Dear Subscribers,

By now the web is buzzing with news of the "extradition" of Gregory Caton aka James Carr from Ecuador to the United States. Since I am not a legal expert, I will not comment on whether or not a crime has been committed and, if so, by whom. I will, however, speak from my own experience and expertise on the subject that has drawn fire.

The "black salves" were first brought to my attention by a Cherokee medicine woman in Santa Fe who, ironically, had not learned of them from her own forebears but rather from an American shaman who was using the paste on nasal polyps. I believe we can safely say that the date was sometime in early 1990. Shortly thereafter, one of my colleagues said that Jane Heimlich mentioned the salves in her excellent book, "What Doctors Won't Tell You." She gave a source for the salves, and I phoned the owner of the pharmacy. He referred me to a doctor in Florida who claimed to have treated 10,000 patients without losing any as a result of the salve use. He, in turn, referred me to some articles in professional journals and Roy Upton, now a quite well known and respected herbalist, referred me to the work of Dr. Eli Jones. In short, following one lead and anecdotal story after another and another, I spent the whole of the 1990s involved in some way or other researching the salves.

Interestingly, running on a parallel track, Kenny Ausubel and his film partner Catherine Salverson concentrated on the political aspects of this treatment and produced a documentary film called "When Healing Becomes a Crime." It was nominated for an Oscar, one of three films in the documentary category that year, but it did not win. It did however win some acknowledgment and it changed the destiny of Kenny and many others who today know him better for his work with the Bioneers than with documentary film making.

I knew Kenny quite well in those days. He actually took some of my medical astrology courses and he sometimes passed ideas by me to get some feedback from another perspective. During the premier of his film at the Lensic Theatre in Santa Fe, I happened to be sitting next to a woman who had, twenty years earlier, been cured of cancer at the clinic in Mexico that became the pilgrimage destination for many patients.

Kenny's film is about a controversial man named Harry Hoxsey. He was not educated, not attractive, and not diplomatic, but he had a mission and was indefatigable. A friend of mine who is a dentist read the book, and said more or less that his blood was boiling too much to talk. He had successfully cured himself of a melanoma using an escharotic, but for a number of reasons, he had chosen not to tell me where he sourced his product or how he used it.

The Profit Motive

Setting the stage this much, I would like to rewind the tape and urge people who are interested to recognize that one of the chief factors limiting availability of effective cancer treatments is greed. The profit motive has had a devastating effect on medicine in general and cancer in particular. I think this is partly because cancer is a disease that tends to linger so there are vast sums of money to be made by anyone who can get his foot in the door. Moreover, I think we could argue that if you are doorkeeper, you are under immense pressure to filter who gets through and who doesn't. It is probable also that who and what passes over the threshold depends less on medical judgment than on financial potential. In short, like most wars fought with bullets and other lethal weapons, the "war on cancer" is not just a can of worms, but a crime against humanity.

The method of treatment using a combination internal tonics and external pastes is ancient, but the particular product used by Hoxsey and others in America relies on Native American herbs, particularly bloodroot. This is the herb Dr. Weil mentioned in his book and on his web site so it seems more than synchronistic that I happened to mention Dr. Weil in my last post. Obviously, if there were a safe and effective cure for cancer, everyone would want it, right? You can only imagine how many inquiries there were. Some people began their conversation with me something to the effect of, "Whew! I finally found some bloodroot, now which part of the plant do I use?" You see, Dr. Weil did not explain this. He just told people to talk to me. So, the answer to the first question is simple, "You use the root," but the problem is this is also useless information because the question that comes next is how do you prepare the root. Then, what else is mixed with it, and we still haven't touched on how to use the product once it's made. I tried to address all those questions in my book. It's a how to manual with enough information to appeal to both highly trained professionals and patients.

As I said, I spent the decade of the 90s researching the book. It changed my life completely but like many changes, not all were voluntary or congenial. Of course, as a lover of truth, I was fascinated with where my journey led me. For instance, though the use of bloodroot, which, for the record, only appears naturally on the Eastern part of North America from the Carolinas on up into Canada, was attributed to Native Americans, the actual ingredients in the salve include galangal and zinc chloride. Galangal comes from Thailand but some species can be found in Southern China and Indonesia. How did the Native Americans come to use this member of the ginger family in their pastes? I found that it was the favorite herb of Hildegard of Bingen and that it was actually introduced to Europe in the 9th century.

If you have ever read an herb book, you know that the books start with descriptions of the habitat and foliage and various names by which the plant is known in different cultures. In short, the famous Abbess of Bingen must have known about the Far East long before Marco Polo ran into problems with the Inquisition for his accounts. I was dumbfounded. I was so astonished by this revelation that I wondered what else was wrong with what we were taught in history.

I became obsessed with the Inquisition and with who was persecuted and why. One of the first stories I stumbled upon pertained to another erudite woman of her times, Jacoba Felicie. In 1322, charges were brought against her by the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris. Witnesses, testifying against her, said that after properly trained doctors failed to cure them, they were healed by her potions. She was repeatedly fined, essentially for practicing medicine without a license, but life got worse and worse until possession of garlic could have been construed as an attempt to alleviate illness, something the profession simply could not accept. The Inquisition was, in fact, at least partially a vendetta on folk medicine, and many would argue that it is alive and well today despite the closure of its visual offices.

Midwives and herbalists were the primary target of the Inquisition and as one wise woman said to me, "the deeper underground the truth is buried, the more it takes to unearth it." According to his biographers, Hoxsey was arrested more times than anyone else in history. He never went anywhere without at least $10,000 in cash in his pocket because he never knew when he would have to post bond. He was, however, known for spontaneous acts of generosity, and despite all the arrests, he was never convicted of anything, and was, in fact, vindicated in two cases that did go to trial. He was in some respects not unlike Jean Valjean in Les Misérables because those who wanted to thwart him, mainly Morris Fishbein of the AMA, were able to engineer countless sinister harassment schemes so he was constantly hounded and hunted until his chain of hospitals was shut now and a cracker box of a facility was opened in Tijuana.

Legacies

Hoxsey had received his "cancer cure" from his family and transmissions of this type moments before death were a typical story related to me by the other heirs to the "cure" so I also had to wonder whether the secret was really a secret or simply a family treasure. Enter the tale of someone who could, if your imagination permits, almost have been the ancestor or precursor or previous embodiment of Hoxsey, Samuel Thomson (1769-1843), another healer who drew the enmity of the establishment and who suffered accordingly. He published a tiny book that sold like wildfire, sort of the Kevin Trudeau or Mike Adams of his times. Pardon my Mercury/Mars in Virgo but it is very hard for me to take people who make noise seriously. Thomson sold a tiny book which I saw under a piece of glass in the Lloyd Library and Museum for the staggering sum of $20. For an additional $5, one could buy a patent and receive a list of the missing ingredients. So, when settlers loaded their covered wagons and headed west, they took their little book with the patent and since that was as secret as a mantra given by a guru to his disciple, no one actually knew who else knew. As generations passed, everyone must have believed they inherited the cure for cancer from some illustrious ancestor who got it from someone who was not very schooled but spent a lot time with Native Americans.

It would make a great wide screen film and I don't know why script writers haven't done this. I can see it all before my mind's eye, the problem is that the truth is far more astounding than fiction.

What I can say without having to check the endnotes in my book is that the battle over cancer salves has been going on for hundreds of years. During this time, only two proponents of this treatment method managed to perform any serious research. The rest is entirely anecdotal. I regard myself as some kind of trustee for this method of treatment and have therefore cooperated with absolutely everyone who wanted to make a film, write a book, finance research, or produce a product. Sooner or later everyone is stonewalled. I told a story once of a friend who was a guest at a party of a famous, very famous celebrity. She met the CEO of a pharmaceutical company and asked what he would do if there were an $8 cure for cancer. He said, "Make sure it never gets on the market." She never mentioned the CEO by name, but I bet I can guess.

So, the charade of senators asking academicians why billions of dollars haven't produced even a tiny bit more hope if not a cure is just that: entertainment for C-SPAN. If there were a cure, like baking soda or dandelions or burdock or bloodroot, you can be sure that the person who discovered or reported the cure would be reviled, discredited, and perhaps persecuted. I am not saying Greg Caton is a victim because I don't have the facts, but I will make a couple of very harsh remarks and then return to the bigger picture.

Here is a good example of the murky waters:

http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Others/Others-Doc-Health&Medicine/+Doc-Health&Medicine-Cancer/CansemaStory.htm

Without even reading all the finger pointing rubbish, just look at the jars. What do you see? Metal lids. Zinc chloride is reactive with metal and should not be allowed any contact with metal. It is made by pouring hydrochloric acid on zinc and the escharotic product should not be allowed any contact with metal. This is clearly stated in my book. When applying the paste, a wooden implement should be used.

So, without taking up more of your time, I simply want to say that this treatment is amazing, but it is not for the faint of heart or the uninitiated. It is today a "composite" treatment involving protocols from many eras and cultures so while bloodroot is a North American plant, the Native Americans who taught its use never worked with zinc chloride. Moreover, neither the Europeans who did use zinc chloride nor the Native Americans combined these with galangal. This innovation must have been introduced by Eclectic physicians later. This said, what Alpha Omega has been selling is a variation of the paste used in Mohs microsurgery so the real issue and the one for which he has already done time is his right to produce and sell such a product or, as some have maintained, to "tell the truth about it."

I have received a lot of email about this "story" but the problem for me is that it is an ongoing story and over the hundreds of years that the story has been rerun and rerun, the people who are really suffering are the patients who are impacted by the greed, ignorance, suppression, deception, and countless other transgressions on, sad to say, both sides of that threshold. Speaking for myself, my life was easier before I heard about the salve. Since, however, I heard about, hardly a day has gone by that someone or other hasn't asked about it. My soul suffers when I cannot use the knowledge I have and this truly is an agonizing situation and it affects thousands of olther people whose skills are different from mine but also restrained. Patients suffer also. Many have asked me, "What about my rights?" Australia has a law that basically permits patients to do anything they want, but the law only protects them once the system has failed to cure them. They cannot invoke the benefits of the law if they opt out before the system is given its chance. Now you know more about why I have so argued so strongly against more government and more regulations and more surrender to corporate interests because health care without freedom of choice is frightening.

I do not however want to end on this note. I want to take just a bit more of your time and repeat something I have brought up before. In a study of multiple personalities, it was found that each alter using the same physical body suffered from different illnesses. To make this very simple, let me just say that one alter could be diabetic and another would not suffer from high blood sugar at all despite the fact that the physical body was ostensibly the same for all personalities. I believe I understand this perfectly because the energies that activate the physical body are what determine how the chakras and their corresponding endocrine glands will function. Now, taking an even bigger leap, if you imagine that you are a script writer and can rewrite your own personality whenever you choose to do so, you can write a script that eliminates all imbalance and this has to be the secret of spontaneous remissions as well. In the surrender to the Divine, all the prejudices of the personality are moved aside and only perfection remains. In short, anyone can be well any time he or she so chooses. Thus, while I commiserate with all who are suffering and truly feel for them, we can change the film in the projector and watch a different movie.

We can do it.

Many blessings,

Ingrid

Cancer Salves: The Controversies || Bloodroot: the Heart Chakra Initiation

	Cancer Salves: A Botanical Approach to Treatment Ingrid Naiman 264 pages of two-color text plus 8 pages of full color pictures with instructions and formulae. $
	Kenny Ausubel has written a book that will stir your emotions between tears and rage! Informative, thorough, thought-provoking, moving, and relevant! 461 pages, $
	Also available as a DVD!  This film was nominated for an Oscar as best documentary film.  While it did not win, it achieved the highest recognition a film of its type has ever had. It did win the "Best Censored Stories" Award. 83 minutes, $
	Hoxsey Therapy When Natural Cures for Cancer Became Illegal Harry Hoxsey This book is a historical account of the battle between Natuopath Harry Hoxsey and both the American Medical Association and the Food and Drug Administration.   $

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