by Jody Berger
I told him that Silver didn’t say much definitively: he didn’t know the cause, although he thought it had something to do with chicken pox; he didn’t know how it would affect my body or how the drugs he suggested might work.
“Right,” Christopher said. “The only thing they know for certain is that it’s forever. If they diagnose MS and it goes away, then it must have been a misdiagnosis, which means they’d have made a mistake. It’s bullshit.”
“Wait,” I said. “You mean they know so little about it that one set of symptoms can ‘definitely’ be MS until the symptoms go away and then they ‘definitely weren’t’ MS?”
“Yeah, right. It’s a moving target and let’s not worry about the label anyway,” he said. “I’m not a doctor, I’m not a naturopath and I’m not a licensed practitioner in health. I’m an educator in the field of holistic health and I’ll share information that changed my life. I’ll give you information so you can act on it if it feels right to you. And it is up to you,” he said. “Most people don’t know what feels right to them. They just do as they’re told.”
Do as they’re told? I wondered. That’s not exactly my strong suit. In college when everyone encouraged me to do internships and prepare for a career, I studied philosophy, worked in kitchens and taught canoeing in the summers. After school, conventional wisdom said I should start working at small newspapers and work my way up to bigger and bigger publications. I took jobs at the racetrack and applied to Sports Illustrated instead.
Christopher and I were still standing near the door, so I invited him in. We took seats at the table near the windows overlooking the water. He was ready to share his wisdom, and as a recovering reporter, I was ready to take it all down. For the first time in a while, with a notebook on the table and a pen in my hand, I felt back in my element, ready to do what I’d always done to make sense of the world and to feel safe. I’d ask questions, lots of questions, and relentlessly gather information without judging any of it. Somewhere deep inside, I knew the world was beautifully complex, that at any given moment there were a number of right answers to the same question, several solutions to a single problem. Looking back, this was one reason I became a journalist in the first place. I collected information and reported every story from endless angles just to make sure the world outside matched the truth I believed on the inside.
And in this case, I needed to report out the story so there could be more answers and so I could make sure I found the right one, regardless of what that was. I didn’t want Silver’s diagnosis to stand all alone, with nothing to compare it to, no data before or after that point in time, no idea how it fit into any pattern. I needed to ask dozens of questions to put the tingling sensation and Silver’s take on it into context, so I could see options and possibilities that I hadn’t seen before. So I launched into full-on reporter mode.
Subconsciously, I knew that as long as I was in reporter mode, I couldn’t be in sick-person mode. In other words, I couldn’t let myself be a sick person.
I asked Christopher how he got started in the healing educator business. He started the tale in 1986, when he had a successful photography business in Vancouver. All was going well, so well that he decided to put work on hold and tour Australia for six months. When he returned to Canada, he was exhausted and had a fever. It lasted a while, so he saw a doctor, who told him, “It’s mono. Get some rest.”
A few months later, feeling worse, Christopher went to another doctor who said it was Epstein-Barr virus. This time the prescription was, “Eat well. Get some rest.” For the next four years, he ate well, rested, and felt worse and worse.
“There was no diagnosis that led to a practical treatment,” he said. “I had all the symptoms of MS—arthritis, palsy and heart problems, but no lesions. I saw several doctors who said nothing was wrong, take antidepressants.”
At first this confused me further. Christopher had had horrible MS-like symptoms—but he had no lesions, and so somehow he received no diagnosis. I, on the other hand, had lesions and comparatively minor symptoms. But it was the lesions the neurologist latched onto, and it was his interpretation of them that had sent me spiraling downward in fear.
Christopher made a pot of peppermint tea and told me that, eventually, a friend of his who had similar symptoms was diagnosed with Lyme disease. Christopher went back to his doctor and suggested they look for Lyme. When the test came back positive, he received intravenous antibiotics.
Still, the symptoms persisted. “There were four years of relapses and remissions because the antibiotics never cured the cause,” Christopher said. “The antibiotics killed it in my blood but not in my central nervous system because they don’t cross the blood-brain barrier.”
Finally, he suffered the rock-bottom relapse. The pain was so great and the fear so intense that he thought to himself, “I cannot live like this.”
He contemplated going back for another round of intravenous antibiotics and stopped himself. “Isn’t doing the same thing and expecting different results the definition of insanity?” he wondered. (Good point.) And then he remembered something he’d learned in a Tony Robbins seminar. The international self-help star was speaking about success in business, and the sentiment worked here too: don’t go to a teacher; find someone who’s successfully doing what you want to do and copy them.
Instead of seeking yet another physician who could talk about symptoms from a safe distance, Christopher started to hunt for folks who had experienced his same symptoms—people who had been submerged in them, felt like they were drowning in them—and then had managed to successfully swim away. In other words, he looked for people who left degenerative diseases behind by taking control of their own health. He found many of these people in health-food stores.
Suddenly, I realized that I felt the best I had felt in months. Somewhere between Denver and this moment, the tingling had left my hands and settled uncomfortably into a spot between my toes, like I was wearing flip-flops (except I wasn’t). But to me, it wasn’t the physical sensation, the tingling, that was a big deal. It was what Silver said the sensation implied: that I had a degenerative neurological disease. Christopher quickly dismissed the whole doomsday outlook. (Maybe it was his hopeful demeanor that caused the tingling to recede—since I had become a human mood ring and all.)
At that moment, talking intensely with a near stranger in this stunning apartment, I also realized I wanted to follow his path. I wanted to know people who didn’t take on a strange diagnosis as a life sentence. If my MRI had shown lesions, I wanted to know that that didn’t mean disaster was necessarily looming, and I wanted to know how I could take control of it instead of letting it sink me. I needed a role model, and this friend of Bruce’s, this tall, skinny guy, he was it.
“They were talking about the weird world of natural healings, and it was very confusing to me,” Christopher said of the folks he met early in his journey. “This one said buffered vitamin C and that one said natural vitamin C. This one said reverse osmosis and another said filtered water. It all seemed contradictory.”
Pain can be a powerful motivator, and Christopher was sick and tired of being, well, sick and tired. Despite the contradictions, he searched for commonalities. Themes emerged. He kept studying, and over time, he put together an eight-piece plan for optimal health: breathe, hydrate, move, stop the poisons, take out the garbage, nourish, sleep and believe.
“These are the eight steps toward dynamic life and health,” he said. “I say ‘toward’ because the potential is so huge.”
Christopher explained how the eight ideas work together, serving as a platform for optimal health. I had questions about stopping the poisons and flushing them out of my system, and he was happy to answer. “It’s important for the body to eliminate what it doesn’t need,” he said.
We talked about the effects of “new” toxins, like pesticides, herbicides, industrial fertilizers, fluoridated water and mercury fi
llings—new in the sense that until recently, people did not live with these things. As a species, we hadn’t had time to adapt to and evolve around them. In labs, Christopher said, evolutionary biologists study fruit flies because the scientists can see the beginnings of the slightest hint of the idea of an adaptation after five hundred or six hundred generations. And fruit flies being busy, this all happens inside of a month.
Us humans, we go slow. We are only two or three generations away from the beginning of industrial agriculture, when scores of chemicals were introduced into our world and our food supply. The human body wasn’t ready then, and we haven’t adapted yet.
“The liver wasn’t designed for the new chemicals we add to the environment,” Christopher said. “So the body stores toxins in fat and connective tissue, waiting for the liver to catch up and deal with the toxins, but the liver is busy with food. So the toxins just stay there.”
Fat cells serve as deep storage in a human body. When the body wants to tuck something out of the way, the way we might throw junk we don’t want in the attic or a public storage space, the body dumps its junk in fat cells. With me, for whatever reason—good diet, good genes or just good luck—I’ve never carried a lot of fat on my body. The one place, however, that even the skinniest among us has fat cells is in our brains—fat cells comprise 60 percent of the brain—and the myelin sheath that coats the spinal cord. If my body was looking for a place to hide toxins, the central nervous system might have looked like a good place for the secret stash. Is that what the MRI showed? Mercury-made lesions?
Christopher had started reading the medical literature and studying how the body works nearly two decades earlier. And he was sharing his knowledge with me. I didn’t ask him to cough up the citations or provide the original research any more than I asked Silver to show evidence that steroids stunt the immune system or that they were a good idea in my case.
We talked for hours until we were both exhausted. We walked around the corner to the Whole Foods store, each bought a juice and called it a day.
The next morning, after a deep, motionless sleep—not the anticipated eleven hours, but a solid nine—I stretched and sat down to meditate. I lit a candle before me on the floor and the one behind the glass plate. As I inhaled, I silently said, So, and on the exhales, Hum. So hum, so hum. It’s so simple, and it means “I am that.” I sat focusing on my breath, silently so-humming with the Buddhas dancing all around. After twenty minutes, I expressed gratitude, as I always did, for this life, this love, this mind, this body, this healing and all my teachers, in this and every present moment. And, I’m grateful, I added, for this apartment. It’s so sweet.
An hour later, Christopher picked me up to go to a holistic healing center in the tony Yaletown neighborhood. There we met Daniel Smith, a health detective of sorts who studied nutrition, acupuncture and other therapies before opening the healing center. Tall and thin with gray hair, Daniel spoke gently and guided Christopher and I down the narrow hallway to his office—which was half the size of the office where Rebecca and I sat with Silver that awful day, yet so much more comfortable.
“Electroacupuncture according to Voll, or EAV,” Daniel said, to introduce an odd machine that sat on his desk. It looked like the mini flight panel of an old airplane with its art-deco dials and needles and nobs.
“A German doctor named Voll created it in the 1950s,” he said. “It measures the resistance of the skin at the acupuncture point. The optimum reading is fifty and there are six hundred points on the body that correspond to organs. It’s a very simple, reliable test to determine your overall health by measuring energy levels at specific acupuncture points.”
I didn’t know much about acupuncture but was open to it since I’d once had a great experience back in New York to combat allergies. After trying all the over-the-counter allergy medicines that one sneezy spring, I was at the end of my rope and would have tried anything. A friend suggested acupuncture and gave me a name to call. I booked one session, sat with the needles in for half an hour and haven’t suffered hay fever since. Even the acupuncturist was surprised.
Daniel handed me a small copper-colored rod to hold and took out a small penlike wand, both attached by wire to the EAV machine. I took off my shoes and socks, and he set about touching the wand to thirty-four points on my hands and another twenty on my feet. He watched the needle on the machine, and as he called out each number, Christopher wrote them down.
Most of the numbers were in the sweet spot around fifty—meaning that energy was flowing easily through the point. If a spot was too low or too high, it signaled an imbalance or obstruction. Three were mighty low: the right-eye lymphatic system was twenty, and the point that corresponds to hormonal activity was twenty-six. The pancreas was nineteen.
“Help me out here,” I said. “My lymphatic system? My pancreas? I’m not sure I know what they do or what that means.”
“Oh, right,” Daniel said. “I can explain. The lymphatic system is the body’s drainage system. It filters the blood and supports the immune system.”
The pancreas, he explained, is a gland that sits deep in the abdomen and aids with digestion, among other things. Prednisone—which I had recently taken by the handful—I later learned is known to have an impact on the pancreas, affecting the secretions and, in high doses, causing damage to the organ itself.
The EAV also showed a few points that were high: the gall bladder and kidney, both of which support digestion and filtration, were in the seventies.
Daniel reconfigured the EAV machine to show my response to fungus, parasites, bacteria and viruses. “Hmmm,” he said, watching the needle bounce around each time. “Looks like a full house inside you.”
He didn’t look alarmed, more bemused. And for me, this felt like a life sentence had been reduced to a parking ticket. The real culprit could be fungi, parasites, bacteria and viruses? If they could arrive, they could also leave. Any and all of those sounded less permanent and more appealing than the mystery of multiple sclerosis.
“Likely the parasites are everywhere,” Daniel said. “Most will be gone in a week. I suspect this could be Lyme disease however, which is a nasty parasite. It takes a bit longer.”
We walked back to the front of his offices, where Daniel and Christopher conferred and started pulling items off the shelf to help me begin my recovery. They handed me a protein powder to make a smoothie each morning so I could start my day with energy. They gave me olive leaf extract, which has antibacterial, antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties, to dissolve in water. There was a little bottle of Lugol’s solution, an iodine solution to combat iodine deficiency, and magnesium oil to massage into my feet three times a day.
“Magnesium is depleted under stress,” Daniel said. “It helps with nerve transition and muscle strength. And the body absorbs it more efficiently through skin.”
Daniel gave me liquid vitamin D3 and a detox remedy to help clean up my lymphatic system. And to help the body detox faster, he recommended I come back each day for “exercise with oxygen therapy,” or EWOT, and to sit in the infrared sauna. For the EWOT, I could sit on the recumbent bike, read, put on a mask and inhale straight oxygen—which Daniel and Christopher said would help with nerve regeneration. And the sauna was to speed detoxification. Unlike a traditional sauna, an infrared one allows the body to get hotter without that uncomfortable feeling of your skin burning. Because I couldn’t help myself, I asked a dozen questions about whether they would help me and what the potential side effects would be. Daniel answered them all to my satisfaction: it was clear my symptoms wouldn’t get worse from these treatments, and they seemed innocuous enough. And the best-case scenario? The combination would catapult me back to perfect health. I made a series of appointments to bike and sit in the sauna, thanked Daniel and walked outside with Christopher.
Back at the apartment, I took out my notebook to jot down ideas from this meeting. It occurred to me that
I felt like I was in good hands for the first time since this whole process began. Both Daniel and Christopher had shared loads of detailed information and had worked hard to make sure I understood. Equally important, these two men listened to me and patiently answered my questions, neither dismissing my concerns nor disregarding my fear. Maybe it’s just a journalist’s tendency, but I’ve long been skeptical when people give directions and then close the conversation. “Because I said so” never inspired much confidence in me. It was my body and my health we were discussing, and they seemed to believe, as I did, that I needed to take the lead role in caring for both.
As I reviewed my notes, their theories made sense to me. I was also glad their advice didn’t come with pages of disclaimers about liver failure or suicidal tendencies as the pharmaceutical solutions did.
Christopher came by later with a big bag of tricks: vitamins B and E, flaxseed oil, Gingko biloba supplements, a multivitamin and digestive enzymes.
“We talked about getting rid of the viruses, bacteria and other garbage at Daniel’s place,” he said. “This is part of the nourish plan. You’re starving yourself.”
“What?” I interrupted. “I eat so healthy.”
“No, it’s not that,” he said. “Most foods are grown far away, picked green and shipped around the world. When they arrive in the grocery, they’ve often lost most of their nutrients. That’s why we need to supplement our food with vitamins.”
This sounded reasonable and vitamins never hurt anyone, as far as I knew. For the next few days, I fell into an easy routine. I’d wake up in the morning, practice yoga and sit in meditation with the friendly, dancing Buddhas. Then I’d make a shake with fruit and vegan protein powder and take my remedies and supplements. I’d shower and head out the door and walk twenty-five minutes to Yaletown. I’d say hello to Daniel and pick something from his library.