My regular fasts continued through 1984, by which time I had recovered my fundamental organic vigor and had retrained my dietary habits.  About 1983 Isabelle and I also began using Life Extension megavitamins as a therapy against the aging process.  Feeling so much better I began to find the incredibly boring weeks of prophylactic fasting too difficult to motivate myself to do, and I stopped.  Since that time I fast only when acutely ill.  Generally less than one week on water handles any non-optimum health condition I’ve had since ’84.  I am only 54 years old as I write these words, so I hope it will be many, many years before I find myself in the position where I have to fast for an extended period to deal with a serious or life-threatening condition.

I am a kind of person the Spanish call autodidactico, meaning that I prefer to teach myself.  I had already learned the fine art of self-employment and general small-business practice that way, as well as radio and electronic theory, typography and graphic design, the garden seed business, horticulture, and agronomy.  When Isabelle moved in with me she also brought most of Great Oak’s extensive library, including very hard to obtain copies of the works of the early hygienic doctors.  Naturally I studied her books intensely.

Isabelle also brought her medical practice into our house.  At first it was only a few loyal local clients who continued to consult with her on an out-patient basis, but after a few years, the demands for residential care from people who were seriously and sometimes life-threateningly sick grew irresistibly, and I found myself sharing our family house with a parade of really sick people.  True, I was not their doctor, but because her residential clients became temporary parts of our family, I helped support and encourage our residents through their fasting process.  I’m a natural teacher (and how-to-do-it writer), so I found myself explaining many aspects of hygienic medicine to Isabelle’s clients, while having a first-hand opportunity to observe for myself the healing process at work.  Thus it was that I became the doctor’s assistant and came to practice second-hand hygienic medicine.

In 1994, when Isabelle had reached the age of 54, she began to think about passing on her life’s accumulation of healing wisdom by writing a book.  She had no experience at writing for the popular market, her only major writing being a Ph.D. dissertation.  I on the other hand had published seven books about vegetable gardening.  And I grasped the essentials of her wisdom as well as any non-practitioner could.  So we took a summer off and rented a house in rural Costa Rica, where I helped Isabelle put down her thoughts on a cheap word-processing typewriter.  When we returned to the States, I fired-up my “big-mac” and composed this manuscript into a rough book format that was given to some of her clients to get what is trendily called these days, “feedback.”