well-advanced cancer who had been sent home to die after receiving
all of the above treatments and were now ready to give alternative
therapies a try since they expected to die anyway. I also had a few
people who were beyond help because their vital organs had been so
badly damaged that they knew they were dying, and they wanted to die
in peace without medical intervention, in a supportive hospice cared
for by people who could confront death.

Great Oaks School was intentionally named a "school" of health
partially to deflect the attentions of the AMA. It is, after all,
entirely legal to teach about how to maintain health, about how to
prevent illness, and how to go about making yourself well once you
were sick. Education could not be called "practicing medicine
without a license." Great Oaks was also structured as a school
because I wanted to both learn and teach. Toward this end we started
putting out a holistic health newsletter and offering classes and
seminars to the public on various aspects of holistic health. From
the early 1970s through the early 1980s I invited a succession of
holistic specialists to reside at GOSH, or to teach at Great Oaks
while living elsewhere. These teachers not only provided a service
to the community, but they all became my teachers as well. I
apprenticed myself to each one in turn.

There came and went a steady parade of alternative practitioners of
the healing arts and assorted forms of metapsychology:
acupuncturists, acupressurists, reflexologists, polarity therapists,
massage therapists, postural integrationists, Rolfers, Feldenkries
therapists, neurolinguistic programmers, biokinesiologists,
iridologists, psychic healers, laying on of handsers, past life
readers, crystal therapists, toning therapists in the person of