Lois!

The name is almost magical to those who have sought her knowledge of healing, and it was only after some leg problems that traditional medicine could not or did not cure that I sought her help. That was about six years ago.

“Please call Lois,” a kinsman, Courtney Cook Blossman, admonished, adding, “She saved my life.”

The next morning, I was sitting in her Tylertown office. She was a lady of undetermined age, wearing bright, happy colors and pretty jewelry and exuding a love and genuine interest in her new client. To me, there seemed to be an aura about her.

Lois Diamond Weeks’ name is synonymous with herbal healing, not just in the South but in many other parts of the country. She is one of the most respected in the discipline advocated by Naturopathy, or the use of natural substances to heal. She’s been pursuing the art since she was 19, or for the past 56 years.

She grew up in Wesson and was a majorette in the Co-Lin Junior College Band “a long lot of years ago.” It was at Co-Lin that she met Grady Weeks, her future husband, now deceased.

After college, she went to New Orleans where she enrolled in nursing school “and did a quick dropout, entered medical school briefly and dropped out, then went into the ministry and dropped out.” The reason for withdrawing, she said, was, “I could not reconcile my maverick thoughts with what I was being taught.”

Lois’ introduction to the power of herbal healing was a personal episode that began when she was 9 and had rheumatic fever. Her mother and grandmother were at odds. “My mother firmly believing in medical treatment and my grandmother just as firmly entrenched in herbalism, so behind my mother’s back my grandmother judiciously threw away the medications and nurtured me with herbs – and I recovered.”

Lois was a teenager before her mother discovered the ruse. The girl admitted that she had been talking and listening to her grandmother, “And I’m not taking any more medicine,” she said. “Herbal healing became a way of life for me at a very young age.” Her grandmother came from a very long line of herbal healers, and, “The basics that I use today are hers,” she said.

Lois first used her gift of healing when she was 19. A lady in a nearby apartment was dying, and she recognized the symptoms, made an herbal tea, and the woman miraculously recovered.

“I thought, ‘You didn’t do that; God did that,'” Lois said, “and I still feel like that today.”

Before I went to Lois, friends had told me what to expect: “You’ll have to take your shoes and socks off, and she’ll feel your feet and tell you what’s wrong with you.”

They were right. Her discovery of what ails you is called Unilateral Therapy and Ancient Traditional Herbalism, similar to the Oriental method of reflexology.

“I don’t think there’s any recording of it,” Lois said. “It’s a way to use pressure points, or nerve endings that run from your feet and hands all the way through your body to your brain, to give an impulse to actually nourish the body through the sympathetic nervous system and the blood and the organs. In Universal Therapy, you connect the left and right sides of the body to make sure that the organs are in alignment. We are actually electrical in our body. Our organs generate electricity. Combustion really does equal life.”

So what she does stimulates the body to heal itself.

Herbs, Lois said, sometimes have as many as 400 helpers along with the active ingredients of a plant. All work together in the healing process. A prescription drug, she said, extracts the active ingredient but it has none of the supporting essentials. In each plant is also a toxic ingredient that is eliminated from the body by bowel and kidney action in the herbal application; such help doesn’t exist in prescription drugs. The difference, she said, is that herbs nurture and prescription drugs submerge.

“The greatest scientist ever known did not make a mistake when he made those herbs for healing,” she said. “He created three kinds: daily maintenance, which we use to nourish ourselves in food; medicines, which are the roots and bark and heavy leaves; and the flowers, for emotional healing. So nothing was left undone by God. Man cannot improve on what was already perfect, and that was my thought as I looked at the medical books.”

Eating the right foods, she believes, is the secret to good health, and the food laws given in the first book of the Bible are not obsolete. “When man left the Garden of Eden, which was a perfect array or balance of all the minerals and nutrients that we need, and began to forage and dig, nowhere do you see a law that says to dig into the bowels of Mother Earth and pull out the fecal matter and nourish yourself.”

God wasn’t playing games or doing puzzles, she said, so, today, instead of 1,000 years, our life span is about 70 plus “and most of those are lived in pain.”

The dietary laws that she follows ban grains as “grass meant for the cattle of the field.” Nor does she recommend anything, other than sweet potatoes, that grows under the ground. Even eating medicinals and roots on a daily basis is unhealthy and “could actually bring us closer to our departure date.”

When I began going to Lois, some of my skeptical friends called her my voodoo queen, but another friend, a medical doctor, told me she knew more about medicine than anyone he had ever met.

Though she hasn’t been to a medical doctor in 38 years – that was during the birth of the last of her three children – she has a good rapport “with some of them that I cherish. There are a lot today who are beginning to incorporate some herbs into their programs, for they’ve realized herbs really do work.”

Others, she laughed, will say to her clients, “Well, go ahead and do the program. It’s not going to hurt.” Among her clients are medical doctors, nurses, and chiropractors. She works with any for the benefit of the patient because, “if you combine therapies and know what each one is doing, you get better results.”

Naturopathic physicians, which is what members of Lois’ profession are officially called, are licensed in some states, and one can take special training at a variety of institutions. Diplomas and certificates, however, don’t mean much to her, and she has papered a wall with them, stating, “I really don’t use anything I’ve gotten from those courses. What I do came from my grandmother and from experience. We take care of things. We don’t do invasive therapies or surgery. We don’t prescribe, just suggest. We use natural substances.”

The word “practice” never appealed to Lois, who believes “to practice on a person is the atrocity of mankind. I don’t practice. I can help you get better if you’ll do what I say,” and if you don’t, you’re wasting her time and your money.

Most of what we need, she believes, can be found in the grocery store – fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, seed and meats, though she is a vegetarian. She gave a few examples: a poultice made of carrots and honey will pull poison out of a diabetic sore; celery seed and fennel made into a tea will reduce body fluid; and a broth made from parsley, celery and sweet potatoes is something she drinks every day. It’s hard for cancer to grow in it, and she believes “that is what has kept me healthy.”

“Everything is made that you need,” she said. “Only God can create a seed. Hybrids can’t reproduce, and that’s what is wrong with food today. It has been altered to the point that it is not alive. By that, I mean that it cannot reproduce itself.”

There are too many success stories to enumerate, but one is close to home. Lois’ daughter Cheryl had little patience with her mother’s herbal practice, and her husband felt the same way. They were living in Texas when Cheryl called her mother. She was in the hospital, suffering from an incurable cancer. Doctors had given her only a few weeks to live, and she wanted to come home to die. Long story short: Lois went to Texas, got her daughter out of the hospital, flew her to a clinic in Mexico, and due to herbal remedies Cheryl recovered in a few weeks and has never had a reccurence of the cancer.

To Lois, “People are not numbers. They matter. They’re not a page you stick in a file cabinet and forget about and bill Medicare or whatever. They have a life. They have people who love them and who care for them. And they’re scared. By the time they reach me, a lot of them don’t have any hope. The doctors have given them a diagnosis of something incurable or very frightening, and they don’t know what to do, so they’re vulnerable. They need to be listened to ….”

When clients visit Lois, she does an assessment and supplies information on herbal supplements. At the end of a session she tells them to follow her directions for a month “and you will be better.” After a while they come back and they say, “I’m better.”

She believes the mind, the power of suggestion, is a miraculous tool to help in recovery. It’s one of the treatments her grandmother used on Lois when she had rheumatic fever.

Retirement is not in her vocabulary. She’s working on a book explaining her use of herbs and healing and hopes, “God will let me stay a little longer if I don’t sit down. He might say, ‘If you’re not going to do anything, come on!’ I think everything is about God.”

Lois Weeks loves people and feels that her work “is a calling. I don’t think I could do this without God saying, ‘Look here. I gave you a chance at life. Now then, you owe me,’ and I think I do.” Recalling the year she spent in a comatose state as a child, she added, “I do believe there was a reason for me to get up and get moving.”

Untold numbers of her clients are thankful that she did. I’m one of them: through her suggestions of herbal remedies my “incurable” leg problem hasn’t bothered me in years.