It was the early 1950s when Dr. Stephen Gyland of Tampa, Florida fell ill with severe symptoms which included unprovoked anxieties, tremors, weakness, dizziness, faintness, unprovoked rapid heart beat, and difficulties with memory and concentration. His symptoms became so severe that he sought the help of an eminent specialist he knew.
After being told by this first specialist that his disorders were all in his mind and that he should retire, Dr. Gyland was forced to spend the next three years searching for relief from his ailments. He eventually saw a total of fourteen specialists and visited three nationally known clinics, including the Mayo Clinic.
For his troubles, he could choose from an assortment of diagnoses including neurosis, brain tumor, diabetes and cerebral arteriosclerosis – but still no relief from his ailments. As you might imagine, it cost Dr. Gyland a fair fortune to end up where he started – sick, not able to work and more than a little confused by conflicting diagnoses and prescriptions.
It was not until Dr. Gyland himself happened upon the original paper (written by Dr. Seale Harris) on low blood sugar which had been published in a 1924 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association that he found the solution and remediation to his ailments.
These solutions amounted to diet and nutritional changes which, to his own astonishment, enabled him to recover completely from his assorted afflictions. He then enthusiastically returned to his practice to help hundreds of other patients suffering from similar symptoms and complaints. Next, he compiled an exhaustive study on over six hundred of those patients he had successfully treated for the same symptoms he had experienced and eventually was even permitted to read his paper before a medical society.
Curiously, neither his study nor his paper was ever reported in any of the AMA journals, although it finally was published in a Brazilian medical journal (in Portuguese.)