Chemical Free Living Class at Highland County Public Library

Due to medical issues I have experienced in the last year, I have become something I never thought I would be – a label looker. I now read those nutritional facts on food products that I had previously ignored, and I’m not alone in that – consumers today are much more aware of what goes into and onto their bodies, and an upcoming class in Highland County aims to help with that knowledge.

On Thursday, June 15^th, from 5:00 – 7:00 pm at the Highland County Public Library, the Highland Homemakers are sponsoring a Chemical Free Living Class, which will be taught by Terri Walker, who describes herself as a “retired, reformed and recovered RN.”

“The month that I turned 20, I became an RN. I worked for about ten years as a nurse – it was charge nurse and both medical ICU and surgical ICU in a few different hospitals. I ran a urology clinic when we lived in Boston, I worked in an internist’s office. So, you know, I know a little bit about medicine.

“One of the things that’s become apparent, when we study health, is the degree that modern chemicals have affected our lives. And so what I’m going to be doing is briefly cover what some of these toxic chemicals are that are in our lives. And when I say in our lives, I mean everything – our foods, the medicines, and home-care products, cleaning products, anything that you put on your skin that you get from the store – it’s so invasive into our lives. Ubiquitous is a word, but that even probably doesn’t help us understand just how invasive these toxic chemicals are throughout everything. And I will highlight some of the toxins, I’m going to give a list of some of the chemicals to be aware of, to start there, and then I’m also going to talk about the diseases that we know are caused by chemicals. The evidence is there, through science, that these toxic chemicals are throughout our lives, and that these toxic chemicals cause diseases.

“It’s terrible to leave a class with doom and gloom, as if there’s no hope, but that’s the encouraging, actually I think it’s very exciting, thing, and that’s part of what I feel like is my spiritual mission in life, is to help people, one, understand the problem, and two, understand the answer, and that the answers are without chemicals. And so, I will be discussing, on Thursday at the class, ways that we can eliminate, or start eliminating chemicals, and what we can do. Because it’s going to be a vacuum if we just say “Oh, we can’t eat that or we can’t use that in our homes – well, then what do we do?”. And we have to have answers, and there are, and actually, the exciting thing is that when you start eliminating the toxins, most people think that it’s very expensive, to go to the alternatives – actually, I’ve found that it’s less, it’s less expensive. You use less things, for one, and one of the side-effects I’ve noticed that I think is really funny, I’ve never heard of anybody talking about this, but when we started, in our home, to eliminate these toxins, we actually had less trash- a lot less trash.”

She provided contact info for those interested in learning more.

“We are at Trimble House, and the local number is 468-1898, that would be 540 (area code). I do have a cell phone, very similar, it’s 580-736-0100.”