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Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez and His Nutrition-Based Cancer Protocol: An Interview with Mary Swander
Mary Swander’s new book, The Maverick M.D.: Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez and His Fight for a New Cancer Treatment, is a riveting account of the life and work of a dedicated and remarkable physician who fought for the acceptance of a nutritional approach to cancer and other degenerative diseases. Dr. Gonzalez passed away in 2015 after decades of helping seriously ill patients, many of whom conventional medicine had given up on. In this authorized biography, Swander – a long-time patient and award-winning author – delves into the scientific foundations of The Gonzalez Protocol® and the many challenges Dr. Gonzalez faced in developing, administering, and clinically testing it. This interview with Swander sheds light on both his life and his program.
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Roberta Louis: What first led you to Dr. Gonzalez and why did you decide to write a book about him?
Mary Swander: I heard a lecture that he gave in Boulder, Colorado, around 1994, and I thought, “This is the most brilliant man I’ve ever heard, and the science is fantastic.” I’m a creative writer, but I had taken a lot of science classes, and I was really interested in what he was saying.
In addition, I’d had terrible health problems. I had tried everything – conventional medicine and different alternatives – and nothing was working. Hearing Gonzalez speak, I realized, “This man has insight on how you heal from illnesses, and it all has to do with your body type and your diet.”
So, I made an appointment with him – and I’ve stayed on his program for over 20 years. In the beginning, most of my friends would say, “I don’t see why you have to go to New York to see some doctor when we have plenty of doctors here.” I would reply, “This man is light years beyond any doctor that you know.” Now they agree with me.
I first tried to write a book about him years ago, but he said, “I’ll write my own book.” Eventually, he wrote several, including The Trophoblast and the Origins of Cancer, but they were more like medical textbooks. I wanted to write something that would help lay people get a thorough understanding of what he was doing.
Shortly after his death, I contacted his widow, Mary Beth, about writing his biography. She wrote back and said, “Well, there’s a long line of writers who want to do this, Mary.” I thought, “Okay, it doesn’t sound like that’s going to happen.” However, I eventually got the job.
Then, after starting the book, I kept asking myself: How in the world did this man, who was Ivy League, loved conventional medicine, and wanted to be a researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, shift out of that mindset and put together this out-of-the-box protocol? It takes a certain kind of genius to be able to get out of your paradigm and shift into something else. That really interested me about him as a human being.
Roberta: In your book The Maverick M.D., you describe how, as a young man, he shifted back and forth in his career choice between writing and medicine. Would you talk about that?
Mary: He really struggled with that decision. A lot of genius-type people can do anything, and they have to make a choice. He was clearly talented in many areas, and he was ping-ponging back and forth between literature and medicine. When, during his college years, he went to Mexico City for the summer and spent time immersed in the cultural scene with his cousin, a famous jazz pianist, he said, “This is it. It’s the arts. ”
After completing his bachelor’s degree in English literature, he took a job in investigative journalism and was well regarded in that career. On an assignment for Time, Inc., in 1976, he interviewed Linus Pauling, who basically said to him, “You’re asking me more sophisticated questions than my fellow Nobel laureates, so you’ve got to go to medical school.”
But, again, how do you get out of the paradigm that you’re in? As an investigative journalist, he was trained to question, to probe, to keep an open mind and not have any preconceived ideas. After he finally decided on a medical career, that training helped him see past the biases of conventional medicine.
He was in his third year of medical school when his father, whom he was really close to, died of cancer. At his father’s deathbed, he vowed that he would find a cure for the disease.
Roberta: While he was in medical school, he did extensive research based on the work of Dr. William Donald Kelley. Who was Dr. Kelley?
Mary: Kelley was really interesting. He was an orthodontist in Grapevine, Texas, and in his forties, he got pancreatic cancer. This was back in the early 1960s. Conventional medicine gave up on him, and his doctors told him to go put his affairs in order. He had four young children and his wife had left him, so his little Irish mother showed up to take care of him. She threw out all the junk food in his kitchen cupboards and began feeding him healthy food, and he started to get better. It was all organic, whole food—no skim milk or anything like that. She also insisted that he do coffee enemas to detoxify himself.
His degree was in biochemistry, and he was really interested in nutrition. He began to experiment with different foods and supplements, and he could monitor the results because his abdominal tumor was so big that he could actually see it swell or shrink in front of him. Then he began to have digestive problems, so he went to the drugstore and asked the pharmacist what he could take. The pharmacist suggested pancreatic enzymes, and these helped his digestion. You usually take pancreatic enzymes with meals to help you digest your food. He began taking them between meals as well, and he realized that his tumor was shrinking.
So, he and his mother worked out this protocol that basically cleared up his pancreatic cancer – and he lived to about 80 years old.
Kelley played golf with the local medical doctors, and after his health was restored, they started sending him their worst cases. They would tell their patients, “We don’t have anything more we can do for you, but this orthodontist over here has figured out how to cure cancer.” Suddenly, he had all these patients on his doorstep. He didn’t help everybody, but he had a high success rate. And, basically, conventional medicine came down on him. He got harassed and thrown in jail. He had to leave town, and he fled up to Washington State. Then his house was burned down. I mean, just incredible stuff happened. At one point, he got on a train that went through the Rocky Mountains, and he ended up in New York.
Kelley didn’t want to be treating people with cancer. He was a classical scientist, and he didn’t want to be doing this out-of-the-box work. What he did want was for somebody to do a clinical trial to see if his methods were truly effective. Eventually, he ended up in the office of a literary agent whom Gonzalez knew. She picked up the phone and said, “Nick, there’s this crazy orthodontist in my office. I can’t tell if he’s wacko or if he’s really curing cancer. Could you come and talk to him?”
Although Gonzalez was very reluctant, he took the train out to Queens to meet Kelley. Later, he said, “After talking to him for half an hour, I realized the guy was brilliant.” That started a long association between them. Gonzalez had to finish med school and his internship, and then he basically apprenticed to Kelley, whose main office was in Dallas. Later, Gonzalez brought the program back to New York.
Gonzalez had hoped to research the program at Sloan Kettering, but it was just too much for the Ivy League doctors there. So, he basically put out his shingle, saw patients all day, did his own research, wrote books, and gave lectures.
Kelley was really the main person he learned from. Their relationship eventually went downhill, basically because Kelley’s mental health had deteriorated from all the harassment. But there’s a chain of people who were involved in developing the protocol, and Gonzalez always gave them credit: Kelley; Kelley’s mother; Dr. Robert A. Good, his mentor at Sloan Kettering; Dr. Linda Isaacs; and all the others who came along and helped him.
Roberta: Although many people consider him an alternative medicine practitioner, he didn’t see himself that way. How did he view his work?
Mary: He didn’t see himself that way at all. Clearly, he didn’t fit in the conventional medicine camp. But he also didn’t fit in alternative medicine, basically because he had these metabolic types.
He had 12 different diets with 99 variations.Most of the people in the alternative camp have a particular diet that fixed them—and then they think that’s good for everybody else. One of the big things about his program is that it’s not going to work if you’re on the wrong diet. The supplements also differ according to your body type. So, Gonzalez didn’t see much commonality in the alternative world with what he was doing.
Moreover, he wasn’t a guru. He didn’t have a TV show or a do-it-yourself book. In fact, at one point, he wanted to write a book explaining his program, but his editor wanted it to be a self-help book. Gonzalez basically said, “Cancer is not a self-help situation,” and just walked out.
And he wasn’t opposed to conventional medicine. He told me, “There are some cancers that chemo is really good at clearing up, like the blood cancers. I’ve told people with leukemia and Hodgkin’s that they might as well just do chemotherapy because it would clear them up fine.” But chemo is not really successful with breast cancer, colon cancer, and some other things.
Gonzalez became known as the “doctor of last resort,” because many of his patients came to him after conventional medicine had given up on them. Dr. Roy Sweat, who created an Atlas Orthogonal Chiropractic technique adjustment device – a hands-free way to adjust your first cervical bone with a computerized instrument – said to him: “Why are these people coming to you as the last resort? You need to be their first stop. By the time they get to you, they’re so depleted.”
Around that time, Gonzalez told me he would prefer patients who hadn’t been through radiation and chemo because after people had undergone those therapies, their livers were so toxic that it was hard for them to tolerate his program. Although he did take patients who had been through all that, he wanted people to choose his protocol first.
But that’s not how our world works. The usual response to a cancer diagnosis is surgery, chemo, and radiation – and only then you might try some “far-out” thing. It’s a shame; it should be the opposite.
Roberta: Would you explain a little more about the various diets Dr. Gonzalez prescribed?
Mary: The diets really are based on the research of Drs. Weston A. Price and Francis M. Pottenger, Jr. Price saw that people on diets that arose out of their own environment were really healthy.
I’ve got the perfect example of that. My mother’s family was from a little, remote peninsula in Western Ireland. There’s a small island next to the peninsula, called Inishbofin Island, and they intermarried with the people there.
In Ireland, the government is always trying to get the islanders to move to the mainland. They’ve been doing this for centuries for various reasons. Around 1890, the government officials – at that time, this was the British – said, “Oh, the people are too sick out there. How can they possibly survive being so isolated?” So, they sent a physician out to Inishbofin, and he was supposed to document the vast illnesses of the 300 or 400 people there. He came back and said something like: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. These people mostly eat fish from the ocean, and potatoes with a little butter. They have some mutton and a few vegetables that they’re able to grow. But I have found no cancer, no heart disease, no diabetes, no degenerative disease at all. There’s no mental illness or alcoholism. The biggest problem these people seem to be having is that they get fish hooks caught in their fingers, so there’s a fair amount of tetanus.” I read that and thought, “These are the people I’m descended from, and this is exactly my diet.”
The best diet is basically the one that’s right for your genetic code. We’re all a bunch of mutts in the United States, so figuring out what your diet should be is not as easy as it is in Inishbofin, where the people have been living for hundreds or thousands of years and all have the same genetic background. There’s a wide range of possible types, from someone like me – who basically eats fish and meat with a few potatoes and vegetables thrown in – to somebody from a much warmer climate who would be a near-vegetarian.
Your metabolic type is associated with your pH. I am off the chart for having parasympathetic dominance – what they call in this system an alkaline metabolism. With this type of metabolism, the more meat you eat, the more balanced you become. At the other extreme are people who are pushed toward sympathetic dominance by eating meat, and who come back into balance if you take most of the meat away and increase grains, vegetables, and fruit.
I go to Inishbofin once a year, and I have a little class that I teach there. I just love it because when I visit people, they’ll say, “Mary, would you like some sausage? We’ve got a lamb chop here for you. Would you like a piece of chicken? We had some really nice mackerel come in today – could we grill one for you?” And this is all the same meal.
Where you want to be is balanced. A lot of people are born balanced, and that is really great. Balanced people generally don’t get sick unless they eat something really crazy, undergo a lot of stress, or experience toxic exposure or something like that. They can throw themselves out of balance in either direction, but if you start out balanced, you’re a big step ahead of the pack.
Roberta: What is the role of the pancreatic enzymes in the cancer regimen?
Mary: The use of pancreatic enzymes as a cancer treatment was developed by John Beard in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the turn of the 20th century. Beard was another genius scientist, and he became fascinated with the fact that the placenta is very much like a cancerous tumor. He noticed that the placenta stopped growing on a certain day in the pregnancy. If it didn’t stop growing, it would develop into a tumor and usually kill the fetus, and often the mother as well.
Beard wanted to know what made the placenta stop growing. As a result of his investigations, he determined that it stopped growing when the pancreas of the fetus became functional. He also figured out that it was the release of pancreatic enzymes that stopped the growth of the placenta, which contained what he called germ cells. These are now known as stem cells.
Then he made this leap – as great scientists are able to do – and asked, “If the placenta is like a tumor and the pancreatic enzymes stop the growth of the placenta, would they not stop the growth of any tumor?” So, he isolated pancreatic enzymes, which he harvested in a specific way from pigs, and found that they indeed essentially killed cancer.
During the early 20th century, people were using Beard’s research to treat cancer with pancreatic enzymes and having some success. Of course, he got a lot of pushback as well, because at that time, the only cancer treatment they had in conventional medicine was surgery. If you had a tumor, they cut it out – and if they couldn’t cut it out, you died. All of a sudden, this guy was talking about pancreatic enzymes and germ cells. Some people tried it and it didn’t work, but they weren’t working with the right formulas and harvesting the enzymes properly.
Beard’s work basically went out the window when Marie Curie arrived on the scene and said, “Hey, look at this. Radiation. We can just fry these cancer cells.” Never mind that she herself died of radiation poisoning, we took her technique and ran with it because it was so much easier and flashier. She won the Nobel Prize, and Beard died a lonely, poor guy in some little, dank rented room in Edinburgh.
Kelley didn’t know about Beard when he realized that taking pancreatic enzymes between meals was making his tumor shrink. He wanted to know why that was happening. He was a good researcher, so he went to the medical library, looked up pancreatic enzymes, and found out about Beard’s work.
Although Kelley had success with the enzymes, they were tricky to formulate. It was actually Gonzalez who finally perfected the process. He and Dr. Linda Isaacs were married at that time and living in New York, and they set up a little science lab in their home and worked for years getting those perfected. Then Gonzalez found a manufacturer who could do exactly what he wanted done.
The better the quality of the enzymes, the more effective they will be. People sometimes call me and say, “I have a tumor on my arm, so I went to the drugstore and bought some pancreatic enzymes. How do I do it?” I tell them not to do it at all. Kelley was just really lucky that he was able to buy the pancreatic enzymes from the pharmacist and have them work.
Roberta: In addition to the diet and pancreatic enzymes, the program can include coffee enemas twice a day and a great many individualized supplements. Do some people really take 150 pills a day?
Mary: Some people do. I have about that many in my regimen. It depends on your situation, but, in general, you do have to take a lot. The people with cancer also take the pancreatic enzymes every four hours between meals. That means you have to get up in the middle of the night to take one dose, and you can’t ever put anything in your mouth between meals.
You also have to drink two quarts of water a day – and herbal tea or anything like that does not count. I take apple cider vinegar in water twice a day, and that is not included in my water intake.
The program is not for the faint of heart. It’s like an endurance test. But once you figure out, “Okay, I take this at 10:00, I take this at 2:00,” you get into the rhythm of it. I’m used to it now, but I’ve had to make a lot of decisions that would allow me the time to do the program.
Roberta: Was Dr. Gonzalez very strict in requiring adherence to the protocol?
Mary: He was. He would really get upset if you started diddling around. If people asked me about going on his program, I would tell them, “Listen, it’s intense, and you’ve got to do everything on the list. Don’t question. Don’t mess around. Don’t say, ‘Well, I did that three days ago. I don’t need to do it every day.’” He wanted people to adhere to the program.
Some people would go to him and then decide that it sounded too difficult and they weren’t going to do it. Others treated it like a cafeteria program: “I’ll do a little of this, and I’ll eat a little organic food if it’s something I like.” These people wouldn’t have success.
However, a lot of the people I interviewed for the book were able to go off the full program after their cancers cleared up. They stayed on the diet but didn’t have to do all the rest of it – and they’re fine today; in fact, some of them are in their eighties. Others have stayed on the program the whole time. I’ve continued with it because I don’t feel well when I go off it. I have my health back, but my whole family has died of cancer, so I also stay on it as a preventative.
Roberta: Dr. Gonzalez treated patients for many health conditions, not just cancer. How did that come about?
Mary: We just started showing up. What really got me flying to New York to see him was that I had terrible fibroid tumors, and I couldn’t have surgery because of my extreme sensitivity to any kind of anesthetic. I thought, “Okay, this guy basically cures cancer, but he knows how to get your immune system up so you can fight things off. I’m going to give this a shot.”
He never said, “I love to treat Lyme disease” or any of these other conditions, but people started coming. He had whole families with Lyme disease that he cleared up. He had people with diabetes and lupus – all these things that are really hard to treat. I don’t think he knew what he was in for when we all started popping out of the woodwork.
But he did his best. He didn’t help everybody, that’s for sure. He would get really frustrated if he couldn’t help you – and he would get frustrated by the people who wouldn’t stick to the program.
Roberta: Would you tell us a little more about what brought you to him as a patient and what impact his treatment had on your life?
Mary: In addition to the fibroid tumors, I had all sorts of autoimmune problems from trauma. I was in a bad car accident when I was 15 years old, and my neck was really screwed up from that. Then, when I was 33, I had a very serious vaccine reaction. I had hormonal problems, migraines, digestive problems, and pain.
And there isn’t anything in conventional medicine for autoimmune issues. You go to the doctor, and they just think you’re a whiny woman. I told my doctors, “No, I was in this bad car wreck. Something happened to my neck.” They just said, “Well, we can’t see anything on the x-ray.”
When I saw Gonzalez for my first appointment, he greeted me in the waiting room. “Hi, I’m Dr. Gonzalez,” he said. “You’ve got one heck of a neck injury.” Then, when I got into his office, he told me to see Dr. Sweat in Atlanta for Atlas Orthogonal Chiropractic treatments. I was just wowed. This was the first doctor who had recognized anything that was going on with me.
My recovery didn’t proceed as fast as most people’s because of my injuries. Gonzalez would clear up some of his patients, even ones with stage IV cancer, in three or four months, and he thought I should clear up in four months, too. He would bang his fist on the table and say, “I don’t understand why you’re not clearing up faster.” Finally, we both realized it was going to be a more gradual process for me.
Although it took a lot longer than he had hoped, I did recover. I’m a success story! I probably would have been dead by the time I was 50 if I hadn’t gone to him.
Roberta: Could you share the stories of some of the patients you interviewed for the book?
Mary: These were patients I was able to interview by phone. It was amazing to talk with these people. Some of them were so courageous and really fun and interesting.
I spoke with a nurse who, in her forties, got stage IV ovarian cancer. This was way back when Gonzalez first hung out his shingle, around 1990. I asked, “If you were a nurse, why didn’t you go for conventional treatment?” She replied, “I was a nurse in an oncology unit, and I saw what those people went through. I saw how little success the conventional method had with ovarian cancer. So, I was going to find myself something else, and I did.”
She had been living in Brooklyn, and at that time, there was no organic food there. Every week, she had to rent a car and drive into Manhattan to the one health food store that had organic vegetables and load up her car. I asked her, “What gave you the gumption to take on this protocol?” She said, “Well, I had been a nun in my previous life, so I was used to being highly disciplined and dealing with an authoritarian program.” She also told me, “I had a really great network of women friends who supported me.”
On the protocol, she cleared up completely. She’s in her eighties now, and I just love her. We’re still in contact.
Another interview that was really fun was with a man in St. Louis who’d had stage III or IV liver cancer. It had spread when he was still young – only 45, with kids. His doctors had said, “It’s curtains. Get your act in order.”
He had owned real estate, and he told me, “I sold 17 buildings. I was getting ready to die.” Then his mother showed up and said, “You are not going to die. We’re going to find you some help.”
She found Gonzalez and then went to New York with her son for his appointments. When they returned, she was a bit like Mrs. Kelley – she did all the cooking for him and kept him on the protocol, and he cleared up. She’s another example of how women are often the force behind this work.
He said, “I realized that stress had a lot to do with why I got sick in the first place, so I retired.” He stayed on the program for a while, but then he was able to phase off it and just stay on the diet.
As I said, some of these patients are really interesting – full of gumption. And it’s really good if you have a support person, as a lot of these people did.
Roberta: What was the reaction from the conventional medical community to Dr. Gonzalez’s work?
Mary: The chapter in the book that I think is most indicative of what Gonzalez had to go through is the one where he’s invited to Switzerland by the former director of the Pasteur Institute in France, to lecture to these notable physicians who have come from all over Europe to listen to him.
He gives one of his brilliant lectures, gets a standing ovation, and is mobbed with questions afterwards. They’re really interested in his work. This takes place at the Nestle Foundation, which wants to fund a pilot study on his protocol. While he’s there, he gets an urgent message from his office assistant back in New York that says, “You need to call the office immediately,” which he does. The New York Department of Health had brought a series of charges against him, and the medical board wanted to take away his license.
His whole life was like that. Other brilliant people could see what he was doing and wanted to help him, but the conventional medical authorities were saying, “No, we’re going to stop this.” He had to go through constant fights.
Roberta: He had long desired to have his work scientifically validated by a rigorous clinical trial. Would you discuss some of the problems he encountered in regard to this?
Mary: Gonzalez and Isaacs had done a pilot study on pancreatic cancer, which they had received funding for. They wrote it up, and it was really positive. Anybody could read it and see that they had made big strides.
So, on the heels of that, he wanted to have a clinical trial of his program. He had to jump through all these hoops, such as meeting with people at the National Institutes of Health and other big institutes in the US. He had to convince people that this totally out-of-the-box protocol deserved attention in a conventional study.
People tend to dismiss alternative methods because, first of all, they don’t understand them. Second, they always say, “Well, you haven’t had a clinical trial. So how do we know if this works?” That’s why Kelley and Gonzalez and Isaacs fought so hard to get the funding to do a clinical trial.
However, once the study was finally funded and underway, there was lack of cooperation or out-and-out sabotage at every step, and the thing basically collapsed. It was run out of Columbia Medical School, and it ended up that the Columbia doctors wrote a paper saying that the protocol did not work, and left Gonzalez and Isaacs off as authors. At first, the two of them didn’t even know the paper was being written, and then they weren’t informed when it was published.
Actually, it would have been published sooner, but some ethical, conscientious doctors said, “Wait a second. What is this coming across my desk? How come Dr. Gonzalez’s name isn’t on this paper when it’s his protocol?”
It was just one thing after another. One of the difficulties was that people often had to fight to get into the trial – and they were dying of pancreatic cancer, so they didn’t have a lot of time to mess around. Then, while they were following the protocol at home, they had to have a medical doctor monitor them, and there were hardly any doctors who would cooperate. Most would just tell them to go off the protocol and do radiation and chemo immediately.
That right there was enough to negate the work these people were doing. Pancreatic cancer is just about the most serious disease you can have. You need support and encouragement, not someone telling you, “Stop that. We’re going to use chemo and radiation,” especially when you have already been told those weren’t going to help you.
Gonzalez had to write hundreds of memos, firing them off constantly, saying, “No, no. This statement in the minutes of our meeting is not correct. No, I did not say this. No, we have to stop what’s going on.” It was daily. I don’t know how anybody could go through that much stress.
Roberta: What do you think made it possible for him to get through all the stress and continue his practice?
Mary: This was really interesting to me. He grew up a nominal Catholic, but when he married Isaacs – a marriage that only lasted a few years, although they continued to work together in their medical practice – he started going to church with her. Then, in typical Nick Gonzalez fashion, he said, “I don’t know very much about the Bible. Let me research this.” So, he did this deep dive into the Bible and ended up like a biblical scholar. I think he probably had the entire Bible memorized. He had a deep faith in God and read the Bible every day, so he had a strong spiritual component.
Years later, after he married Mary Beth Pryor, she and her family were a big support. The family just embraced what he was doing. Nobody was questioning him or rolling their eyes or anything like that. I know that was huge for him.
Roberta: Would you tell us about the preservation and continuation of his work today?
Mary: Mary Beth has published five books of his posthumously through her publishing company, New Spring Press. If she hadn’t done that, he would have been in danger of having his legacy just disappear in many ways. It’s fantastic, I think, that she’s kept that all alive. She has also founded the Nicholas Gonzalez Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on preserving his legacy. In addition, she is now setting up some educational seminars to train other doctors in the protocol.
Isaacs has relocated to Austin, Texas, and is still in practice. She practiced right alongside Gonzalez, and while he saw the bulk of the patients, she saw many of those who were in the clinical trial. I believe that she’s the only one offering the protocol right now.
Gonzalez’s dream was that this protocol would be an accepted alternative in cancer treatment. He knew it wasn’t for everybody, but he hoped that people would be able to opt for it and have it covered by their insurance. That’s what I want, as well – for it to eventually be out there as another option that people will know about.
I’m hopeful this book will help with that. Finally, friends who have known me the whole time I’ve been on this program have read it – and they’re saying, “Oh, this is what you’ve been doing? This is brilliant.”
To learn more about The Gonzalez Protocol®, see The Nicholas Gonzalez Foundation’s website, thegonzalezprotocol.com. The Maverick M.D. is published by New Spring Press (newspringpress.com), exclusive publishers of the scientific work of Nicholas Gonzalez, MD, and Dr. John Beard.
About Mary Swander
Mary Swander, author of The Maverick M.D., is the co-founder and executive director of AgArts, a nonprofit organization designed to imagine and promote healthy food systems through the arts. She is also the artistic director of Swander Woman Productions, a theatre company that performs dramas about agriculture and the wider rural environment. Swander is an award-winning author of poetry, nonfiction, and drama, and her numerous books include Driving the Body Back, Out of This World, and The Desert Pilgrim. She lives in an old Amish one-room schoolhouse, raises sheep and goats, and has a large organic garden where she grows most of her own food. For more information, visit www.maryswander.com and www.agarts.org.
Roberta Louis is managing editor of the Price-Pottenger Journal of Health and Healing and founder of the nonprofit Shaman’s Drum Foundation. She is also a freelance writer and editor specializing in complementary and alternative healing methods.
Published in the Price-Pottenger Journal of Health & Healing
Winter 2020 – 2021 | Volume 44, Number 4
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