The Beginning....

I would like to start off with sharing my compelling story with all of you readers out there who have taken an interest in this life changing experience. It all started when my neighbor Douglas told me about an idea he had. He wanted to use some of his fathers land in Ecuador to build out a poker room / casino. It has always been one of my dreams to own a casino, so taking a trip to Ecuador to look at property and possibly open up a new business sounded like something I would like to do. Douglas and I had been friends for over 5 yrs, and within these 5yrs we had done some partying in Los Angeles at all the best clubs-Apple, Foxtails, Prey, Hwood, Playhouse, you name it we did it. When we were out and feeling a little buzzed he would tell me a little about his LIFE and share crazy stories of Medicine Men who lived in the Amazon Jungle. He told me of a 101 yr old Shaman who lived in the Amazon Jungle and how his(Douglas's) Grandfather use to work for a large pharmaceutical company and would trade medicine with the Shaman, the leader of an indigenous tribe that lived in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest. Douglas would ramble on telling me about how his Dad was the only person in the whole world that owned land deep in the Amazon Rainforest and how he started a non-profit organization to help the indigenous people of this area. I didn't really pay attention at the time, but he also mentioned that they did some kind of holistic cleansing with all natural medicine. This particularly stuck in my mind because I beleived that holistic medicine could possibly be something that might help ME. I was born with an incurable disease called hepatitis B. One day, back in my early college years, I was in school and began to feel light headed and really deathly ill. I was sent me to emergency and rushed to a liver specialist right away. This is when I discovered I had full blown yellow Jaundice and my liver was not working properly. The liver specialist told me that I had severe Hep B, and that I was too sick to continue with school. It was then I had to take a leave of absence. My parents of course were very alarmed at the dicovery of my didease. As we found out more information on Hepatitis B we began to learn that this disease, in the 80's, was fairly new. The doctors didn't know much about this disease and said "there is no medicine, no cure", and worst of all they had "no answers". They told my mom that I was probably born with it, and that the only help they could give me was to refer me to UCLA Medical Research center. There, I could be a guinea pig, like a lab rat, and they could use me and test different new medicines on me. My mom, of course if you knew my mom, said "are you crazy? !!!.. Nobody is going to use my son as a lab rat!!!!" So being open minded , my mother decided to start contacting holistic medicine doctors such as Chinese herbalists, whatever information she could get her hands on. So to keep a long story short, this (somewhat crazy) Chinese herbalist made me a weird smelling tea that was made from all kinds of different strange things that my mom was convinced, to this day, saved my life. I wasn't convinced ... but the long and the short of it I did start to feel better, and went back to school.
Throughout my life, I would go on feeling a little different from everyone else. It took me a little longer to get my energy level up. All the liver specialists that I would see for the next 15yrs of my life all told me facts about my liver that didn't make any logical sense. The information given by these western medicine doctors was quite contradictory and made me start to lose faith. I wondered whether or not these doctors really had any idea what they were talking about. "Oh you get sick then you build immunity to the virus, you won't get sick again"... but "oh you got sick again, then you have Hep B/C chronic hepatitis which means reoccurring hepatitis", I was like "are you kidding me??!.. You people don't know what you are talking about, and when something new changes in the virus you just add another letter to it. There's Hep A, Hep B, Hep C, Hep B/C, Hep D, I mean come on you people are a joke!!!!". So throughout my life I have always kept my ears open and my mind open to alternative medicine. Douglas had some interesting medicine doctor, or "SHAMAN", which I was very curious about so I told him when we go to Ecuador for the casino deal let's jump in a canoe and go sit down with the Shaman. He responded, "what, are you serious? !!! OK I will set it up Vince, I will get the green berets so we won't get kidnapped by the Geurria or run into any problems with the FARC", and so on and so on. I was like "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS GUY TALKING ABOUT?" To me, it sounded like a movie, and a wild adventure but if you knew me you would know that nothing really scares me. I am always down for an adventure, I like a KEEPNITREEL adventure. For me, and my experience, this is how it all began.....