I was quite happy as well as surprised at the unusual response
of inquiries from those interested in the benefits of using a
little sea water or sea salt each day for what ails the human
species. Since you can’t purchase the sea water, because of
restrictions by the Pure Food and Drug Act, the next best thing (if
you are not wealthy enough to own a fishing yacht and can scoop up
Food or Health Food Store and purchase the Sun-Evaporated Sea Salt.
The natural sea salt has the same flavor as the sodium-chloride
(table salt) which you’ve been shaking in copious quantities on
your eggs, hamburgers and tomatoes for years, but it possesses some
forty-four important trace minerals beneficial to the body which
the common salt doesn’t. Therefore, while flavoring your daily
provender and between-the-meals snacks, why not be doing it with
something that is beneficial to the health as well as satisfying to
the taste buds.
After you’ve purchased your box of sea salt, simply empty
your shakers of the common salt (its’ good only for snails and
puppy dog tails), and fill them up with the sea salt. Then just use
it as you did the common salt-for seasoning and cooking. Remember,
it was only a tiny trace of iodine, added to salt some years ago,
that has almost eliminated the once prevalent goiter in our land.
But with the forty-four trace minerals discovered in sea salt, it
is believed that many other deficiency ailments that plague the
human body may be benefited.
As reported in my earlier article, I had given a box of the sea
salt to my old friend, Bill Nill, now eighty-one, who barely
survived a severe heart-attack over the Christmas holidays. Bill is
an expert watch repairman, has repaired quite a few old-time
watches for me, and I certainly wanted to see him get back to his
watchmaker’s bench to do some more repairing for me. At the
time Mrs. Nill said she was afraid Bill would never be able to work
on watches again. But after four months of using the sea salt, I
went over to take them another box, and see how my friend was
coming along.
Bill was back at working on some watches again. Mrs. Nill’s
box of sea salt I had taken her, was almost empty and she was glad
to get a new supply.
‘You know, I think that sea salt has done more than anything
to help Bill get well,’ she confided. ‘We’ve been using
it all the time, and I know I feel better, too. It’s helped my
nerves and I can walk up the stairs so much better.’
Furthermore, I have told many of my friends who seem to be
lacking in health, and have their miseries, to at least try using
sea salt for flavoring, provided they are permitted to use salt by
their physicians.
To those who want to know more, I always tell them to send
twenty cents and a long, addressed and stamped envelope to, The
Hopkins Syndicate, Inc., Mellott, Indiana, 47958, requesting the
Dr. George Crane pamphlet on the benefits of sea water or sea salt.
In it you will find some interesting claims on the values of sea
water or sea salt in helping the body back to natural health. It is
only when the body is healthy that it can overcome many deficiency
diseases, caused by the lack of natural minerals once provided in
our depleted soil. You will thrill at the story Dr. Crane tells how
a little sea brine helped his 97 year old father-in-law, a
bed-ridden invalid suffering from severe arthritic pains.
Some have written that they can’t locate a Natural Food or
Health Food Store in their areas, so I have asked about it at
Slade’s Natural Foods, 912 Gray Ave., Greenville, Ohio, 45331,
and Mr. Slade said he could send a box of the sea salt for one
dollar-that’s 45 cents for the salt, and the rest for Uncle
Sam’s postage. One fellow wrote in and wanted a dozen boxes, to
give to friends, and Mr. Slade said he’d have to charge around
$7.50 for that amount which includes parcel post. However, try to
get it in your area, if possible, and you will save much expense in
shipping.
The human race is sick, and suffering seems to be a sizeable
portion of our earthly lot. My Grandpappy was a self educated,
horse-and-buggy country doctor, back in the days when it was much
simpler for a general practioner to hang a shingle on his office
door. Grandpa attended medical lectures at the University of
Cincinnati, went to the Civil War on the Federal side and served as
a member of the healing arts to the wounded lads in both the blue
and the gray. When he was released from military duty, he arrived
one day on steam cars and disembarked at the Union City, Indiana,
depot. Feeling the fatigue of his long travels, Grandpa hailed a
friend who was sitting atop a buckboard wagon near the station and
asked if he’d mind driving him to his home.
The man, (a democrat, as Grandpappy used to tell it), yelled
back above the roar of the steam locomotive, ‘I’m not
taking any d…..yankee home!’
To which, snapped Grandpappy, yanking out his army colt, ‘Oh
yes you are, you d…..rebel!’
Well, that’s just one of the many little nostalgic episodes
that we often like to revel in-glories of our illustrious ancestral
past when many of our modern, thriving midwest metropolises were
but frontier cow-towns and the patriarchs of our tribes often
endowed with nerves of iron and the courage of their convictions.
Sometimes I feel it is a sign of modern weakness, in that we too
often are satisfied in basking in the mere empathy of our eminent
forebears, rather than emulating their fortitude and downright
fervor in the settling of many of our modern problems.
Suffice it to say, however, that I have long felt that some of
Grandpappy’s love of helping others, has to a degree been
inherited by me. Though possessing none of the eminent and
scholarly attainments of my eminent progenitor, I have been forced
to indulge in self-study and the making of various therapeutic
gadgets to help me overcome some serious physical handicaps, after
the doctors had done all they could.
When I was a little boy, I suffered constant embarrassment from
my eyes. My one eye turned in and pained me constantly. The other
boys all called me ‘cross-eyed’, and this was most painful
to endure, from a psychological standpoint as well. I always saw
two of every-thing-two faces whentalkingto someone, two pages when
I was trying to read, two roads ahead when riding my bicycle, two
cars approaching, instead of one, in on coming traffic. As a
seventh grader, when I got a job of waiting on trade at the
neighborhood grocery, I suffered constant humiliation. Later, when
I clerked in a local haberdashery, the same suffering persisted and
it was very difficult to wait on people, although I persisted and
hung on till the store sold out several years later. In the
classroom it was the same story. No one wanted me on the school or
scout-camp baseball team, and when I tried to make the school
basketball squad, even the coach made fun of my physically
handicapped eyes before the entire squad.
The doctors had done all they could, fitting glasses, trying to
operate on the muscles of the eye, to straighten it, but without
relief. I continued to find reading and study difficult, and
mingling with the public even worse.
When school let out at noon, we had to walk the mile across town
to home, gulp our dinner and walk the mile backall in one brief,
hurried hour. As if this wasn’t enough, sometimes the
neighborhood grocer would phone, asking me to deliver some noontime
orders, which didn’t help the time situation. In order to make
up time at noon, I tried hopping onto the rear of the old Model-T
grocery truck. The older hoys knew how to hop off, but the first
time I jumped off backwards, at thirty miles an hour-and was dashed
flat on my back on the brick pavement. At the time I didn’t
know it, but from this fall a back injury was inflicted which was
to cause daily suffering much of my adult life.
Deciding I would have to do something on my own, to relieve my
eye trouble, I began reading books on orthoptics and ophthalmology.
Instead of being cross-eyed, I discovered my own case was mdeically
diagnosed as ‘left internal strabismus and hyperphoria with
amblyopia exanopsia and false fovea to the side of the fovea
centralis’. I went to my local ophthalmologist and explained
what I had, right in these terms, and he was quite surprised and
asked how I knew that.
I replied, ‘Doc, I’ve been studying up on my case, and
I’ve been exercising my eyes to try and help that weak and
deviating eye.’
He said, ‘More power to you. You’re exactly right in
your diagnosis-and only one in a million with your will power could
do that.’
Some years later I began making some interesting eye-exercising
machines, some with electric circuits and cam-operated lights by
means of utilizing old war surplus motors and gunsight telescope
eyepieces. I also designed and made several other smaller
instruments providing various methods of eye stimulation and
vergeance eye-muscle exercises to overcome my handicap. With these
instruments, I got my eyes to working together for the first time
in my life, although I still had a long way to go.
Meantime, my old back injury was looming its ugly head. I found
I couldn’t sit straight in my seat at school, stand comfortably
at the blackboard, walk over uneven ground or ride in a car that
rode over bumps-without discomfort.
In my early twenties, this became so pronounced I could only get
out of bed in the mornings by the strength of my arms, so great was
the pain in my body from this injury.
A chiropractor did all he could, then dismissed me.
‘You have a sacroiliac rotation, or inonimate lesion, and
that has resulted in a double curvature,’ he said. ‘I put
everything in place, but when you walk out my door, everything goes
right out of place, and you go that way till the next
treatment.’
Trying an osteopath, the same answer came.
‘All I know to do is to put a brace on your back,’ he
said. ‘I line everything up in place, but it gets out of place
while you’re leaving my office, and remains out till the next
treatment.’
By this time I was reading up on the principles of stretching
the spine to allign it. I had made an astronomical telescope in my
high school days, and decided my back was more important. So I
dismantled the old cream-tester gears from the telescope mounting
and made a machine I can lie down on and stretch my spine. After a
while I had the vertebraes in place, and my spine felt much
better.
Thus it is, that with the help of my own eye-machines, and my
spine machine, I have been able to maintain decent health. Had I
not made the spine machine, I would long ago have been confined to
a wheel chair from sheer pain of movement. Had I not made my eye
machines to exercise my weak eyes, I would still be seeing double,
whereas my eyes work fairly well together now. In both cases, the
doctors had given up, having done all they could. But, not giving
up, it marked only the beginning for me to do something for
myself.
All this has rubbed off onto me-may-be even a little of
Grandpa’s memories, too-but I can’t look at a sick or
miserable person, without offering them some kind of suggestion or
old remedy which I’ve heard has worked with others. Oftentimes,
as vice president of our Darke County Natural Food Associates, I am
called on to load up my back machine, my eye-exercising machines
and other ‘gearing’ and shove off for some neighboring town
or city, to explain to others what a person can do for himself,
when the doctor’s give up and tell you, ‘I guess you’ll
just have to learn to live with it.’
If you have the determination for bettering yourself, you can do
many things to improve your health. With all due credit to our
healing arts and professions, I still say a person has to live with
himself and knows his own pains better than any physician.
Every evening my wife comes home from teaching school, and
complains of vertebraes being out of place in her neck and spine.
She says my back machine is too hard to lie down on, so I have her
lie across the bed and relax. Sometimes I massage the muscles of
her neck and back. Then I gently cup one hand under the chin, and
the other hand around the skull, and pull firmly. By pulling, then
releasing, then pulling again, the muscles will gradually relax and
the vertebraes will come in place. Sometimes I also rotate the
head. This will also help break up adhesions in the back. If I
didn’t do this, she would be waiting in a doctor’s office
every day. Misplaced vertebraes in the neck can cause lumps on the
neck, poor vision, even hemmhorroids. Keeping them in place, as one
can learn to do gently and by the principle of stretching the spine
by pulling on the head, will help one in keep much better health.
God has placed means in out own hands, and intelligence to help
ourselves.
Now Grandpa-quit egging me on and drive your buggy on down the
road, so I can end this column! And don’t come back till you
can tell me how to grow hair where it ‘ain’t’.