Joe. I came upon the Master Cleanse because I was pig-headed enough to keep looking for a natural way to handle my failing health that would not cost me an arm and a leg and would not cause unwanted side effects. I just decided to keep looking until I found that way. Fortunately for me, I succeeded.
I am not a licensed health professional and cannot diagnose or prescribe. However, I knew what it had done for me in 2003 and I began to tell others on the Internet. There I saw the Master Cleanse help more than 100 people regain and maintain their vibrant good health in our first ever group Master Cleanse in January 2004. I also saw that people had the same questions over and over. So, I decided to write this book to answer those questions. Since then I have been fortunate enough to see literally thousands of people benefit from it. In January 2009 alone, we had more than 1,200 people doing the Master Cleanse on our Forum! (You can sign up at www.TheRawFoodSite.com /forum. Or you can also visit the Forum through my Master Cleanse Coach iPhone app by tapping “MC Community” on the first or second page.)
From reading some of the great healers of the past, I believe people can extend their lives and avoid illness and disease if they eat mostly real, live food (raw fruits and vegetables, seeds and nuts), drink unpolluted and unfluoridated water, and clean their colons frequently.
I firmly believe that each person is responsible for his or her own health. If you want to be healthy, have energy and feel good, you must learn what is involved and apply it. You have to monitor what goes into your mouth, what exercise you do, what air you breathe, and most important of all, what thoughts you think. And you need to detoxify regularly.
The good news is that valuable knowledge is available if you take the time to look for it and are willing to determine if The Master Cleanse is true for you and your body. The reason you have to determine it for yourself is that each person’s body is potentially different. For example, most people find penicillin valuable for killing bacteria. Some people are allergic and can die from it.
You are the only person who can make the determination of what is useful or not for you. Health professionals can give you valuable information and do other wonderful things, but ultimately, the buck stops with you. So you have to learn to use good judgment along with your experience, and that includes determining if the information in this book is useful to you.
Therefore, the information in this application is solely for educational purposes. It is not intended as medical advice or to diagnose, treat, cure or prescribe. If you decide to follow it, it must be because you have determined that it would be good for you to try it.
Each person should seek the counsel of their health professional, and then use his or her own judgment. This caution applies to the information in this book and that posted on the website— www.TheRawFoodSite.com. In fact, this caution applies to any information in life.
If you are in ill health, have any disease or are taking any medications and want to do the Master Cleanse, consult your licensed healthcare professional first. Most especially, do not discontinue any medications without guidance from a licensed healthcare professional.
I think the Master Cleanse is great. You have to decide for yourself. I am only telling my story and some of the many stories on the www.TheRawFoodSite.com bulletin board. If you have made the decision to do the Master Cleanse, congratulations for doing something really wonderful for yourself and your body!
Best wishes for your vibrant good health,
Peter Glickman
Foreword
Health care reform is a gargantuan issue facing not just the U.S. but also the entire world. I, too, believe that our system is broken and in need of change. However, I think Washington is barking up the wrong tree. They are busy arguing about coverage and access for the current “sick care” system when what the country truly needs is “health care” reform: reform that shifts the focus from a symptom-suppression model of sick care to one of prevention, wellness and the elimination of unnecessary drugs.
Ironically, Washington appears to mirror the problems that exist in Western Medicine. Sick care treats symptoms instead of dealing with the root causes of disease. Western medicine is not the medicine of the future because it does not address why we are unhealthy and how to change. If we do not change why we are unhealthy, we will continue to be unhealthy and we will remain economically distressed. To provide better health care, to become a healthier nation, we have to make serious changes. We will only flourish when we address the root causes of the problems.
For 2,200 years until 1805, medicine was practiced exclusively according to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (460-377 BC), the founding father of natural medicine. He taught that the first and foremost principal of medicine must be to respect nature’s healing forces, which inhabit each living organism. Thus you are the only person who can cure yourself. Healers only assist. Hippocrates considered illness a natural phenomenon that forced people to discover the imbalances in their health. He strongly believed in good food and related the course of any disease to poor nutrition and bad eating habits. He taught, “Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food,” advice that, to this day, has not lost its validity.
During the 1800s, a new school of medicine emerged: the allopathic school (using drugs to suppress the symptoms of a disease) or Western school, based on patentable drugs. The idea behind it was that doctors can cure, provided they have the correct technology and drugs. During this era, there were more homeopathic doctors (using natural substances to cure the disease) than allopathic ones, as they were preferred. However, by the 1920s, there was only one homeopathic school remaining. Motivated by profit and through legislative maneuvering, pharmaceutical giants ensured allopathic medical dominance, while ignoring the first rule of medicine: first do no harm. Thus, today we are offered drugs that treat depression with a side effect of suicide!
The reality is that medicine has failed to evolve while people are demanding change. No one seems to get well and cries from consumers fall upon deaf ears.
So, unfortunately, it is left up to you to navigate our unfortunate system of sick care. So for those seeking assistance, I relate a fact known for several thousand years: most illness comes from the colon. Few remember that at one time, colon therapists were an integral part of the general medical practice in America. Dr. John H Kellogg published: “Should the colon be sacrificed or may it be reformed?” in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 26 in 1917. After this publication, colon therapy grew in popularity in America until the invention of colonoscopy. Keeping your colon clean and healthy was replaced with simply looking at it.
As part of prevention, keeping your colon clean and healthy is of prime importance. That is one of the reasons the Master Cleanse is a great tool for those seeking prevention of illness and I respect Peter for doing a great job of not only explaining what to do, but also sharing with you others’ experiences and support. Great health does not have to be expensive.
When I started my clinic, Utopia Wellness, I was tired of issuing bandaids in an effort to treat symptoms. I had to teach myself that real medicine is more than just technology and drugs. I became a physician because I wanted to help people find remedies for their problems. I wanted it to serve as a model for this necessary change in health care, where just about any disease is addressed naturally. We stress prevention, not intervention or sick care. Sick care is ineffective and expensive.
Perhaps someday, individuals who understand real health care for our nation may represent WE THE PEOPLE. In the mean time, you had better learn how to prevent illness, since there appears to be little profit for others to do so.
Carlos M. Garcia, M.D.
Introduction
November 1, 2010
In the fall of 2005, shortly after the second edition was published, I discovered that it was beneficial to take probiotics after the cleanse. and began to promote that on the