In 2013, I was a 43 year old male dying a slow and painful death.
I had been plagued since the late 1990's with lower back and whole body pain that no one could diagnose. In late 2012, I shut down my home renovation and contracting business. I put my real estate license on a shelf. I put a small metal art business and the beautiful robot that served me into moth balls. My global travel experience, my Mechanical Engineering Degree, my Masters in Business, my Big Business experience and 13 years of very creative self employment experience including full-stack web development were pretty much useless to me.
It was time to fix my health or die.
I couldn't walk 100 yards without extreme pain. My body was filled with lactic acid from neck to toe -- morning to night -- from an unknown stress (or a few, as it turned out). I had leaky gut. I had auto-immune issues. I had alopecia. I was dying a slow and painful death. Thirty to sixty minutes of light yoga, or light meditation while laying flat on my back, several times a day were the only natural remedies I could afford to keep the pain bearable. My cats and a supporting partner were the support system I had to rely on to work my way out of a very deep hole or wish bon voyage to all.
It was late 2013 when I scheduled yet another appointment with yet another orthopedic surgeon.
I had already had 10 surgeries to repair ripped, torn and broken body parts that were being put under odd stresses. The surgeries started in 1994 or so. I had 4, or was it 6, in 2010 alone. Unfortunately, none of those diagnostic processes ever exposed nor addressed the underlying stressor that caused chronic pain which could become extremely acute at times.
This time, I only saw three possible outcomes:
1) We were going to properly diagnose the source of the pain and address it properly OR 2) We were not going to properly diagnose the source of the pain, and I was going to convince doctors to surgically sever my hamstrings to reduce that pain, and live whatever life I was left with after that OR 3) I was going to take myself out of the game of life.
At this point in my life, in 2013:
I was familiar with Acupuncture for allergies and pain and had been since 2000. I was familiar with muscle testing for allergies and had been since 2000. I had been familiar with Meditation for 15 years. I was new to hatha yoga out of necessity, and damn did it hit he spot for pain management. I was vaguely familiar with herbs and not familiar at all with Clinical Nutrition. (And those in the know realize what I was missing was probably larger than what I knew. The Medical Machine's white wash of nutritional information from the 1930s was obliterating. )
By 2013, I had been familiar with the positive benefits of orthopedic and general surgeries for properly identified ailments for decades, having logged about 8 or 10 outpatient surgeries by then. I was also quite familiar with an array of antibiotics and vaccines as well as seasonal and food allergies that had plagued me my entire life.
Unfortunately, I had also been keen to the horrific nature of the private health insurance system since 1992, when I was turned down for health insurance as I departed my parents umbrella. By that time, this private insurance system had silently evolved into a forced labor system for Corporate America and our Government entities, ensuring that all creative types with a pre-existing condition were unable to pursue the lives they were destined for.
This forced labor system also made for a "perfect" sales system for petrochemical based pharmaceuticals. which few would consume if they hadn't been indoctrinated at a far younger age. Hospitals and Medical Practices aren't problem solving entities, they are sales entities, looking for customers who might think they need the products and services they have to offer. This is easy to see when you realize that no one truly follows you through a complex healing process.
And while the orthopedic portions of my Western Medieval experience for diagnosed problems had been "okay", the lack of a proper diagnosis for a decades long chronic pain matter combined with a plethora of auto-immune issues that were piling high was literally killing me, one day at a time.
And then it happened...
The orthopedic doctor listened to my long pain history.
Without putting his hands on me much, he was without explanation, as was the case with the other docs who then got sidetracked with my other issues they could fix for easy profits.
At a loss, and determined this would be my last attempt to find an answer, I asked the doctor to x-ray my hips.
I remember telling him that my hips, generally central to all the pain, were about the only body part none of the doctor's had focused on.
This Doctor was "nice guy" and he said "sure", seemingly only to console me. He walked me around the corner to the x-ray room.
And it was that stupidly, simple $45 x-ray that I initiated which exposed cam and pincer lesions on my femur and sacrum on both sides (aka hip impingements, aka fai ).
The surgeon called me to the x-ray viewing screen and showed me what was up. It was so clear to see it was silly.
And right AFTER that, he laid me on a table, put his hands on me, and did 10 seconds worth of range of motion tests which I failed miserably. Range of motion tests which could have been used to detect massive physical defects at least a decade earlier to confirm the results of the x-ray?!?! That's 180 degrees out of phase?!
And it's on that day, at that very moment, as he was completing simple range of motion tests that any moron-in-the-know could have executed to help me diagnose this, that I started asking myself...
wTF?! WtF?! oMg?! wtF?!
And it was then and only then I started to learn about the utterly corrupt Rockefellar Medicine Education System which eliminated the entire "wellness" portion of our "medical system spectrum" along with all proper nutritional education almost a century prior...
And and I've been a little HOT ever since.
The brainwashing started for the current generations at a young age with Soap Opera's that glamorized medical professionals and the medical profession. Via these shows which ran in the background for some while being consumed by others, children, young adults and older ones alike were lead to believe we did NOT have answers for life's most challenging health issues like cancer, when in fact, we had them as a society over 100 years ago, when some of the most amazing researchers and scientists ever to walk the planet stepped out of the shadows and into the spotlight.
The confusion about what was known was cleverly obfuscated by groups of profiteers. That masking was then compounded with a fake food pyramid scheme which was noting more than a marketing ploy to provide greater profits and control to Big Ag, Big Farm ,and Big Pharma while leading us all drastically and dramatically astray from our all natural, plant based roots.
The brain washing was reinforced with shows like Doogie Howser, ER and House. If you watched any of those, you were lead to believe Medicine is still a mystery to be solved -- and mysteries pull on our souls like few other powers -- often times pulling so hard we forget to include the mind in our earthly visit.
However, it was deathly obvious I needed a lot more than some bone grinding. My organs were subtly failing too. So I went in search of a Healer. I needed to find someone who knew as much about Healing as I knew about our utterly corrupt commercial worlds, and that's when I met him. Ric Valentine
It's amazing I, or anyone else for that matter, found him given he was without a working website, without signage on his front door with hours or a phone number, and without reasonable systems for sharing the worlds of knowledge he had re-accumulated during his most recent 30 years of practice.
Truthfully, it was only out of mutual necessity that we became friends.
If I wasn't dying, I would not have stuck around (<<< ???) , and I feel we both realize the mutual loss that would have been.
In 2014 I had 6 surgeries...
My life became bearable. But there were still many internal issues to address. Ric, with his understanding of Herbs, Clinical Nutrition and Acupuncture helped me work through a lot over the next 4 years. In return I helped him too. A lot.
In September 2018...
I was feeling much better than I had in a long time, although something still wasn't right. I still "needed" yoga every morning or else I couldn't move well...
In November 2018, I had a full, physical relapse...
I had never felt fully correct physically. I was faking it as well as a I could, and I did that quite well with lots of morning Yoga. But that all came crashing down. Something triggered a melt down. Not sure exactly what it was, but it may have been chemical related.
In January 2019, I went Back to the Orthopedic Surgeon with a list of ailments that would rival most small shopping lists...
Eight MRI's later, we had a plan in hand.
In 2019, I had a bone spur removed from the top of my right foot that was affecting my quad, my back and my neck, as we found out after the releases came after it was removed. Then I had a redo on my right hip that uncovered a bone sliver that was rattling around and not viewable on an MRI. During that same surgery, I had a bone spur removed form my inner left elbow that was creating a hell of an over sensitive funny bone. Six weeks later, I had another surgery on my left elbow that removed a ganglion cysts and repaired a torn muscle, and during that surgery he then slid up to my shoulder to address the SLAP tear there.
It was around this time that time that Ric introduced me to him.
During the past 5 years, I have worked diligently to help Ric regain control of a life and a timeline that had been swept out of control by swarms of commercial forces released some time ago that were hell bent on destroying small business.
Key pieces to Ric's Commercial Recovery has been the use of Chromebooks, Google's Business Suite offering and the paradigm busting release of cloud based spreadsheets.
But that wasn't enough to meet all of his needs
So we took Google Sheets and we turned them into the Small Business Relational Database Systems he needed to become human again too.
So it was Ric's recovery process that forced the surfacing of a new type of business system for small business owners and creative individuals that everyone needs to know about now.
Then Craig stepped in to guinea pig pit for a second pass, and that's when things started to really heat up (or cool down, depending on your perspective)...
Once you know the story, you will always remember that it was Ric's recovery and Craig's addiction to exploring recovery that forced the creation of a new type of business system for small business owners that is going to change the small business and micro computing landscape for many moons.
Together, we've decided to make sure these systems are shared with others in an open-source, data independent, fully customizable way that has too many benefits for any to understand out of the gate.
As all Herbalists know, all pharmaceuticals get their inspiration from nature.
Many come from herbs, and many more come from plants.
Pharmaceuticals aren't magical, but the natural sources of inspiration for them most certainly are.
Customer/Client/Patient Modules
Products and Services modules
Point of Sale Systems
SOAP Notes Management Systems (both database driven and folder driven processes)
Insurance Bill Tracking and A/R Systems
Workers Compensation Case Management, Bill Generation, and A/R Systems
Tax Accounting Systems (to replace Quickbooks)
and more. much more including industry specific solutions well outside of your needs like Metered Water Billing, Legal Billing, Billing and Patient Management for Counseling professionals, and much, much more...
Everyone paying even a small bit of attention knows our chemical laden, mostly European owned pharmaceutical systems are doing more harm than good.
As these systems continue to break down, people need to know what their herbal, clinical nutrition, and homeopathic options are