Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the greatest discoveries are those we make about ourselves. There is no more effective means of making those self-discoveries than embracing the synchronicity that punctuates our earthly existence. Its value derives from the assumption that everything you need or want to know lies within yourself, and the assessing of synchronicity will bring you the kind of discoveries Emerson esteemed as most precious. They are empowering experiences that inspire us to take up the hero’s journey in search of our destiny. By keeping a journal, by applying the simple techniques of interpretation and integration, by recording our dreams, by jotting down every synchronistic event that may happen in our lives, we will be on our own Grail quest toward the authentic life with the God Source as our cocreative inner partner. The more we pay attention to synchronicity in our lives, and the more we record it so we can look at it later, the more we see that our lives will improve and our destiny will unfold as it was meant to be.

  chapter

  4

  WHEN I MOVED INTO MY NEW HOUSE, I WAS CONCERNED NOT only about the physical wellness of the house (roof, drains, etc.), but also the physical wellness of my own body. I have a ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico, where Georgia O’Keeffe used to paint. I have lived there for fifteen years and never had trouble with juniper pollen. When I bought this new house in Santa Fe, I had no idea that allergies would soon prevent me from even visiting my ranch. The synchronicity of buying a house in Santa Fe saved me from taking up permanent residence in New Mexican clinics due to allergies and my inability to breathe in Abiquiu. The synchronicity of ageing has resulted in my putting my creative show business and film life on the blurry back burner of memory so I can focus on what is wrong with me now.

  Because of my allergies I have had to educate myself about my overall physical condition, which has led me to investigate allopathic medicine (that is, traditional Western), as opposed to alternative medicine in this country.

  I have been blessed in my life to be healthy. Good genes, exercise from dancing, and a fairly balanced diet. So to experience anything physically wrong has been difficult for me.

  My surgeries have been expected. Knee surgery from dancing, neck surgery (from sticking it out, I would say), kidney surgery for a cyst that wasn’t cancerous, and a face-lift when I was fifty. All in all, that’s not too much anesthetic. But lately I’ve been having such problems with allergies that I thought it was causing very bad acid reflux.

  Death by Modern Medicine is not just the name of a book by Carolyn Dean (whom I will quote extensively). It’s a condition afflicting doctors and patients. The statistics are staggering. From 1990 to 2000 about 7 to 8 million people suffered death by medicine. There have been thousands of fatalities linked to the drug Vioxx (prescribed to me after my neck surgery). Close to one third of the millions of women who took fen-phen to lose weight suffered heart or lung damage. Celebrex causes heart disease as do other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Suicides are occurring resulting from Prozac, and the list goes on.

  All of these treatments focus on treating the symptoms, not the cause. Drug companies thrive when people remain sick. Modern medicine itself is the number one cause of death every year. The figure is 784,000 deaths a year due to medicine-related causes. That’s 2,150 deaths a day just in this country alone.

  Medical doctors are licensed and regulated by their own medical boards, and increasingly these boards are populated with representatives of the drug industry and doctors who are paid advisers for the drug companies.

  The failure of modern medicine began with its overriding desire to create a monopoly. Documentation goes back to the time of Henry VIII, when allopathic (another word for “conventional”) doctors convinced the city of London to pass a bylaw requiring a license to practice as a way of controlling herbalists. Women who were herbalists, midwives, and healers were burned at the stake for allegedly practicing witchcraft.

  In North America, doctors are in the upper echelons of society, sit on government benches, and create laws and regulations to benefit themselves. In early modern-day medicine, homeopathy, osteopathy, and chiropractic, naturopathic treatments, etc., were frowned upon, but today there is so much suspicion of allopathic medicine that patients resort to spending $21 billion a year for alternative medicine.

  In conventional care, we have five-minute medicine. We wait two months for an appointment, one hour in the waiting room, twenty minutes in the examining room, for five minutes with the doctor. Rarely do we find family doctors anymore who know us and our families. Now everyone is a specialist. Medicine has become a servant of the technology of drugs instead of a healing art.

  The separation between mind, body, and spirit has never been more obvious than in modern medicine. There is no education in medical training that the three are connected. In fact, most doctors will laugh at such a notion. Nutrition and emotional stress are not really considered relevant to a person’s physical maladies.

  Every nutritionist I’ve ever met in a hospital is overweight and underaware of it. When my mother was recovering from surgery, the nutritionist came in with her lunch tray, which consisted of a Coke, a cheeseburger, chocolate cake, and ice cream. When I looked up at her in astonishment, she said, “It’s good for the patient because it makes her think she’ll feel better.” The woman weighed about two hundred pounds. In horror, I watched her waddle away.

  For many people vitamins and supplements are extremely beneficial, but the medical and drug industries are attempting to move them into a drug category so that prescriptions are necessary. Monopoly of medicine and censorship are a way slowly but surely to erode the beneficial effect on human health outside of the accepted allopathic drug industry.

  Why does modern medicine treat alternative cures with such shabby cynicism? The preferred treatments in Europe and Asia are supplements: herbal, homeopathic, and holistic. A holistic doctor treats the mind, body, and spirit. He knows they are connected and one affects the other.

  Our advertising and media contribute to how we heal ourselves. We are inundated with electronic information waves of every description. The advertising world is a scientific operation, and we are being advertised to death. We smoke, drink, overeat, and stress out as we rush to a yoga class and give ourselves only twenty minutes to meditate. We use our computers, cell phones, and Palm Pilots, ingesting all of those electromagnetic waves as we pop diet pills to look as though we are healthy.

  It’s no secret that we all fear disease. But we should remember that disease is dis-ease. The word itself is a clue to what’s going on. We are being propagandized from every corner of our free society.

  Alex Carey, a psychologist, said it best: “The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”

  The most manipulative propaganda is that modern medicine has anything to do with health. Drug companies who make sick pills for healthy people also make a lot of money.

  When I had profound pain three months after my neck surgery, my surgeon (one of the best regarding surgery, one of the worst regarding sensitivity) wouldn’t even answer the phone. He left a message with his assistant: “Tell her to take Vioxx.” It turned out that I had a compacted rib bone from stress.

  I have come to understand that I should approach the food that I eat as I would a medicine or drug. It’s that important. Yet our food is being polluted by pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. I eat only organic fruits and vegetables but that doesn’t mean they are not hybrid. I try to live without the whites: bread, sugar, flour, and pasta. I eat chicken and fish, hopefully raised without antibiotics. But how can we really tell?

  My big problem in my life is my sweet tooth. I’ve had it since childhood. At times I am insulin resistant, which basically means I have an inability to transport sugar into the cells. The result is high blood levels of sugar and insulin. Chronically elevated insulin helps create obesity and, worse than anything, keeps me from losing weight. I do my workout every day and basically don’t eat much, but to lose weight? It’s a nightmare!

  Death by sugar is clear, but a war on sugar…I don’t have the trained troops.

  Dr. Nancy Appleton is a researcher and nutritional consultant who has made a life study of sugar and why we should wage war on it. She has compiled a mind-blowing list of 136 ways sugar is harmful to your health to prove her point.

  Here is a list of conditions that are triggered or worsened by high sugar intake:

  Cardiac arrhythmia PMS (progesterone levels disturbed)

  Fatigue

  Insomnia

  Panic attacks

  Hypertension

  The “alphabet soup” of autoimmune diseases, e.g., MS, MG

  There are ten teaspoons of sugar in a can of soda pop and twenty-seven teaspoons in a milk shake.

  Sugar-free substitutes are just as bad in different ways. Aspartame (NutraSweet) is a neurotoxin and should be avoided completely. Studies link it to birth defects, brain tumors, and seizures and say that it contributes to diabetes and emotional disorders. We should avoid any synthetic sweeteners and use honey instead. That means no Splenda, Equal, saccharin, or Sweet ’N Low. Stevia is okay if it’s natural.

  Sugar is a legalized poison, and I try my best to be poison-free. I use honey on my cereal and have one bite of dessert from someone else’s plate when I’m out to dinner. I don’t eat the fat on chicken or fish, and rarely eat red meat anyway. My carbs come from vegetables and fruit. I’ve given up pasta and bread and am not happy about it at all. For salt I use Kymalazan or Celtic Sea Salt, which is not processed and is delicious.

  I’ve allowed my yoga practice to be a glory of the past because I do so much other exercise (weight lifting, stretching, mountain hiking, and stomach exercising). But I still believe yoga is a miraculous discipline. Yoga itself means “union,” a union of balance, strength, and flexibility. Another discipline I do is Xi Gong. I do spontaneous Xi Gong, which means I stand very relaxed on the floor, allow my intelligent mind to take a backseat, and I get out of a disciplinarian mind frame and allow my body to move in whatever way it chooses to. I’m fascinated by the ways my body wants to move. Sometimes it is gentle, as I find myself swaying slowly as I watch my arms rotate in ways that tell me they have an intelligence of their own. It always makes me aware that the body is basically energy, and the energy tells me it needs to move in certain configurations to stay balanced. Sometimes my arms and legs and torso move for long periods of time and sometimes not. I notice that if something is physically bothering me (aches and pains from exercise or cold or even a restless night), the movement itself acts as a healer because it redistributes the energy, which contributes to the balance of my whole system.

  I think the reason I’ve never really been sick in my life is because I’ve led a drug-free existence. I always have. I’ve never done a line of coke or taken any drugs for recreation. But once Robert Mitchum gave me some bang brownies, and I thought I was walking around in my own brain cells (fascinating, by the way). And I smoked pot in a hotel room in London, and afterward nearly ate the furniture, I was so hungry. At a fancy dinner party in Hollywood, I put a teaspoon of what I thought was very refined sugar in my demitasse coffee. The hostess was horrified, because it was a thousand dollars’ worth of coke. I didn’t drink the coffee, and I was never invited back.

  I naively wondered why so many of my show business friends would congregate in bathrooms with the windows open and come out looking like they’d dunked their faces in powdered sugar doughnuts. So I have no education in the drug world. I am a novice. And where prescription drugs are concerned, I’ve taken antibiotics a few times, and every now and then 2 mg of Valium to sleep. I do take melatonin. It’s calming before bed and wonderful for the hair.

  Alternative medicine has become a bridge to other realities we know very little about in the West. It comes, I think, from a basic distrust in the limited thinking of conventional doctors. Millions of people are taking active steps to venture outside the medical mainstream with acupuncture, herbal treatments, homeopathy, supplements, and holistic points of view in general. Forty-eight percent of American adults, according to the New York Times, use at least one alternative or complementary therapy. The percentage continues to grow every year. They feel their overall well-being is not being addressed. They are looking for ways to assist the body in its own capacity to fight off disease and heal. More and more people are learning to use their own intuition as to their bodies and mind, body, spirit connections. People who follow naturopathic techniques find fewer drug side effects, unhurried service, more affectionate care, and say they feel they are being treated as whole persons, not persons with specific symptoms.

  I have had a hiatal hernia, which caused me severe acid reflux for many years. It was recommended that I take Prilosec to decrease the hydrochloric acid. I took the Prilosec for years until I began seriously to question the role of hydrochloric acid in our bodies. If we have such an abundance of this acid, isn’t there likely some reason for it to be there in the first place? Do we need a natural amount of hydrochloric acid for proper digestion?

  Some doctors say that an infant who is not breast-fed in the first twelve hours will suffer digestive tract maladies later in life because the digestive computer isn’t turned on by the colostrum in mother’s milk. I wasn’t breast-fed, which I came to realize might have been the reason for my digestive computer problems. (There is a reason why nature meant for mothers to breast-feed their children immediately.)

  I began to make a study of what the digestive tract meant to my human health. My research led me to understand that the seat of my health resides with the “inner terrain” of my body, which is governed by digestion.

  Our bodies are alkaline by design and acid by function. Maintaining a proper balance is essential for life, health, and vitality. Without the alkaline balance, our “inner terrain” is a breeding ground for bacteria, yeast, and other unwanted organisms. I found that all leading biochemists and medical physiologists recognize that our pH balance (acid-alkaline balance) is the most important aspect of a balanced and healthy body. Our digestive tracts have varying degrees of acid by design and our urinary tracts should be slightly acidic for healthy function.

  My pH had been out of whack for many years, and I was taking a proton pump inhibitor (a drug like Prilosec or Nexium, acid depressors) which was alleviating the burning acid, but at what cost? My doctors saw nothing wrong with 40 mg in the morning and 40 mg at night, until it began to become evident in patients over fifty that there was a correlation between heartburn drugs and more and more broken hips and fractures. Broken bones and fractures in the elderly often lead to life-threatening complications.

  Patients over fifty who used acid-reducing drugs for more than a year had a 44 percent higher risk of hip fractures than nonusers. The longer the patient took the drugs, the higher their risk.

  Most people do not take enough calcium to start with. Add the lack of calcium absorption, and there is a real problem. Women over sixty taking heartburn drugs put themselves at risk of developing osteoporosis.

  I soon understood I needed to get off the drug. (Nexium, which is similar to Prilosec, is the second-most-profitable drug in the world with global sales of $4.6 billion a year, as reported by IMS Health, which tracks drug sales.)

  So I was learning that I—and everyone else who had digestive problems—was at war within myself. We were becoming more and more susceptible to bacteria, fungus, yeasts, and molds.

  I found I had developed a bad cough and was more bothered by allergies than ever before. I needed to take my pH imbalance seriously and get off the heartburn drugs.

  The germs were nothing; my inner terrain was everything.

  Because of the animosity that the AMA and the pharmaceutical companies have in general for alternative healing procedures, I am going to be deliberately careful with the specifics of how I’ve healed myself. I am disguising the doctors’ names because they could lose their licenses if their work is seen as too expert and successful!

  I reconnected with a naturopathic dentist whom I had known for twenty-five years. He had become a researcher in what is called “energy medicine” and had been practicing with much success as a doctor. His knowledge of teeth was instrumental in furthering his research because he understood that each tooth in the human mouth is connected to a meridian energy line that connects to various organs in the body. But I don’t want to get ahead of my story.

  Dr. Lin took my case, which was: I had allergies, horrible acid reflux, and some problems dealing with menopause.

  Dr. Lin is a spiritual dowser. That means he uses a dowsing rod, which is literally and physically moved by his own spiritual guides to diagnose the maladies in a patient. It was fascinating to watch how it worked.

  I was used to dowsing techniques because I had employed dowsers to locate underground water on my ranch in New Mexico. The water dowser simply holds his rod over the ground as he walks the property. Whenever it moves and points down, we know water is there. When he asks how many feet below the surface, the rod will respond by moving up and down. My water dowser was never wrong. He said he didn’t know if it was his own higher knowledge of the location of water or whether it was a spiritual guide of his. He learned it all from an Indian shaman.

  So as I watched the dowsing techniques of Dr. Lin, I quickly realized I had to know enough medically to ask the right questions. So did Dr. Lin.

  I began by wanting to know what the operating level of hydrochloric acid was in my body. The dowsing rod moved eighteen times, which according to Dr. Lin meant that I had only 18 percent efficacy of what my hydrochloric acid should be. The Prilosec had reduced the effectiveness of my acid down to 18 percent. No wonder I didn’t have heartburn anymore! But at what cost? I was coughing all the time. I felt weak. I wasn’t sleeping, and my allergies were terrible.