The Passing of a Great Healer

[Guest guest]

Dr. Bernard Jensen

 

Excerpts from an article by Dr. Richard Schulze in his May, 2001 Get Well Newsletter!

 

Dr. Bernard Jensen died near the end of February in his sleep. I’ll give you a tiny bit of his history, and my history with this great man. Mostly I will give you his pearls of Natural Healing Wisdom.

 

Dr. Jensen was born in Stockton, CA and at the age of 18 he entered Chiropractic college. In 1929 he opened his first clinic. Even while he practiced he continued to study at various Naturopathic colleges. He was even a classmate at the Dominion Herbal College, with the late Dr. John R. Christopher, America’s greatest herbalist of the twentieth century. He worked at Battle Creek Sanitarium under Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and knew just about every prominent Natural Healer of the era. Even Dr. Kirshner, who specialized in juice therapy, visited Dr. Jensen’s Health Ranch to observe the extremes Dr. Jensen would go to, to create healing miracles, like a 365 day juice fast, WOW. Dr. Jensen, like myself, was a perpetual student and that is what made him a master. After 25 years in practice, in 1955, he opened his Hidden Valley Health Ranch near Escondido, when I was just a kid. He continued his practice and taught there for almost 30 more years, writing more than 50 books and seeing more than 350,000 patients.

 

That’s what is important to me, seeing more than 350,000 patients. THIS MAN KNEW WHAT OTHERS ONLY TALK ABOUT. So I would like to tell you what this man learned during his OVER 70 years of clinical practice, studying, teaching, and a life of helping people to get well. Dr. Jensen also took more than a half a dozen worldwide trips in his life to meet and study people, his favorite subject. He would often travel to areas of the world where people were known to live the longest from the Hunza mountain valleys of Asia to Soviet Georgia. He would then observe and study what these people ate and how they lived, to add this information to his storehouse of knowledge. He would even bring back vegetable seeds to grow their foods in his own organic garden.

 

Dr. Jensen put Nutrition as #1. I remember many times when a patient wouldn’t get it, he would grab his body, or theirs, then squeeze their arm, shake it and yell, "This stuff, YOU, your body, your flesh and bones, It’s all made with nutrition, Nutrition is what YOU are made out of!" He was a Nutritional Healer meaning he was a FOOD healer. His main therapy was Organic Food and Juice way back when the word organic wasn’t yet heard of. He was obsessed with his organic garden, at one time growing up to 3,000 carrots a month for his juicing program for himself and his patients. He knew that our body was made from nutrients, and even studied which organs and systems of the body thrived on which nutrients. He would stuff his patients full with raw, organic food and down them with raw organic juices. He know the best way to get a patient well and assist a body to repair itself was to FLOOD the system with vitamins, minerals and every nutrient that God has provided, but the way Nature provides it, NEVER man made, synthesized, laboratory crap. With his food and the juice therapy I saw thousands of miracles happen, including the continuation of my own healing.

 

As I mentioned earlier, Dr. Jensen was also an herbalist. While many herbalists of the past century were looking for the healing or medicinal phytochemicals in an herb. Dr. Jensen was more interested in the vitamins and minerals in an herb. We would occasionally walk together through his gardens and then out into the surrounding countryside and he would ask me to identify for him some of the wild herbs that grew on his Health Randy. Since I was an apprentice to the late Dr. Jon R. Christopher and sometimes even passed messages between these two great healers, he knew I was a good herbalist. But when I would tell him about the essential oils in a particular plant that were urinary disinfectants or the alkaloids in other plants that were muscular antispasmodics I could see he wasn’t that interested. He wanted to know what vitamins and minerals were in the herbs, because he was a nutritional healer and he knew if he could get the nutrition in, he could get his patients well. He was a FOOD HEALER!

 

We would also discuss super concentrated herbs that were now to be the richest sources of particular vitamins and minerals. He was a big fan of alfalfa grass, wheat grass, barley grass, rose hips and he was very interested in Chlorella algae.

 

During the 1940’s, WWII and after, the great blitz of modern medicine and the AMA came close to obliterating Natural Healing. Dr. Jensen not only kept it alive and well in America, but he also promoted a form of genetic analysis called Iridology - observing a person’s genetic constitution from the study of the iris of the eye. In the early 1940’s he began an a11 year research project that resulted in a 360 page book on Iridology. One thing that his observations into the analysis proved, but what he had already confirmed in his practice, was that many people had genetically weak digestive systems, were chronically constipated, and that this backup of poisons in their systems was a major cause of disease and illness.

 

Because of this Dr. Jensen used colon cleansing as a fundamental in his clinic. He did a special type of gravity/slant board/enema/colonic combination that he developed which he called the colema. It was very effective at getting the old, impacted fecal matter out. In addition he used raw foods, juices, herbs, etc. To this day Dr. Jensen might hold some Guinness record for the most enemas given or for the tons of fecal matter removed, but I can attest that cleansing the bowel, like with most natural healers, was one of the most important foundations of this program. In the summer I interned at his Health Ranch I never saw more fecal matter in my life. Buckets full - wheelbarrows full.

 

Dr. Jensen was a master at simplicity, breaking things down to their simplest level. Obviously an extremely intelligent man, he was also a master at seeing what so many of us miss, what is right in front of our noses. I remember when he was observing a patient that was having a 3 year bout with sciatica. The pain was so extreme that the man was going to let medical doctors carve into his body and cut and cauterize his sciatic nerve. He couldn’t stand the pain anymore. It was literally killing him. The patient described the pain as continual. It was a sharp and burning pain down the right side from his lower back all the way to his right foot. Dr. Jensen simply told this man he had too much money, and that the patient had to give Dr. Jensen his wallet and his money and not come back to the clinic for 2 weeks.

 

The Man looked quite startled, but was desperate, and willing to do anything including this. I thought, "Oh no, Dr. Jensen is really a quack, or some gypsy thief." After the patient left, Dr. Jensen proceeded to explain to me that this man had a very thick wallet that he carried in his right back pants pocket. This man had a desk job and was sitting all day long on this thick leather wallet that was pressing directly on his sciatic nerve. The patient returned 2 weeks later with no pain, a miracle healing after 3 years of excruciating, debilitating pain. Even as a trained Doctor of Chiropractic, who could have treated this man with countless adjustments and numerous types of body work, he was always searching for the simplest of solutions first, and the real cause of the disease.

 

Well Dr. Jensen never worked on anyone for free. NEVER, EVER. Everyone paid, period. He knew that if he let anyone slide, that he would be commiserating and backing up the person’s belief that they were poor, incapable, unfortunate, unable, or that life was tough, or a million other negative affirmations that many people develop as part of their disease. Or maybe the other way around, they develop their disease because of their negative mind or loser attitude. He also knew that the patient had to make getting well the most important thing in their life, even if it meant selling their furniture, their clothes, or event their car, as I did to intern with him.

 

Anyway everyone paid, and if you didn’t have any money, then you went to work, gardening, plumbing, cleaning, whatever, but there were no free rides. Dr. Jensen knew that energetically there had to be what he referred to as an "energy exchange", and without it, there would be no healing.

 

Finally, in the final years I saw Dr. Jensen in practice, COLOR was becoming very important to him. I should say that it was actually always important. He felt a great way to make sure that you got all of your needed vitamins and minerals was (always to make sure) that your food, your lunch or dinner bowl looked like a rainbow, was colorful. He knew that whatever made different colors in foods were actually different vitamins and minerals.

 

But later on he was moving more and more into color. Scientists tell us that different colors have different wave lengths, different vibrations, and therefore Dr. Jensen knew that different colors affect us in different ways physically, emotionally and spiritually.

 

One of the last things Dr. Jensen told me, in his beautifully simplistic, natural way, was to take the time to watch the sunrise in the morning and the sunset in the evening. He felt that all of the colors changing at this time of the day was food for our body. He felt that it was a different type of nutrition that we assimilated through our eyes directly into our brain, but necessary nutrition nonetheless.

 

I have never fully agreed with anyone’s approach to health and healing, even Dr. Jensen’s. When I was very young and I interned with this great man he had already been in practice for over 50 years and I, only a few years. I was the toughest, roughest, most headstrong natural healing Gestapo student practitioners he had ever seen. Some times when he would prescribe cod liver oil, pig digestive juices, kefir or veal joint broth and because I have always been a strict vegetarian, I would utter comments, kind of under my breath but loud enough to be heard. One day in the clinic he had heard enough. He looked me right in the eye and yelled, "I want to see you in my office." He sat me down and very loudly told me that his methods were based on the best of his over 50 years of clinical practice and that I needed to observe, have more respect for him and keep my mouth shut. He was right.

 

He then proceeded to tell me that I reminded him of a very tough, headstrong, young natural healing student he once knew a long time ago - himself. Cocky, brash, tough, self assured and not afraid to try anything on himself or with a patient. He told me that his greatest desire was that someday, I and his other interns, would take all of his work to an even higher level, improve on his protocols, make his programs cleaner and make natural healing even more effective. I apologized, we hugged and that day I grew a little bit taller, and a lot wiser.

 

Dr. Jensen, my great teacher, thank you for your patience with me. We two rams butted heads many times and the few times you threw me out you always welcomed me back. Wherever you may be, you, your work and your experiences changed my life, and I used it to help change the lives of a million more people that you never met.

 

I would say goodbye but you will always be in my heart. I would say, "may you rest in peace", but I know wherever you are, you are still preaching the gospel of Natural Healing, because you know, I know, a half a million of our patients know and millions more of our followers know, Natural Healing Works!

Ian "Doc" Shillington N.D.505-772-5889Dr.IanShillington