Many
people are finding, in herbal remedies, the solution to health-care
problems conventional medicine has been unable to address. It’s hard to
remember that as recently as a few decades ago, herbs were not generally
accepted or available.
Bill
Fage, a fit-looking man in his fifties with a ready smile, is one of those
who used herbs to resolve serious health problems. The experience led him
to a deeper study of herbs, and he is now considered responsible for
having reintroduced herbs to New England and for training many of the
herbalists practicing here.
Thirty
years ago, Fage says, he “had psoriasis from head to foot — I wouldn’t
go out in public.” He also suffered from bleeding ulcers and
hemorrhoids. Because his parents had used natural remedies, he was
receptive to the idea of herbs and had been a distributor for two
companies at different times in the sixties. Despite taking their herbs,
he had health problems until he came across the Nature’s Sunshine brand,
which “cleaned up the skin and got rid of the hemorrhoids.” As a
result of the improvements in his own health, people began coming to him
and asking about herbs.
“In
the course of about six months’ time,” Fage says, “I went from being
a little old farm boy, isolated to myself, to being a manager with one of
the biggest herb suppliers around — Nature’s Sunshine Products. I went
from welfare — food stamps — to being audited by the United States
government, because I was making a five-figure income.”
Fage
subsequently studied muscle testing, iridology, and foot
reflexology, “all of which were completely foreign to me. I thought each
one was ridiculous when I heard about it, but after months and, in some
cases, years of study, I began to say, ‘Hey, these all sort of tie
together.’ ”
Muscle
testing allowed Fage to be much more accurate in finding the herbs and
nutrients a person needed for a specific condition than merely
recommending what typically works. Using muscle testing, Fage says, he
“found things that would ordinarily not be found.” Muscle testing, he
says, “is a way of using the human body to find out which foods it needs
this week as opposed to next week, and even the amounts. You can simply
ingest those foods or hold those foods and use some type of muscle as an
indicator. It takes some of the guesswork out of ‘What do I need most
today, this month, or next month?’ ”

Iridology
is a technique of evaluating the condition of the internal organs by
examining the irises of the eyes, based on the concept that each part of
the iris corresponds to a particular organ or system. Iridology, Fage
says, involves “picking up the vibration between glands, organs, and the
brain. When those vibrations either become excited or calm down, the fiber
in the eye, the ectodermal tissue, will rise or fall according to the
amount of signals, and it will look either light or dark in the eye. All
an iridologist does is look to see if the fibers are raised
up — light — or sunk down — dark. Then they look at a specific area. Each
area of the eye — there are hundreds of them — relates to different glands
and organs.”
Fage
bought a camera made especially for iridology that was developed by Dr.
Bernard Jensen, another pioneer American herbalist and iridologist. He no
longer interprets the pictures himself but sends them to Dr. Jim Jenks, a
holistic practitioner in California. Fage tells the story of a client for
whom he suggested an iridology consultation. "She thought it was pretty
crazy at first,” he says. He sent the photo to Dr. Jenks, who suggested
checking for heart problems. As it happened, the family had a history of
heart problems. “They became very intrigued, because here’s a man
thousands of miles away with nothing but a photograph, telling them all
about themselves.
“Everybody
has a weak link,” Fage says. “If we know where our weak link — or, in
some cases, links — are, we can strengthen them by our diet and lifestyle.
It’s still going to be a weak link, but since you’re aware of it, you
can prepare and buffer the body to deal with that. Is the problem totally
gone? No. But she’ll probably live a lot longer and healthier life
knowing what she knows and cutting out salt and taking HS [an herbal
preparation containing hawthorn] and some of these other things.”

Not
all herbs are created equal, Fage points out. “Plants can only pick up
what’s in the soil, particularly in the case of minerals,” he says.
“A lot of herbs are being mass produced to meet demand for herbs now and
are being grown with chemical fertilizers instead of organic methods, so
you won’t have all the trace elements in there.” Therefore, he says,
it’s important to find a company that runs a variety of tests on its
herbs, to make sure each batch is organically grown or wildcrafted and
that everything is there that should be and nothing is there that
shouldn’t be.
Fage
deplores the current tendency for herb manufacturers to create what are
called “standardized extracts.” The term “standardized” indicates
that each package contains a specific quantity of the herb’s “active
ingredient.” One problem with this, Fage says, is that an herb can be
“standardized” either by concentrating a batch of the raw ingredient
or merely by adding an “active ingredient” that has been chemically
synthesized. Unless the manufacturer indicates this information on the
label, there’s no way to tell which is the case.
Second,
Fage asks, what property of the active ingredient has been
“standardized”? The product could be “standardized” as to weight
or even color. Third, what “standard” is the manufacturer using?
Finally, Fage asks, "if an herb has been ‘standardized’ to a
certain active ingredient, does that mean all the other ingredients [i.e.,
trace elements] are there? Not necessarily. So I don’t like
standardization. ‘Standardized’ is a very tricky term.” Fage says a
label can contain “every buzzword a consumer wants to see” and still
be misleading. Therefore, he says, “the integrity of the company is
important.”
Fage
maintains an herb retail business in Sterling,
Massachusetts. His facility also includes practitioners who do
consultations using muscle testing, iridology, and other techniques. “Everything
I’ve talked about, I’ve practiced — and thought it was the best thing
going when I learned it,” Fage says. “Now, after about twenty-five
years, I’m back to
simply talking about herbs as foods. I grow many
types of herbs in my organic garden. Probably ninety-eight percent of what
I sell, I purchase from Nature’s Sunshine Products, and I’m right back
to ‘Herbs are not alternative medicines.’ That’s the way most people
are looking at it — it gives it the completely wrong light. Herbs are
foods.
“I’m
going back to almost a crusade, trying to drive people away from the idea
that herbs are an alternative medical approach. Herbs are just foods — no
more, no less — that have been noted over centuries of time for having
certain effects on the human body.” Without the nutrients in herbs, Fage
says, “certain systems of the body may not work properly.”
Fage
warns that “there seems to be a movement to make herbs ‘alternative
medicine.’ ” If this happens, he says, “they'll try to take it away
from the common person like myself and put it into the hands of the
professional medical people or the professional dieticians. They’ll
charge all outdoors for it. They’re trying to isolate active
ingredients, to standardize to certain active ingredients. That’s not
the purpose of herbs. That’s how medicine got away from herbs in the
beginning.”
It's
surprising to learn that Fage’s many accomplishments do not include
attending a traditional college. He is a certified master herbalist
through several different schools, the most difficult being Dr. John
Christopher’s School of Natural Healing. Fage studied personally with
Dr. Christopher, who is considered a pioneer in American herbology. After
the latter’s death, Fage finished his master herbalist degree with
Christopher’s son, David Christopher.
Early
on, Fage was invited to speak about herbs and their properties on radio
and TV programs and to lecture all over the world. “It was such an
advanced deal back then,” he says. “At that time, they weren't really
accepted. Some people considered me a witch; others thought I was going
wild.”
Fage
is considered by many in the holistic health field to be responsible for
having reintroduced herbs to New England and for training many of the
herbalists now practicing here. He is also considered the father of the
“herbal hour” — a talk he began giving in private homes, schools, and
for physicians, which others in the herbal field now do routinely. The
herbal hours consists of a series of slides showing what local herbs look
like — “I give background information on how the Indians used each herb,
how the gypsies used it,” Fage says. He also researched and included
information on what conventional medicine recognizes as the “active
ingredient” in each herb.
In
recent years, the state of Massachusetts created a category called “herb
teacher,” specifically to enable Fage to teach classes for which
pharmacists and physicians receive continuing-education credit.
Bill
Fage
Sunshine
Valley Health
1 Williams Street
Sterling, MA 01564
978-422-8064
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