CHAPTER FIVE

NEW IDEAS

St. Petersburg, Florida: In 1969, it was still pretty typical of Small Town, USA. There were green benches all along the streets of the downtown area for the retirees to rest on as they gossiped away their time. The health food business in this part of Florida was a small and fledgling industry that just fit in the slow, relaxed pace of the city.

Many of the people I knew thought I was foolish to embark on a business venture because I had MS. They just couldn’t seem to understand that MS was precisely why I felt I had to go into business for myself. Even with my new confidence that I would overcome the disease, there was no real guarantee that I wasn’t just doing a variation on the denial of the disease syndrome, the same denial syndrome that all MS’ers seem to go through. Regardless of my personal feelings of confidence, everything that I could learn about the disease, from every source available to me at the time gave me the prognosis that eventually I would end up in a wheelchair or worse.

That was my fear and it was the very reason for my going into business! If I ever became useless in the TV station, I didn’t want to be kept on as a paid employee. That would have been an act of charity. There was no way that I could have avoided the pity and the solicitude of my fellow workers, as well as that of all the other people I came into contact with. I would just not have been able to live in such an environment; I’m too proud for that. And if I waited long enough for the wheelchair to happen, by then it would be too late to get a job with anyone else, even if it was a job I could perform from a chair.

In my mind the choice was perfectly clear and very simple. In my own business, being in a wheelchair would not be any deterrent to my employment. I could sit behind the counter in my own store and would be able to take care of my customers’ wants and needs well enough from the wheelchair if it ever came to that. Yet I would still be working and be able to provide for my family without taking anyone’s charity.

So off we went to Florida and settled into the health food business. The only thing I knew about health foods at that time I had learned from jokes or seen as spoofs on TV. Owning a health food store certainly would not have been my first career choice if I’d felt I had another option. But I figured I could live with whatever I found, just as long as I was able to provide for those who depended on me.

I guess I wasn’t all that serious about the business until I actually got started. In my mind, I pictured the operations of health food stores as little old ladies in tennis shoes. And maybe that wasn’t too far from the truth for some of them. Of course, there were exceptions. There were a few really good health food store operators in 1969 and I tried to pattern myself after them.

The health food boom, as we know it today, didn’t really get a start until a few years later, in the early 1970’s. With the new success of the health food business came a lot of new stores. And the boom also brought some real businessmen with it. The industry changed then, from being a kind of mystical fringe society, into a real down-to-earth, hard-nosed and somewhat cutthroat business. But all that came later and by then I realized that I had found another real career challenge to keep me occupied.

In order to try and become a competent store owner, I began to read all that I could about vitamins, mineral, enzymes and how the body uses foods. I also began to hear from some people involved in the health food movement that there could be real hope for people with “incurable diseases” through proper nutrition, diet and exercise. Some of them even thought Multiple Sclerosis could be helped!

The store I had purchased had a slogan: “Diet cures what diet causes.” Rereading Dr. Swank’s books and research reports, this slogan began to become more important to me. And as I also read authors such as Adelle Davis, the high priestess of the health food business, I began to have something more than just a vague idea of what Dr. swank was talking about with his diet theory. All of a sudden Dr. Swank wasn’t alone anymore. Some other very nice people that agreed with him, but who didn’t have that MD degree, which my middle class background cherished so much, confronted me. They all wrote or talked in a very knowledgeable way about diet and disease and they even seemed to have my best interests at heart, they just weren’t “real” doctors.

Now here I was, a typical American who had never before been exposed to the idea of diet except at an athletic training table or maybe for weight loss. I was actually following a diet prescribed by a medical doctor for mitigating a disease, but that was just about as far as I was prepared to go. My mind was too brainwashed to accept the idea that anything a non-MD said could have any real value, even if the person saying it was on the fringe of the healing professions. At the time I went into the health food business, I had never even heard of any of the other so-called “healers”. People with degrees like Osteopath, Chiropractor, Homeopath or Naturopath and who were espousing some of the revolutionary ideas about diet and disease that I was hearing.

And some of the “Doctor’s” whose articles I read or that I heard from didn’t even pretend to be “healers,” they just had PhD’s! In my mind, PhD’s were people who taught English Literature or Basket Weaving at colleges. When I came to disease knowledge, they probably didn’t really have a clue. They were most likely, as my friend Dr. Carlton Fredricks who was himself a PhD, liked to say: “Probably half Demented.” Yet here were these people telling me that an MD degree did not automatically change any human being into the know-all and be-all in helping people to overcome their physical problems. Such thought were almost blasphemous to me.

I know that Dr. Swank believed MS was a diet caused disease and therefore it was possibly a diet-cured disease, but after all he was a “real doctor”. He wasn’t just some guy running a health food store, or someone writing books on the strength of an unknown doctoral degree. He was the real McCoy and MD. Hell, to me at that time there was only “the doctor” and that doctor was always a Medical Doctor like Dr. Swank. Anyone who had that prestigious degree always fit in somewhere between cleanliness and Godliness in my mind.

Even if “my doctor”, Dr. Swank, was looked upon by his peers as a little strange and misguided because of his beliefs, he still had, after all, that all important MD after his name! He just had to know what was right. And if he diagnosed what I had as something that was diet controllable, even though every other “real” doctor said it was incurable, well then by God, I must really have something incurable that was controllable! I couldn’t quite square that questionable intellectual understanding with my strong emotional and religious conviction that I was just flatly going to get well, but I was working on it.

However, all the orthodox MS’s said I didn’t have a chance; that the only way I could go was downhill, probably ending up in a wheelchair. These new people I was meeting at least got behind Dr. Swank and gave me hope. They pointed out to me that the unorthodox “diet nut” MD that I was already following, also had a PhD. That might account for his unorthodox approach to MS. My new friends seemed to think that Dr. Swank was on the right track, but that he just wasn’t going far enough.

To say that my first six months in the health food business had me confused by all these conflicting opinions is the understatement of the century. However, since my electronic training was based on studies with a much wider scientific background in Physics and Chemistry, I decided not to take the advice of any of the new people I had met, but instead to do some more investigating on my own. By this time my vision had returned well enough for me to do some serious studying at the University of South Florida library.

I found very little useful information at the University about MS except for descriptions of how and when the disease was discovered and the gross symptoms. There were descriptions of the physical make-up of the myelin sheath and the finds of a few autopsies done on patients. There were some reports on theories of what the cause of the disease might be, but almost nothing at all on treatment except for a few articles on the experimental use of cortisone.

Then I started studying the books in my own store. There were a number of references to treatments for MS, all involving diets and/or nutritional supplements. Some of them seemed pretty far out to me, but the central theme was always the same. Something, somehow, in the diet, allows the onset of the disease and by manipulating the diet the disease can be reversed. “Diet cures what diet causes”!

But if what I read at the library was factual, there is a spontaneous remission rate of about six percent. That means that for about 6 percent of the people in this country who are diagnosed as having MS, the disease just goes away for no apparent reason. But the reports on recovery with the various diets I was reading about ran to 18 to 23 percent and even higher. Of course most of these were reports from Europe, not from here. Still, it gave more credence to what Dr. Swank advocated and made me even more determined to continue following his diet program. It also made me wonder: Just how many of the 6 percent of those American spontaneous remissions were by people manipulating their diets without the knowledge of their doctors?

Of course, none of these reported MS diets were one hundred percent sure-fire or Multiple Sclerosis would already have been conquered and then I wouldn’t have had to worry about it. But there were enough reports to make me realize that the key to MS has to be somewhere in the diet of the patients.

I was already following a diet for MS that my doctor believed would be successful for me if I just stayed with it. So I dug my heels and defied all the people who said it would never help me. Probably the thing that bothered me most about staying on the diet was that none of the reported successful diet therapies had been tested in an accepted scientific manner, so their findings were not established as fact, only as conjecture. Much of it could be classified as folk medicine. My scientific background did not like the fact that there was no proof, but I was improving! My sports background kept saying, “don’t change the game plan when you’re winning,” and my time in Reno agreed; never get off a winner.

I decided to go back to square one and contact some of the people who were respected in the health food business, but this time with a more open mind. Many of them were far outside of the mainstream of American medical thinking, such as author, Adelle Davis, Richard Passwater, PhD and Carlton Fredricks, PhD. Some like Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, PhD and Roger Williams, PhD were not known as health food people at all, but their sympathies seemed to be with us. Still others like Emanual Cheraskin, MD, DMD and William Ringsdorf, DMD, seemed to have a foot in both cams. A few like Wilford Shute, MD and Hans Neiper, MD were not even Americans. At one time or another, I had the opportunity to meet all of these people, as well as other and to get their ides on what might be nutritionally helpful in overcoming MS.

As I had the opportunity to gain insight from these famous people, all of whom I have come to respect greatly, I began to add vitamins, minerals and special food supplements to my daily diet. From Dr. Neiper I learned about Calcium Orotate. Adelle Davis had me add vitamin B-6 and lecithin. Dr. Williams told me about Pantothenic Acid. Dr. Shute gave me a college level introduction to vitamin E and Dr. Fredricks introduced me to Octocosonal. One of the real characters of the health food movement, Dale Alexander (fondly known as the Cod Father) even made me realize that Dr. Swank’s insistence on his patients using cod liver oil was not just a perverse punishment for patients, but that it, too, had a real scientific basis.

The program worked so well for me that I had my last loss of bladder control in 1970 and I had also put the tremendous fatigue we MS’ers all share behind me by then. My speech had cleared up enough so I could start making my own radio and TV commercials for the store by 1971 and I was able to throw away the braces the Air Force had fit me with by 1972. By the time 1973 rolled around, six years after I had been diagnosed and four years after I had started the full program of diet and supplements, I had no more symptoms of MS at all. The only exceptions are an occasional loss of balance that will land me on my backside when I turn too quickly, a continual dry throat and some minor hand-eye coordination problems when trying to work quickly.

I am sorry to say that my improvement was not matched by my wife’s. Several more hospitalizations were ahead of her. Finally in 1976, we called it quits for good and divorced again. By then of course, the boys ere grown and were out on their own. I’m happy to say that she moved back to Oregon and has done quite well. In fact, a few years ago, she remarried and I understand from our sons, she is very happy. Perhaps I was right all along. Maybe it really was me that was responsible for her troubles.

My mother was a teacher and constantly drilled the importance of education into me as a child. During all my years in military service and even in Reno after I retired, I always took college courses whenever I could. By the time I arrived in St. Petersburg, I had a fairly substantial collection of credits. My friend and mentor Dr. Carlton Fredricks urged me to go back to school, earn my own PhD and do my own research in MS and diet. I tried in 1972. I entered the University of South Florida and went for over two years, but I’m sorry to say I never finished.

However, I was able to prove that the diet and supplement program did work, at least to my own satisfaction. Under the supervision of one of the university doctors, I went off both the diet and supplements early in 1973. I really pigged out on everything I knew shouldn’t have; lots of beef with gravy, cheese casseroles and tons of ice cream. It took me just six weeks and one day to have an attack that cost me the use of my left leg for a while. I immediately started back on the program again and within a couple months, I had returned pretty much to normal physically.

About a year later, we tried going off the program once more. This time I started having vision problems again after being off the diet and supplements for a month or so. But at the first inkling of trouble, I went back on the program and have not gone off it again. Even though I had proved my point to my own satisfaction, it wasn’t enough to let me get a research program started. And between trying to run my business, a couple of hospital sieges for my wife and the opposition which I felt there was to any type of meaningful nutritional research in MS, particularly an outsider like me, well, I’m sorry to say I have up.

At that time I had research funding arrange through the National Nutritional Foods Association (NNFA), our health business trade organization. The major health food manufacturers were donating all the vitamin supplements for the research. I’ve always hoped that someday I will be able to find a brave and capable young MD or PhD to carry through the research that I failed to do, but I’ve never been able to fine one.

Oh well, hope has always been my long suit. Maybe someday I’ll run across a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young doctor willing to fly in the face of the establishment.