What’s this MAYR®-Cure thing all about?
The MAYR®-Cure (pronounced as “mire”, not “mayor”) is the famous intestinal therapy from Europe. What is it? For starters, it’s a total inner body cleansing and rejuvenation process. It’s a natural and holistic approach. It gives patients the ability to regain good looks — a cosmetic thing. It’s all of those, and much more than that. As the first ever North American to become a fully-trained Mayr Physician, I am delighted to tell you more . . .
Franz Xaver Mayr, was born in 1875 and died at the age of ninety, fully mentally alert and unusually active. He was an Austrian, who could be ranked among such people as Semmelweis. You know Semmelweis — the doctor who told colleagues not to treat expectant mothers right after performing autopsies, without first sterilizing their hands. So they put Semmelweis in an insane asylum for even suggesting unclean hands caused the high death rate among women in hospital maternity wards.
Anyway, Dr. Mayr came to the conclusion that if the digestive system isn’t clean, it can no longer be completely efficient, and therefore the patient is not going to be healthy. And, that contaminated intestinal waste products, possibly even infections, are a source of toxicity. Well, no big deal today, but at that time such thinking matched the revolutionary ideas of Semmelweis. As a medical student, and later throughout his entire career, he sought answers to a few basic questions. Questions like: How can we recognize good health in general and a healthy digestive system in particular? What are the external signs of a healthy intestine? How are these reflected in the size, shape, and condition of the abdomen? Can we tell by these signs, when the intestines are no longer healthy?
In medical school he kept asking his professors those questions. None of them could give him any answers. In order to answer these questions, he went out and researched them on his own. To do so, he essentially started his medical practice by treating all patients regardless of whether they came to him with head, throat, lung, heart, stomach or abdominal complaints, as if they had digestive problems.
Soon he became very famous, because in doing this he got outstanding clinical results. He then moved to Karlsbad, in Czechoslovakia, which was the most famous spa at that time — virtually a mecca — for digestive disorders. He treated such famous people as publishing magnate Lord Beaverbrook, the Baron de Rothschild, and Jan Masaryk (former president of Czechoslovakia). Because of his outstanding success, wealthy people even came from North America to Karlsbad to be treated by him.
In 1950, after he had discovered the answers to his questions, which can be summed up in the statement “death lurks in the intestines”, he passed this valuable knowledge on to a few selected physicians in Vienna. Two of the physicians that he trained, Dr. Ernst Kojer and Dr. Erich Rauch, are today his only living direct protégés. And, they are now the authorized doctors who teach other physicians how to do Mayr’s methods. Well, that still doesn’t tell you much about this cure . . .
Basically, it’s an intestinal cleansing method. It certainly can’t be called a fast, although some people might refer to a small part of it as being like a fast. It’s not meant for weight loss, but people can lose a lot of weight on it, if that is what the body requires. It doesn’t use any colonics, and seldom even minor enemas. Although high colonics were also the big rage back then, Mayr proved that was an entirely wrong approach. Instead, the intestines must be cleaned out the natural way, namely from the mouth down, starting with the saliva. Once you are able to get a patient onto this kind of therapy, you can eliminate things like chronic constipation in a matter of days. They might have been constipated for years, but in just days they no longer are. Things like food allergies simply disappear; and many of their other health problems vanish as well.
The MAYR®-Cure itself can be done in two different ways, namely, stationary or ambulatory — that is, on an inpatient or outpatient basis. In Europe, it is ideally done stationary. In North America, that’s kind of difficult, since not many of us have access to a fully equipped twenty-five to two hundred bed sanatorium, clinic or spa. So, generally here, we have to look at it on an ambulatory or outpatient basis.
What’s involved in it? There are a number of elements to the cure process. A chemical means, in which natural products are used, such as the “Bittersalz” drink (magnesium sulfate or Epsom salt), plus homeopathy, phytotherapeutics, herb teas, etc. Certainly, there’s some dietary considerations to it. You have maybe already heard about the milk-roll aspect, where you “eat” the milk and “drink” dried up two day old rolls by liquefaction through extensive chewing and insalivation. This in essence gives the digestive system a healing vacation. Or, even other modifications of it such as the “mild elimination diet”. Also, there’s counseling involved; training patients how to properly eat (not so much about what they eat!), etc. But, that’s all still only a small part of it.
The big thing is the Mayr diagnostics — his incredible manual evaluation criteria. This allows you to show your patient how he or she is progressing from day to day or treatment to treatment. You can demonstrate even minor changes — their progressive improvements — to show why they need the therapy, and motivate them to continue on your regimen (this is particularly important in outpatient work!). But not only that, because of the diagnostics you are able to modify your therapy from treatment to treatment or from day to day, for even better results. Also, this knowledge enables you to tell the patients what’s wrong with them. It’s no longer a matter of asking how they are doing or feeling today. With your hands you do the diagnostic procedures and then tell the patient, for instance, you have not yet had a bowel movement today. Or, you’ve got pain right here, because you’ve got a blocked sigmoid; plus, you’ve got that happening there. You are telling the patient all these facts, and haven’t asked a single question yet. This really impresses them, and further instills their confidence. NOTE: Mayr diagnostics can be used with any nutritional approach, however, once you fully understand the concepts of Dr. Mayr, you may well change your mind about yours.
Another element, is called the Mayr “Manual Abdominal Treatment”. This is not a massage. Certainly this is a way for you to make contact with your patient — that hands-on contact which is so often missing in the medicine of today. But, more than that, it’s a means to directly treat many of the patient’s abdominal complaints. This ingenious treatment technique not only allows you to handle some of their problems manually, but also to increase intestinal activity and improve circulation in the abdominal cavity. This is a short fifteen minute treatment that you carry out on your patient during each visit. In the course of this you can recheck a few of your diagnostic criteria, and as a result further optimize therapy from treatment to treatment.
In Europe, all this is strictly a medical procedure, as performed by M.D.’s only. It really should be medically supervised, particularly when it is done on a stationary (inpatient) basis, because crisis type reactions can occur when you radically detoxify patients. When you start intensively cleaning out their intestines you’re bound to have some problems. If you’re optimizing therapy in a stationary setting, you almost need to have the ability to reach for allopathics when required. For example, say you have this patient that just checked in a few days ago, and you’ve been doing some of these things to him. Two or three days into the program, this patient who suffers from gout ends up with severely high uric acid levels, and virtually every major joint in his body is being affected. You’re not going to be able to look after that quickly and give him immediate relief with homeopathics. So, because of these retrointoxications and crisis situations, in an inpatient (stationary) spa or clinic setting, I can see why this simply has to be supervised from a full medical standpoint — and by that I mean someone who at least has the ability to prescribe allopathics.
Also in Europe, the training for it is very tightly controlled. There are only two physicians who can officially teach it, namely, Dr. Kojer and Dr. Rauch. And it’s taught to M.D.’s only. Each of these two teachers gives one two-week training course every year. Each such session is limited to some thirty doctors, which means there’s only sixty or so places each year to even take the training. And there, they’ve got certification down to the point where you have to complete three of these two-week training courses in Austria to become a fully-trained and graduated Mayr Physician. So you can see that training opportunities are limited and they are holding very tight reins over how many annually become Mayr Physicians. Unfortunately, and probably due to that control, in many European spas and private clinics it has ended up as a very lucrative proposition. It’s become the therapy for the rich and famous, so to speak.
For North America though, when we were first contacted by them to look after it here, we pointed out that we have many different kinds of doctors. There’s doctors of chiropractic, doctors of naturopathy, doctors of acupuncture, that are all considered primary health care providers, only to name a few. Thus, we’ve got a different situation here, and will have to be able to accommodate them. It was decided that, as long as they are one, and the Institute feels they are qualified, they can participate in the English language programs. And, since regular training in Austria is conducted in German, with English language programs few and far between, participants will be expected to implement the Mayr approach even after just one training course. Thus, we have it good here from those standpoints.
But, more than that. What’s great about it, is that it’s ideal for North America. Not only do we have a higher rate of intestinal disorders than Europe, but it’s perfect for patients who basically don’t want to change their lifestyle. Patients can come to you on an office visit basis and say, doc, I’ll gladly come for a couple of months of weekly treatments — just get me well again, so that I can continue to do what I’ve been doing to make a living. Even in Europe, the kinds of people that really go for this are the politicians, business executives, show business types, doctors, etc. They like it because in a couple of weeks (inpatient) or months (outpatient; a minimum of one visit per week), they can get their bodies rejuvenated, detoxified and all cleaned up. In the process, most of their other health problems disappear, with full effects often not felt until months later.
There of course, on a inpatient basis it is radical therapy, done in an average period of three weeks. You’re almost working at the borderline of life and death with them, because you are continually optimizing their therapy from day to day, due to your manual diagnostic abilities. Afterwards, they go back out rejuvenated and much healthier. Back out to their rubber chicken banquet circuit or high pressure, high stress business careers. A year later they return and say, doc, here I am — do me again. And all this is so powerful, that in just a matter of a few weeks you can take these sick people and fix them up for another year. Who knows, some of them may even change their lifestyle due to your counseling, but in the meantime they become MAYR®-Cure fanatics and keep telling all their friends and business associates about it.
In closing, you might be interested in knowing how I got involved with all this. I have been following the German language literature on this method since 1983, mainly due to glowing reports from German practitioners, who although not Mayr physicians themselves kept recommending it for their patients (or taking “the cure” personally). In 1985, on one of our regular group tours to Germany we had our first introductory presentation by Dr. Rauch, and I was sold. In April of 1986, the Society of Mayr Physicians invited me to take a two-week German language course in Austria under Dr. Kojer. The object was to prepare me for translating the first ever official two-week English language course, as taught by Dr. Rauch for a group of our Affiliates, and held May of 1987 in Austria. Since then I have completed a total of five such two-week courses and taken further training in Germany on the specialized area of Mayr food preparation techniques (particularly the therapeutic ‘mild elimination and restorative diets’), and regularly attend the annual Mayr Physicians program at Baden-Baden Medicine Week.
Quite frankly, this could well be my “retirement”, perhaps with my own little spa somewhere here in British Columbia. No licensure hassles; no instruments required; and a very relaxed clinical atmosphere — probably open only six months of each year. But, that is a few years away yet! Thank you for taking the time to read through this. If you still need further information to come to a decision on pursuing training in this powerful European therapy approach, you can find information on line as the current Mayr Society sponsors ongoing seminars.
MAYR®-Cure is an internationally registered trademark of “The Society of Mayr Physicians”, incorporated in Austria.
An Exclusive Article for OIRF Affiliates
From THE BRIDGE Newsletter of OIRF
Published January 1998
© Copyright 1998, Sturm/Occidental Institute, BC Canada
