The Healing Crisis

Aajonus was explicit that these are two distinct phases and that confusing them leads people to mismanage what their body is doing. He described the tired, sleepy, fatigued state that many people experience on the diet as the detoxification and healing state, not the healing crisis. During this broader state, the body is actively dissolving damaged tissue, removing debris, carting out waste, and rebuilding. He compared it to gutting a house and rebuilding it: the house is not very usable during those processes.

The healing crisis itself is the end of detoxification, not the middle of it. As he said directly in workshop: "A healing crisis is when the body has almost stopped its detoxification process and is jumping into the healing state." This is a sharp, often intense transition. The fatigue, sleepiness, and general tiredness that precede it are the ongoing work of detox and cellular regeneration, and those states are managed differently than the crisis moment at the threshold.

He used the cold and the flu as specific examples of what the end of detoxification looks like. He said plainly: "The cold, the flu is the end of detoxification." These episodes, which conventional medicine treats as infections to be suppressed, are in his framework the body's signal that it has completed a detox cycle and is entering active repair.

Throughout his workshops, Aajonus emphasized that the symptoms a person experiences during the detox and healing sequence, including pain, swelling, fatigue, discharge, and altered function, are not the disease but the process of addressing it. All of these symptoms, the pain, the inflammation, the swelling, represent circulation moving into an area, nutrients arriving, toxic tissue being dissolved, waste being carted out, and cells being regenerated. He described it as the body's own intelligent response: "Pain, there's circulation going, nutrients getting into that area, tissue being dissolved, removed, carted out, cells being regenerated."

Swelling, specifically, occurs during periods when massive toxins inundate the blood or tissues, such as after injury or poisoning. It is a sign of increased circulation required to dilute and remove toxins and to increase nutrient delivery to toxic areas. This is not a pathological event to be suppressed but a necessary function.

Proper healing, in his framework, is when the body reproduces cells to repopulate areas where toxins destroyed cells. Improper healing occurs when the body cannot reproduce cells because of nutritional deficiencies and must instead relocate live or mummified cells, meaning scar tissue, from other areas. That substitution weakens the entire body. This distinction between true regeneration and scar tissue repair was central to how he assessed the quality of a healing process, not just its completion.

Fever is a critical component of the healing cycle, particularly in relation to cellular reproduction. Aajonus explained that when body temperature rises to 100 to 102 to 104 degrees, even 106 degrees, cells begin reproducing quickly and rapidly. Fever at these levels serves the healing process directly by accelerating the cellular regeneration phase.

He also identified what fever stops: at elevated temperatures, virus production ceases because the body can no longer manufacture virus; bacteria, parasites, and fungi cannot grow in the human body at those temperatures either. All normal detoxification processes that depend on microbial activity are paused during fever. This is not a failure but a phase shift. The body uses fever to transition out of microbial-assisted detoxification and into direct cellular reproduction.

The medical response to fever, treating it with antibiotics and fever-reducing medications, he regarded as actively harmful. Antibiotics given to an infant with a fever of 102 destroy the digestive tract of that infant and arrest its development for at least four to five years. He stated that this arrested development in the digestive tract directly limits the mental capabilities of the child, because the body's ability to produce nutrients for the brain is rooted in digestive function.

Ninety percent of healing happens in the sleep state or in a deeply sedentary alpha state. Aajonus made this point repeatedly and connected it to practical dietary guidance. The body requires a very settled, low-activity state to conduct the regeneration phase of healing, and most people do not reach that state unless they are what he called "heavy meditators" or simply sleeping deeply.

During the healing state, a person will find themselves sleeping more, feeling more tired, and needing more rest. This is not a sign that something is wrong. It is the body drawing resources toward internal repair rather than external activity. He described periods in his own recovery when he was essentially crippled to his couch for days at a time, rolling off onto the floor and scooting to the bathroom with his elbows, unable to function. He understood this as the process, not as a failure of recovery.

The instruction he gave consistently was to take advantage of the sleep state during healing, to sleep as much as the body requests, and to eat more meat during that period. He was direct that the sleepiness and fatigue of the detox and healing state are not the crisis itself, and that responding to them with the right foods, particularly meat, would reduce their duration and intensity.

Cellular division and tissue regeneration require raw meat above all other foods. Aajonus was specific that all flesh foods, whether red meat, white meat, fowl, or seafood, contribute to cellular division. When a person is in the healing state and experiencing fatigue and increased sleep, eating more meat is the primary support. He stated that the more meat a person eats during that healing state, the less sleep and the less fatigue they will experience. This is not stimulation from the food but genuine support of the regenerative process.

He demonstrated this with animal experiments. In groups of injured animals given different dietary supports, the group receiving almost all raw meat regenerated and healed wounds five times faster than those receiving only raw dairy or a combination of dairy and milk. The group eating meat also healed better in quality, not just in speed. He used this to explain why meat is the primary food for anyone in a healing state.

Healing on the Primal Diet does not proceed in a straight line forward. It moves backward through accumulated damage in reverse chronological order, with most people revisiting symptoms and conditions in roughly the reverse order of how they were acquired. He described this as the body going backwards through its history of damage. Most people go backwards in this way; some jump around in their healing sequence, but no one revisits illness in a forward-progressive fashion once proper nutrition is in place.

The reason for the backward progression is that during the original accumulation of toxins and damage, the body never ate properly while cleansing and detoxing those problems. Once proper nutrition is in place, the body will detox each area properly when it arrives at that layer of damage, and heal it properly, unless there is a concentration of heavy metals such as mercury or thallium so dense that the detox process itself creates additional damage. In those cases, the body will have to return again later to clean out scar tissue that was laid down during incomplete healing. Scar tissue repair is not healing in his framework. Using dead cells like bricks in a wall is repairing, not regenerating.

He told people to expect symptoms and to expect to go through a great deal of what he called garbage, because the body has a lifetime of stored garbage to process. This expectation was not pessimistic but practical, framing the discomfort of healing crises and detox states as the necessary cost of undoing decades of toxic accumulation.

The degree to which disease reverses and healing proceeds depends primarily on what a person eats. Aajonus was precise about this from observation across many cases. If a person ate cooked food, reversal and healing of disease averaged 45%. On the Primal Diet as he prescribed it, with raw fats, raw meats, vegetable juices, and raw dairy, diseases properly reversed and healed, and progressive degeneration ceased 90% of the time. This represented a substantial improvement over not only cooked food but over doing nothing at all or following other dietary or emotional disciplines.

He found from 1969 to 1981 that emotional disciplines and practices, including those taught by various masters and healers, had little effect on the rate of disease reversal or healing. The rate of reversal while practicing emotional disciplines was little different than when people changed nothing. The determining variable was diet, specifically the quality and nature of the raw foods consumed.

He also noted that people who started on the diet but did not continue to eat raw food regularly did not heal properly. Because optimal healing requires proper nutrients and takes time, ailments in those people gradually returned. Conditions that did not heal properly during a period of raw food eating usually advanced afterward. Detoxification and healing to the point where people no longer felt hindered by advanced ailments took weeks, months, or years depending on severity. Symptoms that quickly mitigated often returned, indicating that more thorough cleansing and healing was needed. When symptoms lingered because the body was continuing its cleansing and healing process, or when they mitigated and then returned for another cycle, people sometimes became disconcerted, not understanding that this cycling is the nature of the process.

One of the clearest illustrations Aajonus gave of the difference between medically managed and naturally supported healing involved two cases of polio he studied. One person was hospitalized and received massive medication including antibiotics. Bacteria levels throughout the body were very low. Medical science considered this a good outcome, but the patient weakened and deteriorated more every day.

The other person experiencing polio was cared for at home on a raw diet of mainly raw meats and raw dairy, with no antibiotics. She improved every day. Her bacteria levels were high throughout her body. He observed that the more evidence of bacteria and poliomyelitis debris present, the greater her improvements. Her poliomyelitis ran its course of cleansing her spinal cord in just six weeks, with another four weeks to heal to the point where she could move well enough. He described himself as astonished.

From this case and others like it, he drew the conclusion that drugs kill bacteria and retard healing, while a high bacterial level inspires healing. Bacteria are not the cause of disease but participants in the cleansing and healing process, and suppressing them with antibiotics does not accelerate recovery but impedes it.

Aajonus described experiments with open wounds that tested the role of bacteria in healing speed. In one experiment he treated wounds on three people in three different ways. One wound on each person was treated with alcohol. One was treated with the subject's own urine only, drawing on the fact that urine contains most of the same constituents as blood with very few red blood cells, and has been used as a cleansing and healing agent for thousands of years in Ayurvedic medicine. The third wound was left untreated.

The wounds treated with urine healed approximately three times faster than those treated with alcohol. The untreated wounds healed a little faster than those treated with alcohol. His conclusion: alcohol destroys bacteria and retards healing; a high bacterial level inspires healing.

In a second experiment, he observed groups of people with stomach ulcers. One group took Maalox or antibiotics. A second group drank their own urine. A third group drank urine and ate a raw diet. The ulcers in those eating raw foods and drinking urine healed two times faster than those who only drank urine. The ulcers in those treated with medication grew larger. When he asked those taking medication to stop, after one week their stomach secretions had higher bacterial levels and their ulcers had diminished in size or were less inflamed. Again: drugs kill bacteria and retard healing.

The broader principle underlying Aajonus's view of the healing crisis is that bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi are not enemies but tools the body uses to accomplish detoxification. Virus, in his framework, are not living organisms but solvents, soaps, produced by the body to dissolve matter that bacteria, parasites, or fungi cannot address, particularly in areas where heavy metal poisoning has made microbial detoxification impossible. When the spinal cord, for example, could not be cleared by bacteria, parasites, or fungi because all the metal poisoning prevented it, the body developed viral solvents to handle that task.

Suppressing any of these agents, whether by antibiotic, antifungal, or antiviral medication, does not protect the body. It interrupts the detoxification process, preventing the body from completing the cleansing cycle that would lead to the healing state. The healing crisis, as the transition from completed detox to active regeneration, cannot occur if the detoxification process has been pharmacologically halted partway through.

Aajonus drew a careful line around the role of healers, whether medical, alternative, or psychic. The average natural recovery rate for most diseases in this period of toxic history is 60%, even without a proper dietary regime, because the body is always working to complete its detox and healing cycles. This means that recoveries that appear to coincide with a healer's intervention may simply be the body completing its natural process, not the result of the intervention.

He concluded that healers assist with healing primarily through the comfort of their compassion and the quality of their presence. They entertain the patient while the patient's body heals itself. He cited Hippocrates directly on this: after giving the appropriate dietary food regime, the best physicians are those who entertain the patient while the body heals itself. The dietary food regime comes first; the physician's role is to keep the patient calm and trusting while the body does its work.

What interferes with natural healing is panic, which drives people toward harmful medications, unnecessary surgeries, and interventions that suppress the very symptoms that constitute the healing process. Teaching a person to distract themselves from their disease, to not worry, and to trust the body's process, while maintaining a diet abundant in raw fats, raw meats, and some vegetable juices, allows the healing cycle to complete 90% of the time.