Gout #10, Bringing on a Healing Crisis: Vegetable Juice

I made my 2011 New Year’s resolution to not take pain killers to alleviate gout symptoms so that I would cure my gout (which remarkably lead to my last gout attack ending on Dec 30, 2011 and then being completely gout free for 2012). I then finished a normal excess drinking gout episode by January 7, and then the months passed, and absolutely nothing happened! 

I was quite disciplined and ate a low carb diet with the occasional sugar/carbs binge, exercised (walking and yoga), and avoided all alcohol. I was feeling quite healthy and researching gout on the internet, but 6 months passed and nothing happened. No change in weight or any symptoms of gout.

I decided to take more active action:

1. I switched from cigarettes to e-cigarettes which lead to a dramatic increase in feeling better without any angst. It was fairly easy to switch, and after a few weeks those dirty smelly cigarettes became disgusting, and I could never go back. Plus, nicotine (and natural tobacco) is a valuable detoxifier, and was one of the substances recommended by dowsing. (Also, this substance was recommended by dowsing as a detoxifier, see link).
2. I heard about a heavy metal detoxifier (chelater) called fulvic acid which was derived from some mud in Eastern Europe. I bought those supplements and started taking a treatment course in that.
3. I took some aloe vera that I dowsed would help with my gout. I also took borage oil (dowsed as effective), fish oil, and the tissue salts Nat Phos and Kali Phos, but that was not new to me.
4. I bought a juicer and began to juice vegetables.

While I don’t know "what caused what" because I was not running an experiment on a single substance, I believe that vegetable juice was the main beneficial agent. I initially thought that cabbage was the main beneficial agent, but have since come to believe that it was cucumber due to its molyB content (holy moly!).

I got an electronic pH meter (Note: paper pH strips were unable to measure pH accurately) and measured the pH of every fruit and vegetable that could be juiced. They were all acidic; with cucumber being the least acidic at around the low 6s. So much for the “pH diet” (this is not the answer to gout, respiration and other complex outweigh any spurious pH information. Anyway, fish, milk, and liver are the most alkaline foods and these are not recommended, go figure!) I avoided the sugary juices like beets and carrots.

The recipe that arose was the 5-Cs:

• Cabbage juice, 500ml, just regular cabbage.
• Cucumber, 500ml, great source of molybdenum (see #18, chemical specifics of gout 2)
• Celery, 500ml
• Capsicums, 500ml, green ones.
• Cauliflower and/or Broccoli, 500ml. I juiced the stems and leaves which taste exactly like the vegetable, and not the white flowers which do not juice. I would ask the guy at the farmer’s market to give me the stems and leaves he had cut off other people’s cauliflowers, which he was happy to get rid of.
• Lemon juice, 100ml. The final ingredient was squeezing 4 or 5 lemons. The citric acid is a good preservative and it increased the refrigerator life of the final product to at least 5 days safely.

These were my core juices. If available I would juice 50ml of Coriander/Cilantro, an amazing deep green colour that reeks of medicine, or Kale, or Spinach, or Silver Beet, or Asparagus etc. Sometimes I had 10 different juices in the mix. I had a strong bias towards green vegetables, as non-green capsicums and red cabbage would turn the whole mixture a dirty looking color.

The first thing I noticed was that my appetite was curtailed almost immediately by the V juice. It also was very good in helping sugar and alcohol cravings (see gout #11, reducing alcohol cravings).

The fresh juice tasted best: full of life and energy, and the blend tasted better than the individual juices, with celery and cabbage, in particular, tough juices to drink by themselves. I didn’t have the time to juice every day and the taste stayed good for days. In some ways, the blend is there to allow the cabbage juice to be easily consumed, particularly after a few days in the fridge.

Eating a raw vegetable like cabbage is fairly difficult. It is tasty and spicy but there are large amounts of indigestible fiber that must be consumed (the logic that putting all that fiber in the digestive tract is helpful can be equally applied to cardboard, and like eating cardboard, fiber stresses my system). On the other hand a medium cabbage may only produce 500ml to a litre of juice and the juice seems to be the digestible component – at least for raw cabbage – and certainly contains extremely beneficial substances. Cooked cabbage (and the other vegetables) was also a part of my diet combined with some fat from meat, and I think both raw (juice) and cooked cabbage is beneficial and synergistic.

About 2 months after drinking the vegetable juice almost every day (8 months into my new program), the healing crisis started. I didn’t know anything about healing crises and it was after I had recovered that I found that term on the web. One site recommended vegetable juice to induce healing crisis, so I think it is safe to assume that the V juice was mainly responsible.

The healing crisis involved being out of action for almost 3 weeks, hardly eating, and drinking a lot of water. (I now believe that drinking "dead water" is not as good as v-juice or even coffee). It was like a mega Gout attack with other symptoms. I had strange dark marks on my back that moved around. I had very dark urine, one time it was actually a black colour. I even experienced 2 days of back spasms where I had to lie/sleep on the floor as I physically couldn’t get out of bed. Back spasms are a different type of pain to the constant burning of gout, as they are intermittent and I would dread the reappearance of a spasm: but, I wouldn’t like to have to choose one over the other. Handling the pain is described in gout #2. I surmise that the toxins were being released from tissues in my back, perhaps from the fat around the organs, which led to these symptoms. The gout seemed to have a purpose as well. It visited my major joints in order, from feet, knees and elbows, but always only affecting one leg at a time so I could hop and move when I had to -- some type of evolutionary survival technique? This is more evidence of body intelligence. The healing crisis was a whole program and it seemed like ancient instructions were being followed in a logical manner. The body knew what it was doing and took over my existence for these 3 weeks.

I stayed away from any medical treatment. I sensed that the process of healing is often painful, as described in gout #1. My suspicion is that doctors would have interfered with the healing process, alleviating symptoms and keeping all the toxins inside my body.

My very last treatment in this episode was a surprise. I still remember clearly the first day in about 3 weeks that I had been able to make it outside. (Another piece of evidence in favour of the body’s intelligence was that the healing crisis hit at a rare time where I had 3 weeks during which I could work from home). I was weak, but walking well, my joints had recovered, and feeling clean on the inside. Life was fresh and new. The feel of the wind on my skin and the smells were amazing. I took a walk to a park, and took my shoes off to walk on the grass like a new-age hippie. The weather was cool, but the sun was hot so the spring day was pleasant. I took two steps and boom, a bee sting! This was fantastic! I imagined that new-age rich people pay to get given bee stings. I took out the stinger. There was a burning/buzzing pain, but it was different to gout pain. I’d spent so much time in pain these past 3 weeks that it didn’t bother me at all, and I went back to feeling the grass on my feet as I walked on, though on the alert for bees, thankful for the free medicine from the bee, thankful for life, thinking how much better the future could now be.