How I Discovered The Secret to Repairing Tongues

So now you may be wondering how I discovered the secret to repairing sick tongues…

That’s a good question. It all started when I was a teenager…

Back then, my dad worked for Pan Am (that dates me a bit since they went out of business in 1991), but anyway because my dad worked for the airlines we were able to travel quite a bit. One year we went to Ireland and one year Germany… another year we went to Mexico. And that is where my troubles began.

Caballeros Baños

It seems that during that trip, I picked up a bad case of “Montezuma’s revenge” or traveler’s diarrhea. It was the worst case I have ever had… it seems like I spent half the trip in the men’s room. But after a while I seemed to recover. The operative word there is “seemed”…

Throughout High School, I had recurring bouts of intestinal problems and was diagnosed by my family doctor as having an “Irritable Bowel”. According to him I was too stressed out about school and so the problem in my stomach was really in my head! (Like I said before when they don’t know the answer… the problem must be in Your Head).

Well, I didn’t buy that! My problems didn’t go away during the summer and I’m sorry but life for a high school kid spending his days hanging out on the beach on Long Island isn’t all that stressful!

From there things got progressively worse and eventually I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. The diagnosis didn’t help much. Big deal doctors now had a name for it… but I continued to have problems. Eventually, I made it through a private engineering college in Upstate New York, where I learned the keys to doing good research… which believe it or not, eventually led to saving my life. But I’ll get to that in a minute. But first…

You see, like most college kids… I ate a lot of junk food and I put on a bit of weight. I started college at 120lbs and four years and lots of Pizza and Ice Cream later I weighed 135lbs. But after college, the Crohn’s disease got progressively worse and I started losing weight. Eventually, a friend of mine actually accused me of being anorexic…

But the fact of the matter was it was just too painful to eat!

I would eat a few bites and then be in such pain that I would literally roll around on the floor. Obviously, it was difficult to eat under those conditions. I couldn’t go out for longer than a couple of hours because eating was so painful. And I always had to plan my trips so I knew were the closest bathroom was (because I never knew when the “runs” would hit me). So I went to doctor after doctor. And during this time I developed white patches on my tongue that seemed to migrate around. I later discovered that it was a combination of thrush (yeast) and geographic tongue.

During the treatment process for the Crohn’s disease I found that antibiotics killed the thrush (temporarily) but once I stopped taking them the thrush would come back worse than ever!

Eventually… slowly but surely… I went from a healthy active 135 pounds down to 95 pounds and looking like something out of a concentration camp. My body was so weak my hair started falling out.

Remember I said that your body prioritizes the use of scarce resources? It seems, hair is not high on the priority list either.

I finally convinced a doctor he had to do something… or I was going to waste away to nothing.

So I had surgery. The doctor removed about 1/3rd of my intestines and believe it or not afterward I was feeling wonderful …

IV with Vitamins

I was fortunate, I found a surgeon that knew the benefits of nutrition (at least in theory) and I convinced him that rather than just giving me clear sugar water in my IV, how about putting some vitamins in there? He agreed and I made sure the nurses in the hospital didn’t miss a single one. If they tried to give me the clear stuff, I made them take it back and bring the yellow one with the vitamins in it! And the doctors and nurses were amazed… I healed in “record time”. Imagine that… Someone with a steady stream of vitamins heals faster than someone living on sugar water alone. “Who’d a thunk it?” 🙂

For the next year I was on “Cloud Nine”, going to the beach, building muscle, running, exercising, having a great time doing all the things I hadn’t been able to do for the last couple of years… it was wonderful! Except that after the surgery, I began developing a really bad case of Geographic Tongue and so on one of my follow-up visits with the surgeon I asked him about it and he nonchalantly said, “Oh, we removed the only portion of your intestines that absorbs B-12 so you are probably deficient in that… you will need to take injections for the rest of your life.”

Uh, well wouldn’t it have been nice if you had told me that before?…

Not that it would have prevented me from having the surgery but I could have started on the injections earlier and had less problems…

But then I may not have discovered ….

After starting the injections I found that my Geographic Tongue was gone! At least as long as I took the injections regularly. That was my first clue that Geographic Tongue can be nutritionally based! (Unfortunately, since everyone is different… B-12 isn’t the only cause but it is certainly a good place to start.)

So I started using the research skills I had developed in college to research nutrition and natural ways of healing. Not that I avoided doctors all together… because after about a year the pains started coming back! I was devastated. It was one of the worst days of my life. I had put on a bit of weight by then and I didn’t want to go back to being a walking skeleton! I had just started enjoying life again… It wasn’t fair!

And in addition to my stomach problems, my geographic tongue was getting worse again.

So that was lesson #2- Listen to Your Tongue

The first lesson I learned was that vitamins can help your tongue improve. And the second lesson was to actually pay attention to what your tongue is trying to tell you. Don’t stress over it, it’s not a major catastrophe, it is just your tongue trying to tell you something. But you do need to pay attention.

You need to do something different than you have been doing lately. Something has changed… something isn’t right… maybe you are under more stress physically from sickness or work. Maybe it is mental stress from worry or dealing with sick relatives, etc or even emotional stress.

Whatever it is your body is no longer getting enough nutrients to keep up with the rebuilding process. Maybe you’re being bombarded by bacteria or viruses or yeast. And you may need to reduce the stress, get more sleep or give your body something that it is missing. But you can’t ignore it! Or it will get worse, and not just your tongue other things will start to give way.

Once I learned this secret…

Now by keeping an eye on my tongue I can tell when I might be coming down with a cold or virus (or when I have just forgotten to take my vitamins for a while). And I can head it off before it gets too bad. But that’s not all…

When the student is ready the teacher appears…

You may have heard the old saying, when the student is ready the teacher apears. Well, in my case the teacher was a real estate agent. You see…

During this time I had moved from New York (where I thought the “best” doctors were) to the back of beyond… where it would probably be impossible to find good health care, or so I thought. When I first moved to Bedford, a small town in central Virginia between Lynchburg and Roanoke, I was still in the process of recovering from my surgery. The fresh mountain air was wonderful, and life was good. But it wasn’t perfect. Something still wasn’t right. I had a white coating on my tongue, I knew it wasn’t those same old bald patches with the white rings around it… it was something else.

Tongue Covered with Yeast

It turned out that all the antibiotics and steroids I had been taking for years had killed off all the good bacteria in my system and by now the “Yeast” or “Candida” had taken over. So even though I was able to treat the geographic tongue with vitamin injections… the thrush continued to get worse and eventually the Crohn’s disease came back as well. As the thrush got worse, my overall system got weaker and my body wasn’t able to deal with the outside stresses, so the slightest little thing would “put me over the top”… I developed food allergies, fatigue, mold allergies, my body just didn’t have the reserves to handle anything extra… I was going down hill fast.

Thrush is just a visible sign that Candida is all over your body, it was taking over my digestive system, poisoning my blood and overall weakening my system.

But providentially the lady who was our real estate agent said she had just been reading a book on yeast and it sounded like that was what I had. And I should get the book. So once again I started researching. I guess someone was watching out for me, because it turned out that one of the doctors mentioned in the book as specializing in Yeast ran “Mount Rogers Clinic” a small doctor’s office way out in the boonies of Virginia. And Mount Rogers was exactly two hours and forty minutes away from me. No back roads even it was big highways most of the way, just hop on US-460 to Interstate 81 and I could be there. WOW!

I’m sure I wouldn’t have gone all the way to Virginia to this clinic had I still lived in New York, but this was perfect. The doctor believed in looking at things the typical establishment ignored and he specialized in Yeast problems, what more could I ask for? So I made an appointment and spent half the day on the road (there and back) and half the day at his clinic.

I was amazed, after a week or so of treatment, as the yeast population got less control of my system I started feeling better. And before long my tongue no longer had the thick white coating and I was doing much better.

It’s Baaaaaaack…

Unfortunately, once again, the good times didn’t last and my Crohn’s disease came back. So I had to try to find a new Gastroenterologist (stomach and intestines doctor). I was fortunate in find a young doctor in the big city of Lynchburg (pop. 50,000) who wasn’t afraid to try new things.

He did some tests to confirm that the Crohn’s was back (and it was) and he said, “We found that this medicine works in some cases of Crohn’s disease but we don’t know why, do you want to try it?” I jumped at the chance! I would do anything not to have to go back to the pain and suffering I had gone through before.

Fortunately, it worked for me and

Another step in my system of promoting health was forming.

So the first step I found in controlling geographic tongue is nutrition, and the second step is to listen to your tongue and work on developing systemic health rather than just treating the symptoms that pop up here and there.

Over the years I was able to expand on that basic formula and then one day I was talking to my friend Allison…

Allison began losing weight. At first it looked good on her (I thought she’d gone on a diet or something) but before long I knew there was a problem. She said she had pain when she ate. That sounded familiar so I asked if she had Crohn’s disease… and she said no… the doctor’s said her problem was fibromyalgia which was causing her pain whenever she ate.

So like in my case, she would stop eating before she had gotten enough calories to maintain her normal weight. And somehow this resulted in geographic tongue for her too.

Since the doctors weren’t much help, I knew I had to do something!

So I began putting together some of my old research into a report that I could give to Allison. In addition, I turned my efforts toward finding even more information for my friend.

It became a quest, an adventure, a search for the Holy Grail of health…

Well sometimes my wife says I can become a bit obsessive. Anyway, I spent the next two years compiling all sorts of information that I would periodically give to Allison. And by the time I was done I had 145 8½ x 11 pages of useful information on all types of tongue problems.

Allison was absolutely thrilled with all the information I put together for her… here is what she had to say when I emailed her the information in my report.

Yes, She really did put all those exclamation points in there. To say she was happy was an understatement.  And I was thrilled to be able to help her.

If you’d like more information on How to Eliminate Tongue Problems.