Natural
healing has always been a part of my life. I received my first chiropractic
adjustment at six weeks – for a fever. At the time, my mom worked for the only chiropractor
in Greenville, Alabama, and what he did for that town is still being felt
today. Along with regular chiropractic
care, Dr. Sidney Taylor prescribed vitamins and used magnet therapy on his
patients, including me. In my early teens I had pinched a nerve that was
causing severe lower back pain. The doctor and nurses at the emergency room in
town told my parents I was faking the injury. Dr. Taylor recognized my pinched
nerve and had me fixed in less than a week.
My mother
also used many family cures when I would come down with a stomach virus or a
cold. Moms all over the world have used whatever was available to help their
children long before and after pharmaceutical “cures” started to be the norm, but
this is happening less and less as natural remedies are forgotten and replaced
by less effective allopathic treatments. We have just started to realize that
something isn’t quite right about the way we’ve been treating disease. For too
long we have blindly believed in man-made medicines developed for profit. We bought
the snake oil, and now we’re paying the price.
For years
now, pharmaceuticals have indeed been making things worse. The further we get
from natural healing, the more we see these doctor prescribed and over the
counter drugs aren’t working – at least not without dangerous side-effects.
Unfortunately,
I learned this the hard way. Two things happened at once that really changed my
health for the worse: I started taking an over-the-counter allergy medicine, and
I started to eat more GMO and gluten-based foods. The combination of the two
made me feel very tired and irritable. I gained a lot of weight. And I started
to have mystery stomach pains. For months I went to doctor after doctor. None
of them could tell me what was happening or why. I got my blood and colon
tested – nothing. Not once did an MD suggest that I change my diet or my
medication. It was only through personal research online that I started to
understand that the problem was my lifestyle and food choices.
The changes
I made (eating organic, non-gluten based food and choosing a natural
alternative to my allergy medicine) not only healed my pain and allowed me to
lose all that extra weight and inflammation, but it also led me to the path of becoming
a natural healer. I am now a Family
Herbalist, Aromatherapy Practitioner, and Reiki Master. None of these things
would have happened if I had never had my own health crisis. In fact, I
probably would have continued down the slow, painful road of lifestyle diseases
and their symptoms.
I see many
people making the same mistakes I did. And it seems that Southerners have fared
the worst from the industrial pharmaceutical and food industries. The fattest
and sickest states in the US are almost all Southern states. We have gone from
being people who grow our own food and medicines to being Wal-mart obsessed
super-consumers. The real problem is not just the Southern style of food that
we prefer – it’s the ingredients in that food. (People who cooked with lard 100
years ago were healthier than those who cook with GMO Canola oil today.)
And it’s
not just the food we eat, but also our attitudes towards natural or
“alternative” healing that are making us sicker. For some reason, Southerners
will turn to their traditional doctor for help before trying any kind of
alternative modality. This may be an
over-reaction to our heritage. We don’t want to be seen as “backward
hillbillies.” But the truth is, those hillbillies of the past were on to
something. They recognized that God had provided medicines all around them.
They also used prayer and other “alternative” methods of healing with much
success. As far as we know, none of these things had any side effects.
I hope that my Reiki work will show another alternative treatment available. Like
prayer, it can do no harm. In fact, some form of energy healing has been
performed by different peoples in all countries throughout the ages. “Reiki” is
just the Japanese name for a certain type of energy healing. Other cultures may
call it different things, but it is essentially the same –the sharing of energy
to heal. RockNReiki is just another specific form of energy healing – one that
seeks to balance the energies of country folk everywhere. And when our energies
are balanced, our bodies are healthier. To that I say, “Yeehaw!”
Mom at Dr. Taylor's Office.
Dr. Taylor
