Who Was Dr. Otis Carroll?

Source: Dr. Jared Zeff, ND, http://www.jaredzeff.com/

"Dr. Otis G. Carroll is considered one of the most significant naturopathic physicians of this century. He practiced from 1917 - 1962, in Spokane, Washington. His clinic was the most famous west of the Mississippi, and he was the primary teacher of those who taught my generation, Dr. Bastyr, Dr. Dick, and others. His clinic was a “Mecca” of healing, drawing people from all over the world. His work was based upon the European nature-cure approach, which favored a simple, vegetarian diet, hydrotherapy, homeopathy, and herbal medicine.

With all of his success, he was unable to help his chronically ill son. This stimulated his continual search for better methods, which led him to the work of Stanford’s Dr. Abrams, a professor of physiology. Abrams had been experimenting with new techniques in diagnosis. Dr. Carroll modified Abrams’ work to devise a method of testing for foods which are not well digested or metabolized in a particular body, and thereby become a source of maldigestion, intestinal toxemia, dysboisis, and chronic irritation to body tissues. This naturopathic concept was not a part of standard medicine. Through this work, Carroll discovered that his son was intolerant to fruit, which he had always thought was a perfect and healing food for anyone. He removed fruit from his son’s diet, and for the first time his son recovered.


In applying this method of testing to all of his patients from this point on, he determined that there were common categories of food intolerance. Most people tested intolerant to one of the following foods or food categories: milk, egg, meat, sugar, fruit, and potato. In addition, he discovered that most people had a problem with one or more combinations of food, similarly not well tolerated. The most common food combinations were these: grain and potato, grain with milk, grain with fruit, grain with sugar, and fruit with sugar.

Food intolerance is not limited to these categories, but most commonly a person we test will fall into one of these. Occasionally we need to look to other possibilities, such as soy, nuts, fish, etc."