The Master Cleanse

DO NOT JUST STOP TAKING PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS,
with or without the Master Cleanse!

I am often asked by people taking psychiatric drugs whether they can continue to take them or if they should discontinue them. I used to reply that, like any other prescribed medicine, they needed to consult the prescribing healthcare practitioner or seek the professional advice of another licensed healthcare practitioner.

With psychiatric medicines, it is even more important. As Dr. Donald E. McAlpine, Psychiatry and Psychology, at the Mayo Clinic said, “It’s important to taper off slowly, extending the taper over several weeks under your physician’s direction. When you stop too quickly, you may experience so-called discontinuation symptoms, which can masquerade as relapse.”

Then one day I ran across The Road Back website. Their program has been in use since 1999 and more than 30,000 people are drug-free having followed their program. So, now I send people to their website.

In 1999, James Harper, the Founder and CEO, began investigating antidepressants and the cause of their adverse reactions. He found one common denominator with every adverse reaction caused by antidepressants and all other psychotropic medication.

Now, medical doctors, psychiatrists, chiropractors, pharmacists, naturopaths, registered nurses and other health care providers use The Road Back program in their practice. Even a major university has used Harper’s first book, How to Get Off Psychiatric Drugs Safely, for their doctorate program in psychopharmacology.

A couple of people have asked me to respond to Joy Bauer’s attack on the Master Cleanse on Access Hollywood and I’ll do that. After all, Burroughs’ Master Cleanse produces great results in so many cases that, without any advertising or media, hundreds of thousands of people do it each year and inspire others to do the same! But I think a greater danger lies in those merchants and authors who are selling supplies and ideas for something else than Burroughs’ Master Cleanse and calling it the Master Cleanse.

One website I won’t mention has 8 kits. Only one is for the Master Cleanse as written by Stanley Burroughs. The other 7 kits, all called Master Cleanse Kits, are for every variation imaginable. For those who are worried about not enough protein, one of those kits contains protein to take during the cleanse. Another kit contains vitamins for those that are worried about not getting enough vitamins during the cleanse. Why not sell another with food for those that get hungry?

As readers of this newsletter know, the power of the Master Cleanse comes from it being a juice fast. Fasting has been used for thousands of years to restore health and vitality. Nearly every major religion recommends fasting. The closer a person gets to a pure water fast (nothing else taken) the more powerful the results. Adding anything else, such as psyllium husk/bentonite clay shakes or cayenne in gelatin capsules (made from boiled hooves, tendons & sinews), diminishes the power of the Master Cleanse and reduces it to merely another colon cleanse, not a cleanse and rejuvenator for the whole body, like Burroughs says.

The right approach is to educate people so they understand that going without protein for 10, 20 or 40 days is not fatal, will not lead to permanent damage and in fact, done occasionally, is very beneficial as can be seen from the results posted by the more than 450 people so far in this year’s January cleanse.

Another website sells two kits. One with cayenne powder and a second with capsules for those who do not like the taste of it. Again, this merchant is doing a disservice to his customers because cayenne is much more beneficial taken directly by mouth. He should be educating people so they get the best result possible.

There’s another well known Internet bulletin board that has a posting of “the Master Cleanse” in Spanish. The only problem is that it has the recipe for lemonade wrong! And when someone posted a correction, the original poster replied that he hadn’t done the Master Cleanse himself, but “looked forward to doing it!”

I’ve even seen someone selling a book called “Master Cleanse Secrets.” I would think that’s pretty funny given all the free information I try my hardest to give out. However, one of his “secrets” is what food you can eat to “cheat” on the Master Cleanse—correct answer from Stanley Burroughs: nothing.

Truthfully, I’m not that concerned about the opinions of media “experts” who have never done the Master Cleanse. I’m much more concerned about merchants who alter the Master Cleanse rather than educate people because it’s easier and cheaper.

Why? Because the Master Cleanse will spread and be useful as long as it gets great results. It’s spread because there’s a story in the media, positive or negative. Word of mouth about real results is how “new” discoveries spread.

When your friends and family see you happier, with more energy and looking much healthier, it won’t make any difference what someone on TV said. No, the real danger is changing the Master Cleanse so it’s less effective and still calling it the Master Cleanse. Because then people who don’t get great results will think they’ve tried it and they’ll tell others it doesn’t work and those people will never get a chance to see what the real Master Cleanse can do.

I’m frequently asked about taking supplements or psyllium husk while on the Master Cleanse. My answer up till now has been not to do it because I know from literally hundreds of people that following Stanley Burroughs’ instructions exactly produces great results. So don’t change it.

However, recently I’ve discovered a more fundamental reason. The Master Cleanse is not just eliminating waste from the colon (which is why psyllium husk is used in other cleanses). The health benefits from the Master Cleanse go way beyond this. The power of the Master Cleanse comes from the fact that the Master Cleanse is a juice fast and fasting has been used for thousands of years to regain health and increase mental clarity and spirituality.

To understand why fasting is so powerful at restoring health, we have to go back 140 years to the time of Louis Pasteur, the French scientist who discovered germs and invented the process, Pasteurization, to kill them. Pasteur’s germ theory said that disease is caused by specific external hostile, living things (germs, bacteria, viruses, etc.).

However, at the same time there was another French scientist, Antoine Bechamp, unknown to most everyone now, but at that time a very famous Professor of Pharmacy in Strasbourg, France. Bechamp proved that it was the living environment in the body that provided the opportunity for disease. Specifically, he showed that the germs that fermented wine could change from one form to another depending on the chemical content of the wine.

What does this have to do with fasting and the Master Cleanse? Well, the vaccination/germs/disease theory of medicine says that there are specific things that cause specific diseases. Find the exact virus that causes colon cancer and you can make a vaccine that will protect people from that disease. (Not to mention the fact that whoever finds that exact single source will become rich by owning the patent.)

The concept of health for the two thousand years before that said that the body (living environment) causes disease when it is overwhelmed by overfeeding and poisoned by toxins.

What we call disease is merely the body’s way of dealing with those toxins. Thus anything that allows the elimination organs (liver, intestines, kidneys, gall bladder, skin, and lungs) a chance to concentrate on eliminating old toxins (without adding any new ones) will speed its healing. Thus, adding anything to the Master Cleanse, especially solid food, will reduce the fasting aspect and lessen the results.

Arithmetic is such a nice “clean” science. Everyone agrees that 2 + 2 = 4. No one argues that it equals 5, or 3. When you buy something at the store and use a $5 bill to pay for an item that costs $4, your change is always $1. Aerospace engineers and workers produce workable airplanes from the same plan every time. This is the mark of a known science. The exact same action produces the exact same result every time. With that in mind, let us look at cancer research.

Since 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared War on Cancer, the total amount spent on cancer research and treatment is estimated to have passed the two trillion dollar ($2,000,000,000,000) mark (Wall Street Journal, 16 Oct 2002)!

Yet global cancer rates are expected to increase by half again by the year 2020, according to a 351-page study from a branch of the World Health Organization.

In industrialized countries, more than one person in four currently dies from the disease, a rate more than twice as high as developing countries (countries without the benefit of our expensive laboratories). By the way, the same study reports the industrialized countries with the highest overall cancer rates are the US, Italy, Australia, Germany, The Netherlands, Canada and France.

Clearly cancer isn’t as simple as 2 = 2 = 4 or is it? A member of the Danish Institute of Health, Mikkel Hendhede, made a dramatic proposal to the Danish government during World War I. He said feeding grain to farm animals and then eating meat was wasteful. Using that system, one person can be fed. However, the same amount of grain could feed people. So, he proposed Denmark should sell most of its farm animals to Germany and turn vegetarian for the duration of World War I.

Almost the entire Danish medical establishment protested saying the proteins in grain were incomplete and there would be 1,000’s of deaths from lack of protein malnutrition.

Hendhede told of large vegetarian populations in Africa and India who seemed to do well on a meat-free diet and the Danish government acted on his advice. The Danish medical establishment were utterly in opposition to this and they spent much time and effort on the collection of statistics on deaths with special attention to death from lack of protein.

This should sound familiar to vegetarians who are frequently asked, “But what do you do for protein?” It should also be familiar to Master Cleansers who watch comments on TV from nutritionists, who have never done the Master Cleanse, saying there is not enough protein for it to be “safe.”

Surprisingly, or not, there were no deaths from lack of protein. In fact, by early 1918, the total death rate in Denmark had decreased by 17%, the major part due to fewer cancer deaths!

Once you start to look for yourself, the data is not hard to find. Albert Schweitzer reported that the natives in Gabon, Africa in 1913, were cancer free vegetarians.

In 1923, the British Medical Journal published three letters from English doctors in various parts of Africa reporting the same freedom from cancer.

In 1974, the Hopi Indians of Arizona, living on their traditional vegan diet, were reported to have only one case of cancer per 1,000 people. The white population in Arizona at this time had one case of cancer in every four people.

Near the Hopi are Pueblo Indians. The Federal Department of Indian Affairs decided to improve the diet of the Pueblo Indians by giving them food stamps providing a high meat diet similar to the rest of the population of the US. Not surprisingly, it was not long before cancer went from one in 1,000 to one in four, the same as the general US population.

All of the above comes from the “Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients”, Oct, 2004 by Wayne Martin.

Norman Walker has said the same thing for decades. T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. has recently documented the same findings in The China Study.

Step one for our sick society is for each one of us to realize we are responsible for our own health. We can and should get advice from health care practitioners, but we are the ones who have to understand it and LOOK to see if the information works scientifically time after time. When a doctor says there is no cure, he is only saying “I don’t know of any other cure.”

Step two is to decide that good health can be yours and not to quit looking until you find a workable method for you.

This world is a very large place. It is large enough for “pockets” of true knowledge to exist unknown by the general populace. There is a great deal of valuable, workable knowledge out there. You have to decide it is your job to find it and that you will not stop looking until you do.

There have been many, many physicians and healers who have observed that “Death starts in the colon.” Sir William Arbuthnot-Lane (1856–1943) was such a physician.

As a surgeon, he became famous for three procedures, one of which was treatment of chronic disease by cutting out sections of the colon. He actually mapped the specific areas of the colon that caused various illnesses. Later, he learned more about autointoxication (self-poisoning as a result of accumulated wastes in the colon being reabsorbed into the blood supply).

His research revealed that lack of fresh fruits and vegetables in the diet resulted in chronic illnesses. As a result, he resigned from the British Medical Register in order to promote improved diet as a means of maintaining vibrant good health by means of New Health Society (the first organized body to deal with social medicine). He also started health education programs functioning in the UK today and wrote newspaper articles, held public lectures and improved the distribution of fruit and vegetables.

The swine flu, popularized by the media, is a type of flu virus that is commonly spread among pigs in North America.  There is also a new flu virus that has elements of swine, bird and human parts.  Initially called the swine flu due to its commonalities with the original swine flu, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has renamed it to “Novel Swine Flu (H1N1)”.  They advise that the majority of those who catch this strain of the virus have been able to recover without further medical treatment.  However, for about 70% of those that required hospitalization already had medical conditions that increased the risk of serious complications such as heart disease, pregnancy, diabetes, asthma, suppressed immune systems and kidney disease.

Furthermore, the CDC reports that there are no indications that older adults are at any greater risk of serious complications from the novel swine flu any more than the typical flu.  However, it appears that people younger than 25 seem to get novel swine flu more than older people.

With the exception of those with pre-existing medical conditions and those who are pregnant, the consensus is that novel swine flu is no more serious than the other more common strains of flu for those that are otherwise healthy.

As for the question of whether or not the Master Cleanse (or Lemonade Diet) can be beneficial to improve your overall health and immune response, absolutely.  Detoxifying your body to rid it of toxins and relieving your organs of elimination of excess burden is a great way to strengthen your defenses and feel better at the same time.  Plus, the Master Cleanse is cheap and relatively easy to do.

The Master Cleanse is essentially a juice fast.  It’s helpful to remember that Fasting has been around for centuries and used by Hippocrates, also known as The Father of Modern Medicine, to manage diseases involving sweats, hot or cold.  He is quoted as saying, “If one gives to a person in fever the same food which is given to a person in good health, what is strength to the one is disease to the other.”  Along the same lines, it would appear that the Master Cleanse would be good for flu.

To read more about the Master Cleanse or to get more information on how to achieve a healthier life, please visit our website by clicking here.