When I felt that tell-tail “slip – pop”  and collapsed on the ground, I knew I had sprained my ankle, but it didn’t occur to me at the time that I’d be turning the experience into a blog post. Actually I was thinking mainly of the fact that this was Saturday evening and that I was starring in my church’s Christmas play the very next morning. The two main thoughts running through my head were “I’ve never backed out of going on stage for any reason,” and “I’m not going to start now!”

We had been rehearsing this play for a month and they were counting on me, but I could barely walk at all, let alone dance, which I was going to have to do in front of my whole congregation in just 18 hours, but I’m an herbalist, I see miracles happen all the time, so I wasn’t too worried, but I must admit that I was slightly concerned when I had to hop to bed that night. If I couldn’t put ANY weight on this ankle, my performance the next morning would certainly be one for the shutter-happy scrapbookers of the world.

I did as I usually do and started treating the ankle right away. In school I learned the standard protocol for sprains RICE (Rest Ice Compression Elevation), and while that’s all fine and good, I knew it wouldn’t have me acting anytime soon, so I pulled out the big guns.

The first thing I did was to give myself a Quantum Touch treatment (www.quantumtouch.com). I featured QT on my radio show a few months ago and have been practicing it for about a year and a half now, so I was comfortable using it in a first aid setting, even though the person I was aiding was me! I also kept it elevated, and since I was at my folks house, I had my mother (who also knows QT) work on me for a while. I also applied deep tissue repair oil (https://web2.herbdoc.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=17&Itemid=38) and Dr. Christopher’s Complete Tissue and Bone ointment (http://www.drchristophersherbs.com/collections/dr-christophers-herbal-ointments-massage-oils) and did alternating hot and cold packs on the ankle using a hot water bottle for the hot pack and a flexible ice pack that I keep in the freezer. By the time I went to bed that night the swelling was 80% gone, the stiffness greatly reduced, range of motion was about 250-300% of what it had been.

There never was any pain – at all – from the moment it happened till now (16 days later) not even when I put pressure on the ankle. I could definitely feel an instability and a feeling that there was damage there, but there was never any pain at all. I credit this to the quick response with QT treatments and the fact that I’m extremely well nourished with organic vegan foods and herbal superfoods. I believe that pain is simply the body saying that it doesn’t have the resources it needs to heal and if it has everything it needs, particularly nutrients, then there is simply no need for pain.  And no, I hadn’t been drinking or using any pain relievers, even herbal.

The next day I was walking with a cane and a limp, but the ankle was strong enough that I could go on stage with the cane at my side. I just did my best Marty Crane impression and incorporated it into my character and no one ever suspected that the cane wasn’t just a prop, until I told them, that is.

That day I did some more QT and some more of the same ointments that I mentioned. Whenever I would walk on the ankle, for more than a few steps, the swelling would increase and it would feel tired.

The second day after the injury (Monday), I was walking easily without the cane and with only a slight limp. I went to my chiropractor to have him put my ankle bone back in place, because I could tell that it wasn’t sitting properly in the joint. The adjustment loostened it up quite dramatically. He also reminded me to take plenty of manganese as it is important for healing injuries, so I took lots of red raspberry leaf which is very high in manganese. Thanks, Doc, even we in the healing professions sometimes need a reminder from a colleague with an objective viewpoint (that is, it’s easier to see things when you aren’t too close to the situation).

Tuesday I had almost no limp, but still had to be careful of what I did with my ankle to avoid re-injuring it (e.g., I only walked on smooth flat surfaces, took occasional rest breaks and put the leg up as much as possible while sitting. Also continued with QT and occasionally applied the ointments.

Wednesday, I attended the Christmas Eave service at my church and no one could tell that I had ever injured my ankle.

Thursday, I walked almost a mile on an easy trail (I love to hike). My ankle did just fine, and I had only a slight tenderness in it at the end of the day.

Friday, I walked 1.26 miles on another easy trail.

Ankle did great with normal daily activities from Saturday through the next Wednesday.

Wednesday I went downtown for the New Years fireworks display and did a lot of walking, not sure exactly how much, but it probably added up to at least 2 -3 miles. Had to rest once, but no big deal and still no pain, just a little chaffing on my shoe because the ankle was still ever so slightly swollen.

Thursday – New Years Day – (just 12 days after the initial injury) I went on a moderately difficult, non-flat, non-smooth, very steep hiking trail that I’ve never tried before, and my ankle was great. It wasn’t even tired afterward.

Today, Monday, Jan. 5th, I spent about an hour on a ladder doing some work on my skylights and had no hint of any problem or instability in my ankle. There are still a couple spots that are a bit tender when I poke them, but my ankle doesn’t feel or act injured at all anymore.

My ankle was sprained on December 20th 2008 at about 4:30 pm and I had completely normal use of it on New Years Day. It was improved enough that I could get around without trouble by Dec 23rd. I had a very pleasant Christmas.

I looked up ankle sprains to see how long one would typically take to heal and most of the estimates were 4 to 8 weeks with medical treatment and some people still didn’t have normal use of their ankle 6 months later! I feel sorry for all those poor saps out there still using conventional medical treatment for ankle sprains!

This brings to mind two of my favorite quotes when it comes to healing:  “Use what works,” and “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

Herbally Yours,

Chris Lewis, MH, CMT

Listen to “Growing Your Health” on www.realcoachingradio.com every Tuesday at 5:30 pm MST.

I recently heard that an old friend of mine died. He had brain cancer. This may come as a bit of a surprise to those of you who heard my radio program on curing cancer naturally. The sad fact of the matter is that I can’t MAKE anyone well. I can help them heal themselves, but if they don’t want to participate in the process, there’s not much that I can do about it.

One of my radio guests, Richard Gordon says, “A healer is someone who was sick and got well, and a great healer is someone who was very sick and got well quickly.” This simply means that the only person who can heal you is YOU. Not me, not your doctor, not the president, not your favorite celebrity, even God doesn’t seem to force healing on anyone against their will. I know a couple of individuals who have had sudden miraculous healings that I couldn’t explain with anything other than divine intervention, but even these required the person’s willing participation and their willingness to receive healing.

Free will is one of our most precious gifts, but it can also allow us to make some big, even fatal, mistakes. With great power (the ability to make our own decisions) comes great responsibility (to do our homework and make the best choice possible – for us – and also to keep our freedom of choice in our own hands; otherwise, what good is having a choice at all). If we give away our own power and freedom to a professional, how is that different from giving it away to a political dictator or despot.

I spoke with this friend several times and tried to convince him to use the natural cures that I knew would help him (and probably would have saved his life), but for whatever reason, he was only willing to do a very tiny bit of work to heal himself — not nearly enough. He also insisted on receiving chemotherapy and radiation treatments, even though I warned him that those treatments would be more likely to kill him than the cancer itself (which I have seen happen many times).

Now, I’m not saying, “Let’s just through all of modern medicine out the window and forget about it.”

What I am saying is, “Let’s look at each situation in turn and use real science and real experience to decide which approach is best for each individual person in each individual situation.” I think that this is the only sane and responsible way to make a treatment decision. If conventional medicine gets better results for condition X, then let’s use that, but if Natural Healing gets better results, then use that.

Unfortunately, there are people, like my friend, who decide to do what their doctor says, not because it has been shown scientifically to get better results, but simply because it is their doctor who said it! They believe that anyone with the letters “MD” after their name is somehow the ultimate authority on everything to do with health, even though this is certainly not the case. There is no one modality that has ALL the answers for EVERYBODY. And the best person to decide which treatment is best for you is not your doctor, it’s YOU!

If my friend had bothered to get several different opinions from several different kinds of practitioners, prayed about the situation, and chose the therapy that was shown to be the most successful, he might still be alive today; because the fact of the matter is that, in the case of cancer, natural therapies (and certain ones in particular) have been shown to be far more successful and safer than chemo and radiation (even the US government says that chemo treatments are totally ineffective for many types of cancer), yet people still choose the most dangerous and least successful treatments available. Why? Well, if you figure that one out, please let me know.

There are situations for which conventional medicine has clearly been shown to be the best option available, but chronic degenerative disease is not one of them. Instead of choosing the most extreme, radical treatment available, just because it’s there, why not choose the one that has actual evidence to back up its effectiveness and justify its use?

Conventional medicine does has some good things to offer, particularly in the field of emergency medicine, but it is only one of many.

Before choosing a treatment, would it not be the more intelligent thing to do to look at at least 5 or 6 different approaches (conventional, herbology, acupuncture, energy therapies, massage, chiropractic, reflexology, cleansing, exercise, nutrition, lifestyle modification, etc.) and pick the one (or ones) with the greatest chance of helping you heal?

If you hire a contractor to do some remodeling on your house, and the first day, he manages to destroy almost everything he touches, would you not fire him and immediately start looking for someone with a completely different approach who would do a better job? Of course you would. And yet there are still people going to the same doctor after years of unsuccessful treatments. Isn’t it time to fire that doctor and start looking for someone with a completely different approach who can do a better job? That’s what I did, and today all my health problems that were made worse through conventional treatment have been healed with natural therapies – all because I quit what wasn’t working and started looking for something that would work.

There is a saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” My friend kept doing the same treatments over and over again, and kept getting the same results. The cancer would go away and come back and go away again and come back again. I think he should have taken a step back and said, “wait a minute, why isn’t this working, maybe these simply aren’t the best treatments for me.”

Now, I still love this friend and believe that I will see him again one day in heaven, but it still broke my heart to see him go so long before his time (he was only 24)!  I’m writing about this because I hope it will save a life or two so that his death will not be in vain.

So the next time you need to seek a treatment of some kind, remember that medical doctors are only one of many practitioners out there, that they are only trained in one basic modality – one way of thinking – and that the one tool they have at their disposal may not necessarily be the one you need. When your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, but what happens if you try to use the hammer on something that really needs needle-nosed pliers?

Just some food for thought.

Listen to “Growing Your Health” on www.realcoachingradio.com every Tuesday at 5:30 pm MST.

Today on Growing Your Health, we discussed how to have a healthy holiday feast and avoid punishing yourself with “foods” that you know you’ll regret later.

One of the things we talked about was substituting healthy sweeteners for unhealthy ones. Healthy sweeteners you can use are:

raw, unfiltered honey (generally , you don’t want to give this to infants, but they should be on a diet of 100% human breast milk anyway).

real maple syrup

agave nectar

stevia powder or extract (a little bit goes a very long way on this one; it’s 30 times as sweet as sugar)

brown rice syrup

evaporated cane juice (and other raw unrefined sugars)

For the liquid sweeteners above, use half as much of them as a recipe calls for in sugar, so if the recipe calls for 3 cups sugar, use 1 1/2 cups of honey.  You’ll also need to reduce the amount of liquid you add to the batter.

For stevia, check a stevia cookbook or look up online, you won’t need much.

The sweeteners to avoid are things like: any form of refined sugar, and anything that doesn’t exist in nature (synthetics) like saccharin, aspartame (”nutri-sweet), and sucralose (”splenda”) as these are all toxic to a greater or lesser degree.

The name of the vegetarian “turkey” is Tofurky and it can be found at your local health food store.

explore organic and chemical-free versions of your favorites at your local health food store. Yes, it really does make a significant difference.

Emphasize lighter foods and plant foods to avoid that uncomfortable bloated feeling.

…and have a wonderful Holiday Season.

Listen to “Growing Your Health” on www.realcoachingradio.com every Tuesday at 5:30 pm MST.

Hi Everyone,

         Let me introduce myself. My name is Chris Lewis, MH, CMT.  I’ve healed myself of several childhood health problems and now help others heal themselves with all-natural methods. I am a Master Herbalist and Massage Therapist and I provide information and training on natural healing topics through speaking professionally, 1-on-1 coaching, and through my radio show, “Growing Your Health” on www.realcoachingradio.com every Tuesday at 5:30 pm MST.

         I will be blogging here about my show, answers to questions about the topics of my shows, importantstuff and announcements about what’s going on with my show, etc. In short, this is where to come to find out about “Growing Your Health,” guests who appear on my show, and more information about topics I cover on my show. I hope to see you there and wish you the best of health -naturally!