Controlling Crohn's Disease: The Natural Way: by Virginia Harper with Tom Monte

More than a million Americans suffer the pain, fevers, and bleeding of Crohn's disease, colitis, and other incurable inflammatory bowel disorders (IBDs), whose numbers are rising every year. While most patients are treated with harsh prescription drugs or invasive surgery, these merely mask or postpone the symptoms.

All her life, author Virginia Harper had suffered from the debilitating effects of Crohn's disease. Even with heavy medication her symptoms persisted, and so she turned to a natural treatment regimen consisting of simple changes in diet and lifestyle. The results were truly remarkable. Within a year, she was not only pain-free, but symptom-free. Some twenty years later, Virginia's diarrhea, painful indigestion, cramps and bleeding have never returned.

In this important book, she shares her life-changing experiences with you. You'll learn about the eating program that has worked for her: which foods to consume, their preparation, and how to combine them in the most effective ways. You'll also receive her advice on easy activities to help restore your energy. Plus she discusses the latest drugs and surgical procedures, including their side effects, and tells you how to work with your doctor to become a more effective partner in your IBD treatment.

With Controlling IBD, you can begin your own journey to reclaiming health and vitality. So let the healing begin!

Since 1990, Virginia Harper has been working full-time to help other people get well. She has made hundreds of presentations on health and recovery to groups throughout the United States and has counseled more than 1,000 individuals with various kinds of health problems, mostly digestive disorders. Virginia has been interviewed for numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and has appeared on several radio programs as an expert on healthful cooking and recovery from severe digestive disorders. She lives in Franklin, Tennessee and can be contacted at her website, www. kiolife.com.

Tom Monte is a professional writer who specializes in health topics. Among the books he has authored are World Medicine: The East-West Guide to Healing Your Body, The Complete Guide to Natural Healing, Staying Young, and Peak Performance: Easy, Drug-Free Ways to Adjust Your Brain Chemistry and Achieve Optimal Health. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Controlling Crohn's Disease: The Natural Way
1-57566-831-9
Author: Virginia Harper with Tom Monte
Pub Date : Feb-02
Imprint : Twin Streams
Format : Trade Paperback

Twenty-five years ago, I met with the dean of one of the nation's top medical schools to ask him to consider funding for a small research project. As a teacher and counselor of hundreds of people who were facing life-threatening, degenerative illness, I had witnessed a significant number of remissions and reversals of grave conditions as a result of simple dietary and lifestyle changes. With more than $80 million in his research war chest that year, the dean had the power to recommend that a small study be undertaken to determine if these anecdotal successes showed any future promise.

I began the meeting by stating my assumptions: that diet played a crucial role in the development of most degenerative diseases, especially cancer of the breast and colon, and that as major killers, these diseases might also be preventable with changes in diet and lifestyle. Responding to the specifics of my hypothesis after a brief, disdainful jaw clenching, this esteemed researcher and scholar dismissed my conclusions as being overly simplistic.

"If you are suggesting that our daily diet of meat, cheese, butter, eggs, sugar, and diet sodas contributes in any way to the development of these diseases," he said, "then you are wasting my time. These illnesses are very complicated, and they are most likely caused by viruses." At the time, the widely held belief that cancer was a virus was the very cornerstone of research.

"Then, how will your research monies be spent?" I asked.

"More research is needed in nuclear medicine, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. These are the only ways we can cure these diseases." Prevention wasn't even a possibility, so treatment occupied most of his thoughts. The impatient physician cut our meeting short, granting me only the slight possibility that nitrates in hot dogs may cause some problems. I left disappointed, although no less determined to stay the course. Although I had no more ability to predict the future than he did, I would never have guessed how quickly things would begin to turn around.

In little more than five years, this same man cochaired a prestigious national panel that concluded that diet plays a key role in the majority of cancers in both men and women, catapulting nutritional research into the lead as the focus of promising research for both treatments and prevention. A few years later, after the virus theory was abandoned, dozens of other groups reached a similar conclusion: that our daily diet might very well be at the root of our troubles.

Like Pogo, who said, “We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us," many observers could actually find something to celebrate. We could take control--self-navigate--and with care and common sense, not only prevent degenerative illness, but actually treat many cancers with diet as a primary therapy. Despite negative reports of extreme treatments and last-ditch efforts to reverse degenerative disease, many patients began to request more information about alternatives, dietary changes, and methods that might complement conventional approaches. The wisest doctors, recalling their Hippocratic oath to do no harm, became compassionate supporters of patients who had little chance of recovery from devastating illnesses. One famous physician, Robert Mendelsohn, known as the People's Doctor, even stated that patients might consider suing doctors who did not inform them of the alternatives to conventional care. Protocols of cancer treatments did little to relieve suffering. A few doctors spoke out against the tide of unproven options, arguing that until more research was done, it was unethical to put forward "false hopes." But by the mid-1990s, the majority of patients with malignancies had already incorporated some alternatives into their daily regimen, giving birth to the new field of "integrative medicine," now widely practiced worldwide.

Amid this revolution in medicine, some people quietly went about the business of healing themselves. Health food stores blossomed, self-help books became bestsellers, and reports of miraculous recoveries by superstars and ordinary mortals filled the airwaves. As a longtime macrobiotic teacher and counselor, I personally saw thousands of people with every devastating disease imaginable, from asthma to metastatic uterine cancer. In nearly every case, diet was clearly a key factor in cause. But never was that more obvious than in the diseases of the digestive system such as Crohn's disease. Years of ingesting processed and refined foods, acidic vegetables, and simple sugars took their toll on tens of thousands of patients. Unbelievably, conventional approaches did little if anything to reverse this condition as patients were sentenced to a shortened lifetime of steroids and suffering.

The Chinese characters that signify crisis also mean opportunity. This paradox remains buried deep in the gut of a beautiful family from Chile. Following the ravages of a poor diet since immigrating to the United States 20 years earlier, one of their own developed severe diarrhea and abdominal pains. When she was eventually diagnosed with Crohn's and placed on prednisone, both she and her family were unwilling to accept that this special woman could not find a way to reverse the degeneration.

Meeting Virginia and her father, Julio, nearly 20 years ago was one of those invaluable experiences that bring such joy to my work. I feel very blessed to have played even a small role in their care, offering some simple guidance and support. But as you read the remarkable story of recovery that follows, know that the clinical approach and specific treatments employed were secondary to what really made a difference in this case. This family was infused with a unity of spirit that is nothing short of unconditional love. And with this love, Virginia Harper was able to unlock the real secret behind the macrobiotic approach: that beyond grains, vegetables, and external treatments; beyond acid, alkaline, and azuki beans; macrobiotics is a way of life. It is a way of harmony, balance, and unity with our environment, both inner and outer, a sort of unity of spirit that the universe offers each human being from every culture, from every walk of life, no matter what their age or condition. It is nature's expression of unconditional love--restorative, regenerative, and quite simply miraculous.

This book will change your life not just because of the story it tells or the lessons it teaches. This book will burn a hole through the densest firewall of protection around your heart. It will crack open the possibility of recovery from yet another "incurable" disease full of suffering that can be eliminated. This story emerges from the courageous power and commitment of a single soul so determined to find the truth that nothing stood a chance of defeating her. Whether medical school deans or internists take another two decades to arrive at the simple truth of the relationship between disease and our way of life won't make any difference now that you have been moved to take control over your own destiny with this book.

Delight in the reality that everything changes, and may your life be filled with the most fortunate blessings!

William Spear
Litchfield, Connecticut
June 2001