The Pre-History of Barton Publishing

...Joe Barton's mother writes about how she came
to trust in home remedies more than doctors...

“Your cat is dead”

These were the first words I heard as I raced in the door.

“She’s lying on the floor in the basement”

I ran down the steps to find my “Kitty” cold and lifeless, still and bulging with the kittens I had been anxiously awaiting. I ran back up the steps, grabbed a scissors and ran back down to my cat and performed a C-section on her. I was 12. I didn’t know the kittens would be dead too.

I grew up without a mother. She had died from an undiagnosed liver failure when I was 5. I was a heart broken little girl, knowing death was very real and it hurt.....it hurt bad. My Mom was dead, my cat was dead, and now my kittens were dead.

That was my first experience with do-it-yourself health care. Even though it hadn’t turned out like I had hoped, somehow that experience made me realize that it was my nature to try to do something, anything to try to help. I had the determination and courage to do “whatever it took”.

My Dad was a pharmacist and owned his own small-town drug store, so I spent many hours with him in the back room watching him mix together many different ointments and concoctions. The store shelves were lined with bottles of intriguing potions with name like “witch hazel”, “Sloan’s liniment” and “Swedish Bitters”. The basement was filled with fascinating, never -used, outdated, old -time bottles stopped up with corks and wrapped in paper and string. Over the years other remedies would get retired to the basement as Dad would say “there is not much call for them anymore” and “We have a pill to take care of that now” or “the drug companies have something better “.

At age 19 I went to work at a large metropolitan hospital as a nurse’s aide. Everything I learned to do had to be done “by the book”. If I was giving a new baby a bath, I was to wash the baby’s eyes first, one at a time taking only one swipe, never reusing that area of the cloth. If something fell on the floor it was “contaminated” and never used... I learned how to wash my hands properly and often, to the extreme that my own skin was getting chapped and raw. There were medical reasons for doing this. I just had to accept it.

One day I came to work and was shown the latest admitted baby lying in an isolette in the corner. The head nurse told me its mother had been in a car accident and the baby had been born way too early and wouldn’t survive. In this era, babies born under 30 weeks gestation rarely if ever lived and this baby was only at 26 weeks gestation... The baby appeared absolutely perfect and was breathing on her own. She was not sickly looking like so many of the other older babies in this intensive care unit. The nurse said the orders were “not to feed her” and to just keep her over there till she died. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe they wouldn’t do all they could to give this little one a fighting chance for her life. The nurse whispered ” I want to feed her anyway” and I secretly hoped she would. The baby did die but I always wondered if she might not have been the one to defy the odds. It had made me mad, really mad. This was against my nature to do “what ever it took”. But......... there were established “medical reasons” for doing this and I just had to accept it.

A few years later I married. At one point I had to go to the hospital and have what I thought was a minor procedure, when the nurse came in my room and wanted me to sign a paper saying I was going to have a D and C. I said I couldn’t have that as I thought I might possibly be pregnant. The doctor came in and was upset that I hadn’t taken any precautions for getting pregnant and after getting a positive result on a pregnancy test asked if I wanted this baby .He said he still wanted to do the D and C any way, that there were medical reasons for doing this and I could have a different baby later. I was quite scared and shocked, to say the least, but said,”Yes I want this baby!” It turned out they did the procedure that I thought I was going to have in the first place. Nine months later I delivered a beautiful baby boy and we named him Joseph Christian Barton. Eventually, I did have more surgery and the doctors ended up taking a big chunk of my cervix out to do a biopsy on, which turned out negative.

When the nurse brought me my new baby she said, “Your baby cries a lot in the nursery”. The nurses never really said much more than that but it seemed like they were exasperated with his crying. Several days later after bringing the baby home from the hospital, I was on the phone calling my doctor to tell him that this child had not pooped yet and was crying all the time and throwing up a lot. I was told not to worry about it that sometimes it takes a while to get things going. At his first “well baby checkup” I was told to give him some malt supex and try that for a while and to come back in a month. I knew in my heart something was wrong with this baby, but I was going to the “best” pediatrician in the cities......so I did what he said. At the next checkup he decided to start him on suppositories. Using them produced a very small hard stool, but little Joe was still always crying and throwing up. After praying and searching all the books at the library I could find on babies with constipation, it seemed as if we were doing everything right. After several months of this, little Joe became so sick we took him to the emergency room. Thank heavens we got a doctor that had a different idea as to what might be the matter with this baby. He said, “He might have Hirshsprung’s disease.” Well after some specific tests, that disorder was confirmed. I was happy to finally get some answers...........But, I was mad too.....mad at the first doctor, mad at myself for not being able to help my son. I think I realized more fully then that the medical establishment was not perfect , medical information available to the public was nonexistent and if I wanted my family to survive I would have to take a more proactive roll and not sit passively by .

Joe ended up having several surgeries to correct his problem and spent many days in the hospital. He ended up with a severe diaper rash since his skin had never been exposed to stool before. We finally got to take him home, but ended up bringing him to the emergency room once again because he spiked a high fever. I remember the doctors accusing me of neglecting him since he had such a raw diaper rash. I told them if they wanted to accuse anyone, accuse their own hospital staff as he just got out of the hospital the day before and that they were the ones responsible for treating him. It made me mad. They basically sent us home saying the diaper rash caused his temperature to be so high and not to worry about it. Ya right.......one minute it seemed they were going to send me off to jail, next minute it is no big deal!!! Needless to say no commercially available diaper rash ointment worked. Joe’s whole butt looked like raw meat. I drove home to Dad’s too see if he could help. Dad ended up concocting an ointment of his own that helped the most. We didn’t use any diapers on him during the day and cleaned him immediately after every poop. We also tried holding a light bulb near the diaper area as it helped the skin dry and heal faster. After a week of perseverance, using our remedy, little Joe was finally getting better.

I was learning that the medical establishment had their way of doing things, they didn’t think or practice “outside the box”, and they couldn’t and wouldn’t try something that was not approved. It seemed like the health care system didn’t really care. I had to use them but I didn’t have to trust them.

After having a second child by C-section at 27 weeks gestation delivered early because my cervix had become incompetent because of the previous surgery on it, I began feeling really dizzy. The dizziness would not go away and I spent a lot of time searching for someone that could help with my problem. After ruling out ear disorders and brain tumors and allergies and countless other diseases and seeing countless doctors , neurologists, specialists and chiropractors ; going to the Mayo Clinic and psychiatrists and priests and pastors and praying with every televangelist on the T.V. , I couldn’t give up trying to find a cure. I tried innumerable herbs and vitamins and tried to eat natural chemical free foods. Without ever solving the puzzle of my dizziness I realized I still had learned a tremendous amount of medical information both traditional and alternative along the way. I even figured out what had caused my Mother’s liver failure. I figured out that my daughter had a fungus infection on her hand and cured it instead of believing it was not just raw because she sucked her thumb like the doctor had told me. I also came to have a deeper trust in my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as my source of strength and hope. I often times thought He knew exactly what he was doing with me. As I searched for my own cure, I would come across remedies for other problems I had and remedies for family and friends. . My personal doctor I go to now says I probably had a small stroke or suffered from too much blood loss during the C-section. Although I don’t have a definitive diagnosis, that observation makes sense to me and one, I guess, I can live with. Although I still suffer with the dizziness, I can see the good that has come out of it. I believe the scripture that says, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose”.

During these early years of struggling with the dizziness, we moved to a new home near some Amish friends of ours. We liked how they lived in such a self sufficient manner and admired their hard work ethic and talked many hours about our shared faith in God and skepticism of the medical establishment. I remember vividly how, Marty, told me that if I ever got cancer, he knew of a good clinic in Mexico that his Dad went to when he got cancer. Marty said his Dad outlived several of his friends that had the same kind of cancer. It wasn’t but 5 months later I found a lump under my arm which turned out to be breast cancer that had spread to my lymph glands. I went to a regular doctor for the diagnosis and surgery but was hesitant about accepting the chemo treatment when I heard the drugs they used were the same old drugs they used for cancer 20 years earlier. I couldn’t believe they hadn’t come up with anything new after all the money they had been given and years they had to come up with a cure. Reluctantly I endured the chemo with its side effects. But armed with my knowledge that the treatment might be ineffective and the physicians might possibly be incompetent and knowing that my life was at stake, I was determined to do something else. My Amish friends gave me all the information they had about this Mexican clinic, we contacted them and made arrangements to fly out as soon as we could.

During my Mexican adventure I met many people who had been given up by the medical establishment in our county. Most of them I met at the cancer clinic in Tijuana called the Hoxsey Clinic. It was named after its founder Harry Hoxsey whose grandfather John Hoxsey observed that his horse cured himself of cancer by grazing upon certain wild plants in its pasture. John gathered the herbs and used them to make home remedies for cancer. Harry eventually opened a clinic in Illinois and other states for the sale and use of his treatment method, but eventually got shut down for practicing medicine without a license. At one point, Hoxsey had the largest privately owned cancer clinic in the world in Dallas, Texas. The food and drug administration banned the sale of Hoxsey’s treatment in the United States in 1960 and Hoxsey was forced to close all his clinics .Three years later one of His nurses opened up a clinic in Tijuana using the same treatments as Hoxsey. In 1967 Harry developed prostate cancer that his own treatment failed to cure. He eventually underwent standard medical treatment and surgery and lived 7 more years. The clinic is still there today. Most of these people I met had heard about the success of this clinic usually by someone who had been there and survived their cancer, just as I did. The treatment had about an 80% success rate, according to their statistics. I went through their whole program. Today, 15 years later, I am obviously still alive and have no cancer as far as I know. My doctors say if I was to get cancer now it would be a totally new cancer and not related to this first one.

Since then too I have done a lot of research on alternative cancer treatments and have a hunger to search and find answers for any health concern I hear about.

My husband Bob also suffered for years with stomach reflux caused by another botched surgery. Eventually we figured out that if he ate an apple the bile he was choking on would stay down in his stomach. We would tell everyone and anyone about it if they would listen. We even told Bob’s doctors. I remember one doctor thinking it was rather amazing and said he had a few other patients that could benefit from that information. I often wondered if he actually told anyone. Thinking there were many other people “out there” that could use this information , I sent out several letters to major drug companies telling them we had a cure for bile reflux using a naturally occurring remedy and asked if they were interested in using this information to make a product for public distribution. I got back several replies stating because the product was naturally occurring they could not patent it and it would not be profitable for them to do research, testing and production. I guess I wasn’t totally surprised that they didn’t really “care”.

I knew there had to be a lot of people around the world who had similar experiences as I did, who had exhausted their time, money and resources trying to get cured.

At this point in my story I could tell you about Joe. How he grew spiritually, grew up physically and matured intellectually and how I feel God has used him to carry on my desire to help people. But that is a whole other tale and one that Joe can tell better than I...

[[You can learn more about Joe Barton, and his natural health company, Barton Publishing, at either of his websites.]]

I can’t write any more, it has taken me a whole day to write what I have here. I hope this is what you wanted, Joe.

Keep up the good work
God bless
Love,
Ma