Have you ever had the experience of filling your weekly pill scheduler and thinking, “How did I get here? How did I end up on so much medication?” I recall it clearly. It seems like one pill leads to another, then two more and before you know it, you might just have the experience I did – that Epiphany Moment. Standing over two massive pill dividers; one for medication and another for supplements, totaling hundreds of dollars a month and realizing that this thing is designed with no exit ramp. There is no getting off the medications once begun. They are designed not to correct root causes, but to mask the symptoms that show up when there is a root-cause issue. Therefore, more symptoms come and more medications to mask them, and on and on goes the rollercoaster. Through the highs and lows of the symptoms but addressing nothing deeper than surface level issues.
In my experience, western medicine has proved excellent for emergency situations but is detrimental to even downright destructive to one’s health for long term issues. Let me explain using my own personal experience as examples. These days I speak of my years spent locked inside the prison of crippling bi-lateral testicular pain as my “Job moment.” But it was more than a moment, it was 30 years to be exact. Feeling every minute of every day that I had just been freshly kicked in the junk. The waves of nausea and pain that so overloaded my neuropathic system that even minor neuropathic inputs were received as pain to me; Example: a hot soothing shower – nope, only pain to me. Sleeping was another thing that eluded me. I averaged less than 2 hours of sleep per night. This usually consisted of 2 nights of not sleeping and then passing out on the third night for close to 6 hours. My eating habits were blown up as well. I either didn’t eat and withered away to nothing or I hyper-focused on the one sensory input that could still bring me pleasure and ate too much and thus gained weight. All this mess was brought to a crescendo with the loss of my ability to walk, then think straight, then with the failure of my heart as the stress just became too much. At this point, I lost it all… my job, my career, my savings, my 401k, everything we had put aside was destroyed. The Lord allowed me to hold on to the two most important things, my faith and my family. That is what I mean when I refer to my “Job moment”.
My Job moment finally ended when the Lord decided, at exactly 30 years from summer to summer, that he would take the pain away. This was after 20 years of searching for the cause of the pain, which turned out to be Lyme’s Disease. Then 3 years of treating the disease until I was in remission – the emergency portion of western medicine that is exceptional. But then another 7 years of masking the symptoms of a plethora of conditions and internal systems that this disease had destroyed over its decades long attack; the most pronounced being the testicular pain. In the end, I laid it all on the line, I took every avenue that I could in pursuit of my goal of eliminating the pain. I read all the studies done in this area from the US and Europe and kept the organs removal as my last move, which in time, became my last remaining move. So, with all the understanding I had accumulated, I made sure the surgeons would numb me before putting me under because that could have been a mistake from my past procedures of severing nerve bundles. If the neuropathway is severed, so I learned, the brain often holds on to the last signal it received from that nerve pathway. This is what is happening when solders experience phantom pain – pain from a limb or appendage that is no longer there. Now armed with all this battle wisdom, I scheduled my final move. And sure enough, when wheeled into the surgery room, the Urology surgeon told me that he would not be numbing me before I went under, but after, according to his procedures. I tell you true, I almost hopped off the table, with my front flapping in the wind, and proclaimed “Then we are done here.” But at the last minute that anesthesiologist saved that day by saying that he could offer the service of numbing me before he put me under. And true to his word he made sure I informed him verbally that I was indeed numb before slipping me under sedation.
When I came to, the first thing I noticed was that the pain was still there. That was the beginning of a dark time. I slipped into a funk that I could only pull myself out of with fasting and prayer. I was in that pain and either depression or prayer and fasting for another 2 months before that Lord decided to release me from that dungeon. I think it had to do with coming to the end of myself and there being nothing but Him to pull me out of the darkness. I was finally free of the pain, but I quickly found that there were a whole mess of issues that were just below the floodwaters that made up the testicular pain and now that the floodwater had receded, it brought all those secondary issues into focus. From Hashimoto thyroid disease, to gluten intolerance, to CVID (a crashed immune system), to heart and blood pressure issues, asthma, vitiligo, back pain, etc. And after 10-30 years of managing these symptoms, depending upon when along this journey these symptoms materialized, I had built up a treasure trove of medication and corresponding supplements to help me do what? According to the doctors, once you start these medications, you are on them for life. That is not the medical art of healing that was promised, but a medicinal art of playing symptom peek-a-boo. This was the point when I said “NO MORE!” and tuned my study of medical ways to the herbal world where I had been drawn over the last decade of disillusion with western medicine. Through the study of the old ways of healing and the root of so many of our medicinal inventions, I have created solutions that have allowed me and my family to reduce our dependance on medicinal forms of sustenance. I cannot claim that we are completely off all medications, because that would be a false claim. But I personally have severely reduced my dependance upon medications. I am down to just two daily medications, one for excessive sweating due to damaged nerve pathways and another for allergies. Both of which I am actively working to correct. Other than that, my scheduler is emptied of processed medications that can cause an untold number of health issues when taking long-term and are designed to heal nothing.
Instead, I have a scheduler of capsules that are made from natural herbal products that are correcting the issues over time – the way that healing naturally occurs in the body. Don’t choose herbalism and expect to take a magic pill to correct the issues. This is about removing the roadblocks to healing and then adding the needed herbal supplements to promote the healing you seek. This is how healing is supposed to take place. Don’t mask it because the symptoms are your sign that you are on the right or wrong path. They are the gateway to know if the treatment is helping over time. If you mask them, there is no more window into the body, until another symptom pops up because your body is sending yet another sign that the path is wrong. But we then mask those and keep walking down the same path expecting things to change when we have done nothing to promote that healing that we desire. These changes could include what and when you eat, how much sleep you get and the quality of it, how much liquids we drink, etc. Wholesome living, natural eating and herbal supplementation produce the environment for simplicity in healing… Naturally. That is the philosophy of my new company Circle G Holistic Healing. So, if, or maybe when, you have your epiphany, don’t forget to look us up. We are here to help you realize the same health gains that my family and friends have seen. A simpler way of life, a more natural way of living and a more whole you.
Peace be with you,
Thomas Storey
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