Margaret--i tried just about everything holistic that i read about. It was a couple of years before i got internet that i first got into that so i could do websearches for info. but on the first floor of my apartment buuilding there was a health foods store and they had a books section and i started reading and buying some of those books, some of them advised a whole range of different holistic things, nutrition, diet, herbs, supplements, body work like massage or acupuncture. It's paid out of pocket so i was limited, so i started with Chinese herbs. i went to a Chinese medicine doctor and she gave concoctions of herbs and i faithfully took them, 4 days i day, i had to cook them on the stove and drink the brew. I used to have abnormal liver function tests. While i was doing the chinese herbs, i did start feeling better, not perfect, but much better, and was very happy when my liver funciton tests came out in the normal range for the frist time since i'd been paying attention to them. It happened two times in a row, i would have it tested every 3 months or so. I stopped going to that doctor because it was too expensive for me. And my liver tests went back to abnormal again.
i tried all kinds of supplemntsi, including colon cleansing herbs. I tried just about everything. I went to a homeopathic doctor and he referred me to a nutritionist who he said was special, not like the others. At that time i was trying vegan diet, no animal products, for about a year. He said the nutritionist would probagly recommend meat. She did---beef and fish, though no chicken. i was desperate and she inspired my confidence, so i followed her suggestions, no salt, no sugar, no caffiene, many things were not on the diet she recommended. Each person is different, not everyone gets the same diet recommended. There were so mnay things not on my diet. i shifted to that diet. Within a couple of weeks i was feeling a lot better, actualy feeling great. She said i would have many ups and downs during hte healing process,and htat turned out to be true. The ups were times of feeling really healthy, where i felt confident that my health was good. The downs were when i would get some kind of symptom that would worry me, usually worry about cancer, depending on the symptom, she said i would probably take about a year nad a half to be healed. i don't know if it took that long, maybe more like a year of ups and downs, but then it leveled out to where i truly was in really excellent health, all my different symptoms went away, headaches, weak legs, foggy head, i just felt good, i had all the energy i could want, i was never fatigued. I was strict in staying on the diet for about 10 years, and then finaly started slacking off. Still, the old symptos did not come back, but i did get that insulinoma. My plan is to get back into the nutritional practices that seemed so healing before, 20 years ago. My nutritionist learned how to work with people on how to eat from Henry Bieler MD, he wrote a book called Food Is Your Best Medicine, and my nutritionist, Eileen Poole was her name, followed along with Bieler's way of doing things, but she really worked intuitively. sadly, she died earlier this year. she was about 88 years old.
When i got into the holistic thing, i began trying to avoid avoidable toxins i the environment. As i thought of it, endeavored to minimize exposure of my body to toxins that would weaken my body, and i supported my body with the kind of nutrition it needed, that seemed to result in really good results. If nothig else, it did give me a feeling of empowerment, that i wasn't just helpless and waiting for the next bad thing to happen, i felt that i was doing things that were resulting in good health and safety from illnesses. So it was a head trip that relieved my anxiety about being threatened by illnesses.