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by Elisa Adams
In
February of 1986, I had a cold —
one of those miserable, runny-nose,
tired-to-the-bones kinds of colds, when you are totally run down and have no
energy for anything. I woke up late and went downstairs to find a slew of
strangers seated in my parlor, listening to my husband.
I took my box of
Kleenex and went to hide in the kitchen, where I discovered a lady I’d not met
before. She was Roger DeHaan’s wife, Ginny; her husband had scheduled a
meeting of his Nature’s Sunshine group at my home on this quiet snowy Saturday
to learn about Iridology.
We chatted for a
couple hours, until the class was ended and everyone dispersed. Then Roger and
Bill disappeared for another hour
— by
which time, Ginny and I were quite good friends! Our husbands finally
reappeared, and Bill was excited to tell me that he had learned from Roger’s
muscle-testing that he was sensitive to wheat and eggs, and milk, too.
I remembered all the
omelets he’d refused to eat, the egg salad sandwiches he’d spurned, the
delicious quiches I’d made that he mocked as ‘ladies’ tea-party food.’
And I suddenly realized that his innate intuition had been trying for years to
keep eggs and dairy out of his diet!
“Can you test
me?” I begged Roger.
“Do you have the
flu?” he asked, his eyebrows raised. I didn’t look very well.
“No,” I promised
him, sniffling. “Just a nasty cold, that’s all.”
Well, he opened a
cardboard box containing dozens of little gray and black canisters, the kind 35
mm. film comes in, and he had me touch this place and that on my face and body,
explaining each contact point as he pressed on my arm.
“That’s
your thyroid point,” he explained, as the third place I touched caused my arm
to drop like a rock. He took out a canister of Thyroid Activator (then KC-X),
and tucked it into the collar of my turtleneck jersey. When I retouched the
point at the base of my throat, my arm was strong. Hmm.
I thought.
The next point to
"blow" was my thymus point, which Roger explained was the center to my
immune system. He put Sinus Support (SN-X) into my turtleneck, and, lo and behold!
my arm was strong again when I touched my thymus.
By now, I was really
getting into this thing! Ginny had told
me that Roger was both a licensed veterinarian and the minister of her church
fellowship, which gave him a double measure of credibility in my book, but it
was the fact that he’d used an indicator point for my immune system, and found
it weak, that excited me and convinced me that this testing was valid.
The next point he
checked was my adrenals —
they
blew, too! I felt crummy enough with my
cold to believe that my body was falling apart. What I loved was the simplicity
with which a small vial of nutrient tucked into my turtleneck could strengthen a
system that had stressed to the breaking point! He
used pantothenic acid (B-5), a third supplement tucked into my neckline, and
immediately my arm grew strong when I held my adrenal point.
Shortly, Roger found
a deficiency at my vitamin A point. By 1986, I’d been a master herbalist for
four years, and no one had told me I
was low in vitamin A! A vitamin A canister joined the others in my turtleneck,
and Roger continued his testing, discovering sensitivities to beef, sugar, and
corn oil. I had given up beef and white sugar in 1980, when Bill and I became
Nature’s Sunshine members, and within three months the eczema that had plagued
me since I was ten months old had totally disappeared!
The food items
totally convinced me that continuing my dietary changes was essential to my
continued good health and soft skin —
a
point my vanity took to heart!
At that point, Roger
reached out to reclaim his little plastic bottles
— and
I felt like I wanted to jump into his cardboard box with them!
He and Ginny left, and I had started to clean up the kitchen when I
realized that I had not had a sniffle for an hour and a half - the whole time
Roger had been testing me! As I stared at
the Kleenex —
the
first one I’d reached for since sitting at the table with Ginny —
I
suddenly believed,
at a gut level,
that herbs work! Whatever was in
those little canisters had stopped my nose from running, for over two hours!
Immediately, I found
an old diaper and cut a square from one corner, placed a couple capsules of each
item I’d been wearing in the center, and tied it up with an elastic band. I
found an old piece of string, and hung the thing around my neck. As I patted the
cotton sack of herbs that hung over my thymus, I realized that, inadvertently, I
had made myself an American Indian "medicine bag"!
I proceeded to
finish cleaning up the kitchen and buzzed about doing the rest of my Saturday
chores, full of pizzazz, with no sniffles. I took my KC-X and SN-X, my pantothenic
acid and vitamin A, and wore my medicine bag to bed, and on Sunday, when I woke
up, my cold was completely gone!
I was so excited at
how simple it had been to get rid of my cold that I started muscle-testing
everyone I met. "Hold your arm out," I would instruct, checking their
points. I found one girl with hypoglycemia who couldn’t do fruit juices, and
another with asthma who couldn’t have milk. Everything I discovered through my
testing made sense; nothing came out bizarre or foolish.
A week later, Bill
had an "herbal hour" with a Spanish-speaking group of NSP people in
Rhode Island, and I dutifully packed a large cardboard box full of products to
use for testers. If it tested well, we sold it to them at the end of the
afternoon. By five o’clock, we were returning home with a dozen happy
customers and an empty cardboard box. It was certainly easier to cross the
language barrier with muscle-testing than to try to convince someone to buy a
product when we speak English and they speak only Spanish!
Meanwhile, we
invited Roger back to speak to our group about muscle-testing. I sent out 45
postcards, inviting everyone to “a free lecture, where you will learn how to
detect body system imbalances, food allergies, vitamin and mineral deficiencies,
candida overgrowth, and heavy metal toxicity.”
We had seating for thirty — we
had a crowd of sixty that night! People
were sitting on footstools, on the floor, everywhere! At the end of the evening, everyone signed up to have Roger test
him (or her), and Roger was booked out, at one day a week, eight clients a day,
for two months!
Roger drove the long
trek to our house every Friday for six months, and I studied with him,
surrogating with clients when it was necessary, taking notes, rescheduling
appointments. Muscle-testing in those days was $20, for 45 minutes. Then, late
in the summer, Roger’s church called him to Michigan, and the entire group was
dumped into my lap.
I am not by nature a
presumptuous person, but I said to myself, “It’s me or nobody,” so I
buckled down to do my best and found that I did it well. I wasn’t as
experienced as Roger and I worked more slowly, averaging 90 minutes per session
instead of 45, but I explained more, and clients were happy with the results, so
I figured that 90 minutes with an inexperienced practitioner was as good as 45
minutes with a well-practiced veterinarian. I kept the price structure, and
glowed with pleasure at the results we were achieving. It is extremely
gratifying to be told to one’s face that one is the answer to someone’s
prayers!
Nowhere in my belief
system is any notion that God wants us to be sick. God does not wish on His
believing children hives or piles or eczema or cancer, or any other illness
common to mankind. I
have always believed that God has given us questing minds and the
capacity to learn, in order to find answers if we seek them long enough. As
Christ said, in the continuitive Aramaic tense, "Keep
on knocking and the door will open; keep
on seeking and you will find what you seek."
There are many
tools that are available in one’s quest for good health. Books, organic food,
and muscle-testing are three aids that I have found to be invaluable in the work
of restoring balance to one’s life and health.
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