The international network of natural and alternative healers is a fairly close-knit one, but as you can imagine it's hard to get all of those voices heard without the sort of backing major medical companies provide themselves. So we would like to occasionally use this newsletter to let you hear from some important voices in the natural remedies community.

One of the best is Adeha Feustel, a healer certified in neuromuscular therapy. This week we're bringing one of her studies to your attention, and hope to share more of her thoughts with you in the future.

Today, Adeha addresses the importance of natural light for our continuing health, and widely shared concerns about artificial light sources.

We'd also like to draw a bit more attention to a valued friend of the Earth Clinic website, Bill Thompson. He's one of our Contributing Writers, but as you will find in his article on the true root of illness, he deserves a much brighter spotlight!

by Adeha Feustel

Asheville, NC 

Many studies indicate that ordinary artificial lighting is not the benign substitute for sunshine that we have assumed, that in fact it has a destructive and even life-threatening impact on our health, raising stress levels and disturbing cell function. When we avoid the sun, we depend on artificial lighting. Yet those indoor lights distort the frequency spectrum of sunlight, altering the critical balance between the visible light frequencies and the invisible light frequencies at either end of the light spectrum (infrared and ultraviolet).

Not only do we compromise our health and immunity by avoiding the sun, we endanger our eyesight, bone density and psychological equilibrium, and we wreak havoc with nervous and endocrine function. By so ignoring our biological mandate, we endanger every aspect of our function. By accepting artificial skewed-spectrum lighting as a substitute for sunshine, we unknowingly precipitate profound physiological effects with disastrous results, the causes of which are invisible to us, although glaringly evident in the available research on sunlight and health.

John Ott's Research into Natural and Artificial Light

John Ott got some truly stunning results when he studied the effect of variation in lighting on life span of a particular strain of mice bred for high susceptibility to spontaneous development of cancerous tumors. He compared the life spans of 2000 mice kept under various fluorescents versus those living under natural sunshine. Mouse life spans averaged 7.5 months under pink fluorescent lighting; mice under different types of light with increasingly wider spectral composition showed a progression in life span up to 16.1 months under natural sunlight!   

(Note the lack of UV light is associated with a huge drop in lifespan! Also, window light without UV was still considerably better than even daylight fluorescents. Full spectrum artificial lighting had not been developed.) 

Ott considered this experimental outcome the most significant of all his experimental work, and concluded that the full spectrum of sunlight was as vitally important to the health of animals (including humans) as to plants.

Of course 40 years after Ott's research, we are beginning to understand the vital importance of UV light in generating vitamin D in our bodies, and of the importance of Vitamin D in preventing cancer. We can supplement vitamin D now, to make up for not getting it from UV light. But many OTHER frequencies in sunlight are missing in indoor artificial light. What if each of those missing frequencies is critical to some vital nutrient in our body? Joseph G. Hattersley quotes John Ott: "Every nutritional substance, medicine and drug," says Dr. Ott, "has a specific wavelength absorption. If those wavelengths are missing in the artificial light source a person is exposed to, then the nutritional benefits of the substance will not be utilized." (2) 

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Footnote: Ott's original research was done in the early 1970's. The research was repeated on a small scale by a few other researchers, but grant money for further research was refused on the grounds that light conditions could not possibly have anything to do with cancer! Anyone with a "genetic susceptibility" to cancer deserves to know about this study. Have you ever heard of it? Do you suppose that lighting conditions, if not the main variable in cancer experiments, should at least be controlled and standardized? Are they? No!

(1) Health and Light, by John N. Ott, 1973, pp 90-99

(2)"Full Spectrum Light: Energy and Health Builder" By Joseph G. Hattersley http://www.price-pottenger.org/Articles/FullSpectrum.html 

© Adeha Feustel. All Rights Reserved.

by Bill Thompson

Contributing Writer

San Fernando, Philippines

bt130550@gmail.com 

"Diseases are crises of purification, of toxic elimination"

-- Hippocrates.

I have a good friend who is certainly a clever guy. He's University educated with a Master's degree in Pure and Applied Math's. He's also pre-diabetic. We gather sometimes with other friends and we talk, sort out the world and enjoy ourselves. Sometimes our conversation turns to ailments and alternative healing and I can tell, as I watch him tip his third heaped spoonful of sugar into his cup of coffee, that he is very skeptical about alternative healing methods. In fact, I don't argue any more, he is a friend after all, so I end up just biting my tongue - hard. 

Here, perhaps, is the greatest example of the difference between training or conditioning by rote or accepted belief and beliefs that are fully realized by self-education and direct experience - using methods that are perhaps well outside the mainstream - and all achieved through using your own ferocious and honest curiosity to discover the real truth. I am not talking about math here, I'm just referring to many people's belief that the allopathic way is the only acceptable and proven way of medicine and healing.   

So perhaps an exploration of the differences in approach between scientific allopathic methods and alternative naturopathic methods is called for. 

Around 1900, the modern scientific medical approach really began in earnest with the final acceptance and introduction of the Germ Theory by Louis Pasteur. But there was another competing theory at the time - called the Terrain or Cellular Theory by Antoine Bechamp and it was a close-run thing between the two, but in the end Pasteur's Germ Theory approach towards disease prevailed. These two hypotheses were, at the time, merely competing theories on the nature and origins of disease. Pasteur was not only a chemist but he was also a rich man, an extrovert entrepreneur, who had powerful and influential friends. By contrast, Antoine Bechamp was a highly acknowledged and respected professor in Belgium, an honest scientist through and through, and a quiet and humble man. Bechamp actually taught Pasteur in his earlier years for a while.

The difference between the Terrain Theory and the Germ Theory can perhaps best be summed up by these two simple quotes:  

Antoine Bechamp - "The primary cause of disease is in us... Always in us." 

Louis Pasteur - "Pathogens cause disease... Eliminate the pathogen to prevent the disease."  

There was much conflict between the two because of their competing theories on the origin of disease. Read the full history here. 

What Bechamp was essentially saying was that if you have a healthy body with a strong immune system, then this was enough to suppress the destructive pathogens already within your body, so build up and maintain a healthy body terrain, and if you are ill then you must treat the whole body to make it healthy again. Bechamp further postulated and proved through several experiments that the human body has a huge number of bacteria, viruses etc. already contained in it. It is a well accepted fact that there are more bacteria and other organisms in our intestinal tract than exist in the rest of our body. If you are healthy then these organisms revert to a symbiotic relationship that is both beneficial and healthy for the body -- but if your body terrain changes and becomes unhealthy (via toxins, unhealthy diet, lack of nutrients), then these organisms will be triggered into a physical and functional change of state - via something called pleomorphism - into completely different organisms that become parasitic, destructive and deadly for the human body.  

And what Pasteur's Germ Theory was essentially saying was that if the body is ill, then we must always regard the causative pathogen as an outside invasive threat and get rid of it with drugs, vaccines etc.

In the 1920s, a brilliant microscopist, inventor and researcher called Royal Raymond Rife, with his high powered and unique bright-field microscope, discovered some interesting aspects about the nature and behaviour of disease:

"Rife showed that by altering the environment and food supply, friendly bacteria such as colon bacillus could be converted into varied "pathogenic" bacteria. For example, Rife also observed that bacillus coli could in time be modified into the bacterial agent associated with typhus, and the process actually reversed. In Rife's words:

'In reality, it is not the bacteria themselves that produce the disease, but we believe it is... the unbalanced cell metabolism of the human body that in actuality produce the effect of disease. We also believe if the metabolism of the human body is perfectly balanced... it is susceptible to no disease.'

This observation closely parallels Alexis Carrel's earlier research at the Rockefeller Institute where he was able to control the rates and levels of infectious disease mortality among mice. Beginning with the standard diet he observed a corresponding death rate of 52 percent. By making specific dietary improvements he was able to reduce mortality rates downward to 32 percent, then 14 percent, and finally to a rate of 0.45 " -- Dr. Raymond Obomsawin 

Strange indeed that through the years from the 1930s when the Electron Microscope was discovered, no other scientific researcher ever noticed what Rife had seen with his own powerful bright-field microscope (light, prism driven). This is probably because the Electron Microscope (or dark-field microscope) had less magnification as well as the fact that it instantaneously kills any organism that is viewed by it, whereas Rife's own high-powered bright-field microscope did not kill organisms, so only the bright-field type of microscope was capable of actually observing the pleomorphic changing behaviours of these organisms. Modern microbiological scientific research has also always favoured Electron Microscopes in their own scientific research studies.  

Over the years, other educated researchers like Gaston Naessens (another bright-field microscopist and inventor), Virginia Wheeler and Tullio Simoncini also discovered the strange pleomorphic nature of pathogens.  

The strange thing and what must be acknowledged here is how Antoine Bechamp's Terrain Theory of disease ties in so closely with the more ancient healing systems of Ayurvedic Medicine, Chinese Medicine and Tibb - the Middle Eastern System. Bechamp's approach is every bit as holistic as these ancient systems - Heal the whole body terrain in order to fight off and prevent disease in the body.

In his experiments, Dr. Max Gerson, who discovered a famous method of curing cancer using just a strict vegetarian diet, vegetable and fruit juicing, mineral supplements, iodine and coffee enemas, completed a most remarkable experiment. He connected the blood systems of two rats so that the blood of each flowed through the other - one of the rats had bone cancer and the other was a completely healthy rat -- and the results were nothing less than astounding. After only a few weeks, the rat with cancer was completely healed and the healthy rat remained healthy!! This is indeed confirmation that the strength and health of your own body terrain and immune system -- just on their own -- are easily enough to defeat and heal even bone cancer.

So perhaps both Antoine Bechamp and Hippocrates were right after all.

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Earth Clinic's occasional newsletter is our sincere effort to deliver updated discoveries on folk remedies and natural healing. We hope it brings ever-improving health and vitality into your life!