longings. WEAN stands for: Want nothing. Expect nothing. Ask for nothing. Need nothing.

I had no sense of time and don't know what brought me back, whether it just happened or the banging on the door snapped me back to my body consciousness. My closest childhood friend, the only one who hadn't abandoned me to avoid my father, felt compelled to find me after no contact for several years. My mother gave her my address and she showed up, pulled me off of the floor and took me home, telling them they had to keep me there because I was ill. My body had been through a lot and I was certainly weak and in need of recovery.

For many days, I experienced what some might call a state of religious ecstasy, or euphoria. Many religions describe something similar by a number of terms. The feeling of peacefulness--not just calm, but an incredible high, no one would ever desire drugs if they felt that. Having felt the love, generating it outward, longing for nothing else--that was heaven, the garden of Eden, Nirvana.. and the opposite state of mind involved the (in a manner of speaking) hell fire of unrequited passion for things, people, belongings, hatred, guilt, all things without satisfaction or resolution that torture the mind and soul. This excludes a "magnificent obsession" to create, do good, or to find the right path and follow it with grand enthusiasm. Of course I came back to earth. If one lived in a monastery, a padded cell, or at the base of a Banyan tree where passersby left food in offering, one might maintain an other-worldly state, but I was soon enmeshed in the things of the world, in other people, and other necessary life lessons.

Decades later, for the first time, I put into words what was revealed to me without words so long ago. In fact, my understanding of it grows with time and it's only now that the words are coming to me, and the courage to speak them thanks in part to an incident that just occurred on Thanksgiving evening (2011) involving an argument with a family member, of all things. I was describing to a brother about some of the principles of a course I'm studying, "Your Wish Is Your Command" about how faith actually generates frequencies, like those in radio waves--in fact, all things boil down to energy form, energy vibrates and every vibration has it's own frequency--so that by powering up your own "frequencies" of thought, making them positive and directing them outward with strong faith, that according to the Law of Attraction, they will attract like or similar frequencies. It's kind of like saying, what you want from the universe, the universe wants for you, and the bigger the faith, the stronger the power behind the thought. A member of my fundamentalist Christian family immediately jumped on me at the word "faith" wanted to know how that tied in with the Bible. I told her, very well. The course included Biblical quotes and gave me a greater depth of understanding, but I stumbled in trying to explain what I was thinking. The lecture began, about how people could only come to God through His Son, Jesus Christ. That we must worship Jesus and his blood sacrifice for our sins. I tried to argue that Christianity was about the teachings of Christ, not the flesh and blood person. The message, not the man. I also asked her if that meant that the world full of people who were of other religions would all go straight to "hell". Her response was, "That's up to God", implying that non-Christians were lost souls, and that there was only one God, not Allah or anyone else. I could have pointed out that Allah is the God of Abraham, which happens to be the same as God perceived as Jehovah, the Christian God. We ended with her quoting, "I AM THE WAY" and me responding with, "Yes, the WAY, not the human man." She left angry and not convinced of anything other than my healthen outlook on life. My debating skills lacked persuasion and finesse.

This disturbing exhange evolved into a wonderful clarity of mind--what I could have said, should have said, but didn't even clearly see myself until forced to think about it consciously, and then the words came, and this is the part which may offend many but isn't intended to do so. Revelation comes to all of us willing to listen, to see clearly, not just to saints or prophets from another time and place. It is easy to discredit or minimize or deny as something else, but when it's real, one knows the difference. This is what I know:

Mankind has some kind of built-in radar or one ingrained after birth that recognizes guilt, rage, bitterness, anger, hatred and similar emotions as something wrong and deserving of punishment. Call it a conscience, or something else. In the old Hebrew system, people were taught "an eye for an eye", that the only way to be forgiven for your sins by God and society was for a blood sacrifice. The father who stole a loaf of bread to feed his starving children had to attone by having his hand cut off. (This wasn't just a Hebrew teaching.) If a married man looked at another woman with lust, he could theoretically have his eye put out, although it was far more likely for a woman to be punished for any kind of romantic or sexual indiscretion. So, mankind believed that the sin separated us from God and society until we redeemed ourselves through a blood sacrifice. In many cases the punishment was death.

NEXT: Diagnosis, Treatment, Healing and Mentoring by Dr. Harold Dick, N.D.