Andrea’s Healing Story – NaPodPoMo

In today’s episode of Self Powered Healing, I’m going to tell you about Andrea Beaman’s healing journey. Her health issues manifested as a thyroid issue, but they went much deeper. But Andrea’s story starts about 15 years before she got sick. When she was 13, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. And of course, the conventional treatments were what were involved with the radiation and chemotherapy and a radical mastectomy. And it seemed that her cancer had been cured.  

Twelve years later, as often happens, it came back with a vengeance. It had metastasized to various parts of her body. And they wound up treating with the same treatments irradiation and the chemotherapy.  

During that second round of illness, her mother became very frail and weak. Her father and Andrea took a course in how to help her to eat better to give her food that would be more nourishing in her condition. And while that did help, and she did get better. Her health did improve for a bit with that ultimately, she succumbed to the ravages of the cancer and the treatments that she had experienced.  

About four years later, when Andrea was 28, she began having recurring illnesses. She had frequent flu, colds, cold sores, anemia, weakness, lethargy, weight gain, depression, low energy, mood swings. And she also had a large goiter on her neck that was associated with her thyroid.  

It got to the point that she went to see a doctor who ran some blood work and came back and said, you have thyroid disease, and the thyroid disease is the main cause of your many ailments. The conventional medical cure for this thyroid disease, is to irradiate the thyroid with radioactive iodine in order to destroy it and then to put her on synthetic thyroid hormone for the rest of her life.  

Since Andrea had watched the effects of radiation during her mother’s breast cancer treatment, she was understandably not wanting to destroy her thyroid with radiation. It didn’t make sense to her. She told the doctor she was not going to take the conventional medical route. She was going to heal her thyroid using natural foods instead.  

Andrea described her diet prior to this as being one heavy in coffee, sugar, pizza, and frozen yogurt. But she was determined that she was going to heal her body with natural foods. Well, of course, you know, the doctor said, that’s impossible. You can’t heal your thyroid through changing your diet. But Andrea said, “Oh, I knew she, the doctor, was just confirming what she had been taught by modern medicine about healing the thyroid, or more appropriately, what she hadn’t been taught.”  

But Andrea stood firm in her decision because she wanted to heal her body, not harm it. And she believed she was better off with all of her body parts intact. She felt that giving her body proper fuel and energy to heal itself instead of damaging it resonated deeply inside her as the way to reclaim her health.  

She connected with a man named Michio Kushi, who was a Japanese man known as the pioneer in the natural foods movement. He had a course in macrobiotic diet, and the course included a checkup with Kushi himself. And he did a very thorough examination of her, more thorough than anything she’d ever experienced.  

He looked at her skin, her eyes, her face, pretty much everything about her. And then he gave her his assessment, “Eating too much dairy, frozen dairy especially, and stimulants, and sugar.” Which is exactly what she had been eating. He told her that changing her diet would result in healing her thyroid. But he also said, if you don’t change your diet right now, “Full blown breast cancer in both breasts within five years.”  

Andrea hadn’t really mentioned her mother’s breast cancer to him, but his trained eye, could see the discoloration in her body that indicated the beginning stages of breast cancer. To the trained eye, those stages are visible long before any real symptoms show up.  

Andrea made the recommended dietary changes right away. And within two weeks, she began to feel changes within her body. And a month later, they were becoming visible in terms of looking healthier and beginning to drop the weight excess weight she had put on.  

Four months after she started the diet, she returned to that same doctor for some more blood work. The results indicated changes, that the thyroid hormones were better than they had been. But the doctor was adamant, saying that the thyroid was still malfunctioning.  

Over the next two years, she saw several different doctors, and they always said she needed the medication, no matter what the blood results said. They had been trained to believe that the only solution was medication.  

Andrea made some other changes because she realized along the way that she needed emotional and spiritual work. So she brought in some meditation, yoga, and tai chi. And she began to allow her true voice to be heard.  

The thyroid is located in the throat and is often associated with our voice. Andrea began speaking out about her own healing and began speaking about it What, about what she had learned in her journey to wellness.  

I want to share a couple of quotes from her book, “The Whole Truth.” She said that, “Symptoms are a sign that something isn’t right inside my body. In modern society, symptoms are covered up with medication ensuring worse sicknesses will inevitably manifest. Understanding this concept changed my life monumentally.”  

She also said, “If I experience pain in my body and take aspirin to dull it, I’m actually covering up the symptom of something else that’s happening inside. The body is brilliant and will inform me of everything that’s going on internally if I listen to its many signals. Any initial discomfort I feel is a warning that something is not right in my internal environment and deadening the pain with a medication will certainly not fix the problem.”  

Andrea’s own experience with her thyroid issues is a clear example of that. Her doctor’s solution was to destroy the thyroid and then be on synthetic hormones for the rest of her life. Yet that would not have resolved the real problem, which was about very poor choices in food and lifestyle.  

Since Andrea’s healing, she has become a very successful health coach with a long term goal of teaching millions of people how to naturally heal themselves, beginning with altering their food choices.

Thanks for listening today. If you have any comments on this episode or on the whole NaPodPoMo concept in general, you can visit this page to leave comments either on this page or at SelfPoweredHealing.com/November2024. You can also find a listing and link for all November’s episodes on that same page: SelfPoweredHealing.com/November2024.  

By the way, Self Powered Healing is still looking for interviews with people who want to share a story of healing. Do you have a healing story? I would love to hear about it and see if maybe you could share it on our show. So if you’re interested in sharing, then visit selfpoweredhealing.com/share to schedule a chat.  

You aren’t committing at this point. You’re just having a chat with me to see what’s going on. It will be confidential unless or until you decide you want to share. And if you get there and there’s not a convenient time for you, send me a message because we’ll always find a time.  

And remember this always,  