“Wait. That man can be healed.” — Private Raymond Christopher, Fort Lewis, Washington
A Life That Was Not Supposed to Happen
John Raymond Christopher was born in Salt Lake City on November 25, 1909, and left as a baby at the city orphanage with his older sister. When Leander and Melissa Christopher came looking for a son, the little boy toddled across the room, climbed into Melissa’s lap and put his head on her shoulder. “This is our son,” she said.
Ray, as everyone called him, was born with rheumatoid arthritis. As a child he walked with a cane or sat in a wheelchair, and he later developed hardening of the arteries. Doctors told his parents he would not live to thirty. His adoptive mother suffered from diabetes and dropsy, and from his own wheelchair the little boy watched her suffer and told her he would become a doctor. She laughed: he could not stand the sight of blood. “Mother,” he answered, “I will be able to heal people without cutting them up. There will be natural ways of doing it.”
At sixteen he met such a doctor, an iridologist who changed his mother’s diet and gave her herbs, and Ray said, “That’s the kind of doctor I’m going to be.” A few months later that doctor was in jail for practicing medicine without a license. It was a sign of what was coming.
After a car accident that left him pronounced dead at the scene (his mother saw an eyelash flicker at the morgue), months of recovery, and the slow death of his mother from diabetes, Ray changed his own way of living and found his health improving for the first time in his life. It confirmed what he had believed since childhood: the body can heal when we give it what it needs and stop giving it what harms it.
The Black Walnut Miracle
During World War II, Ray was drafted at 35. He would serve, he said, and carry stretchers on the front lines, but he would not carry a gun, nor even a nightstick, “because you could kill people with a night stick.” When the officer at his hearing asked, “What if everyone in the world felt as you do?” Ray answered, “Then there would be no war.” He was sent as a conscientious objector to Fort Lewis, Washington, and put in charge of a medical dispensary, a private giving orders to men who all outranked him.
There a soldier was brought before the dispensary heads with the worst case of impetigo any of them had seen. He had been hospitalized nine times. His shaved scalp was covered with a crust nearly an inch thick, and the army had decided to discharge him. “Wait,” said Private Christopher. “That man can be healed.” The major snapped, “None of your blasted herbs!” but the soldier said he would try anything, and signed a release.
Ray had one week. He phoned a friend in Salt Lake City who gathered black walnut hulls from under the snow and shipped them overnight. They arrived soaking wet, the only alcohol Ray could get was rubbing alcohol, and instead of fourteen days to steep he had two, so he carried the jar everywhere, shaking it constantly. He strained it, made a compress like a football helmet, kept it wet for the rest of the week, and wrote the mess sergeant a prescription for wholesome food. On Monday morning, in front of the jeering officers, he lifted off the compress. The scab came with it, and the scalp underneath was clean, with no scars.
From that day the major let him practice with herbs, and Christopher became the only practicing herbalist in the United States Army. His black walnut tincture went on to clear jungle rot, fungus, ringworm, eczema, shingles and boils. You can make it the way he did (with grain alcohol, not rubbing alcohol): chop 8 ounces of green or dry black walnut hulls, cover with a quart of 90-proof alcohol, steep 14 days shaking daily, then strain and bottle.
The School of Natural Healing
After the war, Christopher studied at the Dominion Herbal College in Canada and earned his Master Herbalist degree. Herbs were hard to buy in those lean years, so he took a job weeding gardens every morning, carried the medicinal “weeds” home in burlap sacks, washed and sorted them on the kitchen counter, and used them for his patients that afternoon. He taught patients to gather the same plants from their own yards.
Plantain became one of his greatest remedies. A workman came to him with a hand swollen and hot from a chisel wound, a red streak running up his arm and a lump the size of a baseball in his armpit, afraid that a doctor would amputate. Christopher sent him home to dig plantain, crush it into a poultice, keep it fresh on the wound and drink three cups of plantain tea a day. Within hours the red streak was gone, and in a day or two the hand had healed. When a boy stung by a wasp passed out from the pain, Christopher spread plantain ointment on the sting, and within half an hour the boy was sitting up.
Christopher practiced in Washington, Utah and Wyoming, and he was arrested again and again for practicing medicine without a license. Once he was charged with murder after a dying cancer patient he had relieved of pain passed away; her children testified for him and the case was dismissed. Because the law kept him from practicing freely, he poured himself into teaching. In 1953 he founded The School of Natural Healing, and through its courses, his books (School of Natural Healing, Capsicum, Every Woman’s Herbal and others), his newsletters and his seminars he taught thousands of students, Dr. Richard Schulze among them. He died in 1983 at 73, after a fall on the ice. At seventy, his son David recalled, his blood pressure was that of a man in his twenties.
His son David Christopher, M.H., carries on the School of Natural Healing, and the website herballegacy.com keeps his teaching, case stories and formulas freely available. Its pages on herbal calcium, broken bones and the history of comfrey are worth reading as you study this chapter.
What Christopher Taught
Christopher’s teaching rests on a few principles that run through this whole book.
- There are no incurable diseases. He taught that the body, cleansed and nourished, can heal from almost anything, and that “incurable” says more about the limits of a treatment than about the body. Dr. Schulze took the phrase as the title of his book.
- Cleanse and build. First clean the body: the bowel, the blood, the lymph and the kidneys. Then feed and rebuild it. His formulas come in pairs: one to clean, one to build.
- Herbs are food. Christopher said herbs feed the body what it is missing so it can repair itself, rather than forcing it to act as drugs do. A weak heart is a starved heart; a nervous person is a person with starved nerves.
- Thomsonian roots. Like Samuel Thomson, he relied on cayenne to heat and stimulate and lobelia to relax and cleanse, and he added one or both to most formulas.
- The whole person. Diet, fresh air, exercise, rest, clean water, a cheerful attitude and faith all mattered as much as any herb. His son remembered “a cheerfulness that never quit.”
- Persistence. Chronic illness took years to develop and takes time to heal. He taught taking herbs six days a week with a day of rest, and keeping at it.
Where Arukah parts ways. Christopher taught a meatless, “mucusless” diet. Arukah follows Dr. Weston A. Price on diet and includes nourishing animal foods; see Around the World in 80 Diets and Do This, Detox That, Chapter 12. When you hear his diet advice in the seminar videos, take his herbs and leave the diet.
Christopher’s Famous Formulas
Christopher created dozens of formulas, and many are still made by Christopher’s Original Formulas. These are the ones every student should know. (Chapter 5 explains how he built them.)
| Formula | What it is for | Key herbs |
|---|---|---|
| BPE (blood pressure equalizer) | Equalizes blood pressure and builds the circulation; born from his own hardened arteries | Cayenne, ginger, parsley, goldenseal, garlic, Siberian ginseng |
| BF&C (Bone, Flesh and Cartilage) | Knits bones, heals skin, wounds, bruises, sprains and sore gums; dissolves calcium deposits | Grew from his black walnut tincture: white oak bark, marshmallow root, mullein, black walnut hulls, gravel root, wormwood, lobelia, skullcap and comfrey |
| Burn paste | Burns, even severe ones | Comfrey, honey and wheat germ oil |
| INF | Infection, from the outside in | Plantain, black walnut hulls, calendula, marshmallow root, goldenseal, bugleweed |
| Red Clover Combination | Purifies the blood | Red clover, chaparral, licorice, Oregon grape or barberry, poke, echinacea, cascara, sarsaparilla, prickly ash, burdock, buckthorn |
| Lower Bowel Tonic | Rebuilds and moves a sluggish bowel without making it dependent | Barberry, cascara sagrada, cayenne, ginger, lobelia, red raspberry, turkey rhubarb, goldenseal, fennel |
| Juni-Pars | Kidneys and bladder: incontinence, bed-wetting, stones, infection | Juniper berries and parsley, with uva ursi, marshmallow, gravel root, ginger and goldenseal |
| Garlic, rose hips and parsley | Colds and flu | Garlic, rose hips, parsley, watercress, rosemary |
| Nervine formulas | Feed and calm the nerves | Black cohosh, skullcap, lobelia, valerian, hops and others |
| Adrenetone | Tired adrenal glands | Mullein, licorice, gotu kola, cayenne, ginger, Siberian ginseng, hawthorn |
| Nu-Fem | Women’s hormonal balance | False unicorn, goldenseal, blessed thistle, cayenne, uva ursi, cramp bark, red raspberry, squaw vine, ginger |
| Herbal Eyebright | The eyes, as an eyewash and by mouth | Eyebright, goldenseal, bayberry, red raspberry, cayenne |
| Herbal Calcium | Calcium for bones, teeth, nerves, cramps | Horsetail, comfrey root, oat straw, lobelia |
Christopher also made a respiratory formula (Resp-Free) and a hay fever formula (SHA) with ephedra (Brigham tea). Ephedra supplements were banned in the United States in 2004, so these formulas are made today without it.
Featured Remedy: Arukah Herbal Calcium
This herbal calcium formula is one of my top three most important herbal formulas. It has brought me, my family, my clients and my students tremendous relief.
My Story
I first learned about this formula because of charley horses. During my first pregnancy I began getting painful cramps in my legs. My mother-in-law told me to take calcium pills, and they helped. Then, while I was studying to become an herbalist, I came across Dr. Christopher’s herbal calcium tea. I thought: I would rather take something made from plants than something manufactured in a factory from something my body would never naturally eat. So I traded the pills for the tea.
It went on helping with the cramps. But I had also had bleeding gums since at least my college years. They bled every day, often several times a day, for no reason I could find. Every dentist told me to brush and floss more. I brushed three times a day and flossed all the time, and still they bled. When I started drinking the herbal calcium tea, the bleeding stopped. Years later, when I get tired of the tea and stop drinking it for a long time, the bleeding gums come back. My body needs this formula.
I also had terrible back pain and sciatica after my first pregnancy, when I developed diastasis recti, a separation of the abdominal muscles. Chiropractic gave me relief for a day at most. For three or four years I could not carry my baby except to lift him into his car seat or high chair, could not carry a basket of laundry up the stairs, and sometimes limped. I was not even taking the tea for my back. But it healed my back pain. Today I carry my babies all the time; I even dance and jump with my children.
My son used to get nosebleeds several times a week. When I learned that Dr. Christopher recommended this formula for nosebleeds, I had him drink it, and the nosebleeds stopped, and came back when he stopped drinking it for a long time. My mother had arthritis so bad that she could not get out of bed without help or bend over to pick something up; after a month of the tea she could get up by herself and reach down to the floor. In our family, when a child complains of a toothache, I give them herbal calcium tea, and the toothache goes away.
It took my mother and me about a month of drinking it daily before we noticed all the benefits. Some of my students and clients felt it within days. Everyone is different.
Rivkah Jaton Maddox, a student of mine, wrote: “Her herbal calcium tea relieved my arthritis and heart palpitations.” Dr. Christopher’s own newsletters tell of a girl whose cavity, left as an open hole when her filling fell out, grew over completely after two years of the family drinking the formula, and of people whose insomnia ended when they took it at night.
What It Is For
Dr. Christopher taught that the body needs calcium for the nerve sheaths, the walls of the veins and arteries, the bones and the teeth, and he recommended this formula for arthritis, broken bones, osteoporosis, headaches, nerves, nosebleeds, paralysis, problems stemming from pregnancy, rheumatism, teeth and varicose veins, and for cramps and charley horses and “all calcium needs in the body.” In my own family and practice it has helped with:
- muscle cramps and charley horses
- bleeding gums
- back pain and sciatica
- toothaches and cavities
- broken bones and injuries
- heart palpitations
- nosebleeds
- arthritis
Why It Works
The formula has some calcium, but Dr. Christopher and his son David taught that its secret is silica, which horsetail and oat straw are rich in. Silica helps the body use calcium: the calcium you are already taking in from food (or even supplements) but not putting where it belongs. Calcium that is not properly used ends up deposited in the wrong places, in joints and arteries, which can be part of the pain of arthritis. Silica and the plant minerals help carry calcium to the bones, teeth, nerves and vessel walls where it builds the body up.
This is the beauty of herbs. A drug taken for one problem often causes others. An herb like this, taken for one problem, nourishes the body and heals in places you did not expect, as it did for me.
The Herbs
| Herb | Parts (by volume) | What it brings |
|---|---|---|
| Horsetail (Equisetum arvense), the shoots | 6 | The richest herb source of silica |
| Comfrey root (Symphytum officinale) — the root, not the leaf | 4 | “Knitbone”: allantoin, which speeds the growth of new cells, and mucilage that soothes |
| Oat straw (Avena sativa) | 3 | Silica, calcium and magnesium; feeds the nerves |
| Red raspberry leaf (Rubus idaeus) | 1 (optional) | Minerals and a gentle tonic; wonderful in pregnancy |
Dr. Christopher’s original formula also had 1 part lobelia. Arukah leaves the lobelia out: lobelia is a strong herb best used on its own when it is needed (Lobelia), and the formula works beautifully without it for daily, long-term use and for children.
Measure by volume, not weight. You buy the herbs by weight, but comfrey root is dense and horsetail and oat straw are light, so 4 ounces of comfrey root makes far less volume than the same weight of horsetail. Measure out 6 cups of horsetail, 4 cups of comfrey root and 3 cups of oat straw (and 1 cup of red raspberry leaf if you like), mix them in a big bowl, and store the blend in a large glass jar. When one herb runs out, buy more of it.
Buy the herbs separately and mix them yourself. You cannot buy the original formula ready-made: packaged “calcium” teas leave out the comfrey root, because the FDA advises against taking comfrey by mouth. I buy horsetail (organic or wild-harvested shoots), comfrey root and oat straw from Pacific Botanicals or Mountain Rose Herbs, sometimes Azure Standard, and use Amazon only as a last resort.
To vary the flavor, I sometimes add hibiscus (it makes the tea taste wonderful), peppermint, juniper berries for the kidneys, or hawthorn for the heart. Changing it up keeps the tea from becoming tiresome.
How to Make It
Make it as a nourishing infusion, so the long steep pulls out the minerals:
- One cup: 1 tablespoon of the blend in a cup of boiling water, covered, steeped at least 15 minutes and preferably several hours.
- For the day: I put about a cup of the blend in a French press, fill it with boiling water, let it steep for hours, and drink it over a day or two, sharing some with my family. Or put ½–1 cup of the blend in a quart jar, fill with boiling water, cap and steep overnight.
Strain, and drink warm or cold. Add honey or a little hibiscus if you like.
How Much
- Adults: at least 1 tablespoon of herbs made into tea daily (my mother took a cup a day made with a tablespoon of herbs); for stronger needs, up to a cup of herbs made into a quart or more over one to two days, as I take it.
- Pregnancy and the first year or two of nursing: I need up to double my usual amount for the same relief, because a mother is feeding two.
- Children: a smaller cup, using Clark’s or Young’s rule (Chapter 1); my family has used it for years, including the babies.
- How long: give it at least a month. Some people feel it in days; others, like my mother and me, take about a month. Many people, me included, simply keep drinking it.
Comfrey: Knitbone, and the Controversy
Comfrey’s old English name is knitbone, and its Latin name, Symphytum, means “to grow together.” Since Dioscorides in the first century, people have taken comfrey by mouth and laid it on the skin to heal broken bones, wounds, ulcers and bruises. Its allantoin makes cells multiply; its mucilage soothes. Dr. Christopher used comfrey in his Herbal Calcium, BF&C and burn paste, and in his lung formulas, and called it one of the greatest healing herbs.
In the 1970s and 1980s, comfrey came under attack. It contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs), and in animal studies very large amounts of PAs damaged the liver. In 2001 the FDA advised against comfrey products taken by mouth, and that is why the packaged formulas leave out the root.
Arukah stands with Dr. Christopher’s school. The alarm came from animal studies with extreme amounts: one defender of comfrey noted that rats were fed comfrey in amounts equal to about 24 times their body weight, far beyond anything a person would ever drink. Comfrey was taken by millions of people for centuries, and external use has always been safe. My own family has drunk comfrey root in this formula for years, babies included.
The one caution that Christopher’s school itself gives is plain: people with weak livers or liver disease, heavy drinkers, and people taking drugs that burden the liver should not take large amounts of comfrey for long periods.
Horsetail is likewise safe as Christopher used it. Buy the green shoots of Equisetum arvense, the common horsetail, organic or wild-harvested from a good supplier.
The conventional view. The FDA advises against taking comfrey by mouth because of its pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which in large amounts can damage the liver, and many countries restrict internal comfrey products. Arukah disagrees for the reasons above: the warnings rest on extreme doses, while centuries of use and Christopher’s school show comfrey root, taken in tea at ordinary amounts, to be a safe and powerful healer.
Watching the Christopher Seminar
The 32 seminar videos are recordings of Dr. Christopher teaching, eight sessions in four parts each, about sixteen hours in all. You will hear his stories, his humor, his formulas and his herbal syllabus in his own voice. As you watch:
- List every herb he names and what he uses it for, and look each one up in Part Two.
- Notice the pairs: cleanse and build, cayenne and lobelia.
- Notice his cheerfulness in the face of persecution. It is part of the lesson.
- Leave the diet (see above), and take the herbs.
Sources and further reading
- Christopher, D. An Herbal Legacy of Courage (biography of Dr. John R. Christopher), adapted in “Biography of Master Herbalist John Raymond Christopher,” School of Natural Healing.
- Christopher, J. R. School of Natural Healing. Christopher Publications, 1976.
- Christopher, J. R. Capsicum. Christopher Publications, 1980.
- herballegacy.com (The School of Natural Healing): “Herbal Calcium,” “Broken Bones,” and the comfrey history pages by Daniel Hoover.
- Vega, M. The Life and Teachings of Master Herbalist John R. Christopher (ebook).
- Vega, M. “Herbal Calcium for Sciatica, Broken Bones and More” (video, 2021) and “How to Buy the Herbal Calcium Formula” (video, 2022); arukah.com/calcium.
- Staiger, C. “Comfrey root: From tradition to modern clinical trials.” Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 163 (2013): 58–64.
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “FDA Advises Dietary Supplement Manufacturers to Remove Comfrey Products from the Market.” July 2001.
- Maddox, R. J., testimony in Vega, M., The Arukah Method.