Thirty years of illness. One small book. A turning point.
Martha Christy spent most of her early life sick. Between eighteen and thirty she was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, kidney disease, thyroid problems, and severe endometriosis — followed by six major surgeries and, by her own count, more than $100,000 spent on treatments that didn't hold. She spent her fortieth birthday in bed, where she stayed most of that year.
Then her husband came home with a small book about an old, almost forgotten natural practice. In her telling, she thought it sounded preposterous — but with nothing left to lose, she tried it, and dates the turning point of her health to that decision. Within a year, she recounts, she was hiking the Grand Canyon, swimming, and riding horseback for the first time in her adult life.
Your Own Perfect Medicine is the book she wrote about what she found: part memoir, part history, and part survey of a therapy most people have never heard discussed out loud.