If you’ve been following our writing on Blue Heron Health News for awhile, you’ve seen us quote study after study about natural solutions to tackle numerous conditions.

Sometimes you may have wondered if the results are real or if they’d really work for you. After all, natural approaches can sometimes be farfetched and studies sometimes contradict each other.

That’s why in today’s article I’ll explain how to know for sure what approach will and won’t help you personally and how to determine which methods to use.

How will you do that?

You’ll do that using exactly the same methods many of us use to cure ourselves of various conditions and then developing the methods into the various natural health guides published on this site.

The trick is generating a scientific natural health study. And since you’re only focused on curing yourself and you’re not planning on publishing your study (for now), you only need one subject (yourself) to generate 100% proof of efficacy (that at least will work for you).

And you get to play both the role of elegant scientist and plain guinea pig.

Note: don’t be discouraged if you’ve never been interested in science or flunked fifth grade math. The approach we’re using today can be performed by anyone and may even be more reliable than a million dollar study conducted by the best universities in the world.

The thing we need to determine is what exactly it is that we want to achieve. That should generally be easy, such as improving (or even curing) whatever health hazard is bothering you. Let’s take high blood pressure as an example.

The next step is to make your hypothesis. It’s easier than it sounds. Making a hypothesis is as simple as guessing that standing on your head for eight minutes per day will lower blood pressure (my guess is it won’t). Any educated guess that can be proven either true or false can be a scientific hypothesis.

Now the possible hypotheses are endless. So you’ll want to begin by doing a little bit of research to figure out what is worthwhile for testing. It’s very unlikely that eating three Big Macs per day will results in lowering blood pressure so testing that will be a waste of your time. However, drinking 250ml of fresh beet juice daily has been shown to lower blood pressure 10 points, so testing if that will work for you is well worth trying.

Surf the Internet, read some books and articles (for example the hundreds of free articles on this site) to find things you’d like to test.

For an easy example, let’s say you want to test our Blood Pressure Exercises that often help people lower their blood pressure the very first time they use them. But that doesn’t mean they’ll definitely work for everyone. So you want to test if they’re really a genuine cure.

The next step is to determine how you’re going to measure your results.

It’s easy with blood pressure since measuring blood pressure is simple with most home blood pressure monitors. Type 2 Diabetes is also relatively easy to test with a home glucose monitor. Just make sure you always take your numbers the same time of the day (preferable several times per day) and always use the same monitor.

Other things like arthritis may be tougher to measure with such clear accuracy. In those cases, try to develop a task you can do daily and rate the easiness or difficulty performing the task. Maybe you sit down and stand up ten times and then rate how much it hurt or how easy it was. Make a level 1-10.

After you’ve determined your meter, you’ll have to get your base line.

I’ll be honest, I hate this step because it requires the one thing I dislike to do: wait without actions. But it’s necessary because without it you won’t know for sure if the methods you’re using are working or not. This is equal to a control group in big studies.

Testing if the blood pressure exercises work to lower your blood pressure, you’ll have to take a few days of measuring your blood pressure three times a day (always the same times) to get your average blood pressure. Blood pressure fluctuates between different times of the day and between days. Three to four days should be plenty. You can use this time to familiarize yourself with the exercises or whatever method you’re using.

Take the average reading (add all the readings together and then divide with the number of readings) and you’ll have your base line reading.

Admittedly, I sometimes skip this step and go straight for testing the cure when I’m working on myself. The baseline then becomes the first week of using the method and if it keeps on improving after that, I consider the study success. Not really scientific but it’s faster than a week of baseline and it works for me.

Now that you have your task (lowering blood pressure), hypotheses (the exercises are nothing but scam/the exercises are the best cure available) method of measuring (home blood pressure monitor three times per day) and baseline, it’s time to begin the test.

Practice the blood pressure exercises (or use whatever thing you’re testing) once a day. Keep on measuring and recording your blood pressure three times a day. Write down your average blood pressure daily based on the three readings.

But now comes the toughest part of any research:

STICK TO IT!

I can’t tell you how often I’ve received emails from people who just gave any of our health programs one or two days (even less) before asking for refund saying the program didn’t work. And we sadly honor our no questions asked money back guarantee. Sadly because we know the person missed out on potentially lifesaving results. They gave up before they had any reliable data.

You may also, like many of our readers, experience immediate results, followed by a rise in blood pressure the next day again. These are fluctuations that can be expected with any cure. Improvements almost never happen in a straight line. It’s the general upward or downward trend that you are after.

Sometimes using natural methods, you may even experience negative effects for the first few days before the positive effects kick in. Many people, for example, have flu symptoms after juicing or testing a new diet or herbal remedy. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It may be your body’s immune system fighting off invaders it didn’t have the strength to fight before.

So before you start the experiment, set a date in the future and decide to not give up before you’re reached this date. Be determined. Write down the big date on your fridge in

CAPITAL LETTERS.

Lets say you decide to give the blood pressure exercises at least one month. Stick to it no matter what even if you experience no results till day 29.

Now the experiment is over and it’s time to process your data.

I like to make a small graph. You could have the dates on the X axis and the blood pressure number on Y axis. Fill in your numbers and you should have a zig-zag line going down (a general decrease in blood pressure).

If the results are very clear (like they usually are when using the Blood Pressure Exercises), you don’t have to make a graph, you see your number gradually going down and the last few numbers should be drastically lower than your baseline number.

If the results are not quite as clear, you can take the average of the last seven days of your test and compare it to your baseline. If the results are in the right direction, your study is a success.

Whereas the blood pressure exercises most often deliver the drastic results of bringing blood pressure below 120/80, many methods (for blood pressure and other health problems) are only going to improve your condition slightly. Even if your end results are better than your baseline, it may be by such a small margin that you don’t know for sure if the results are real or coincidence. If this is the case, you may want to give it more time and gather more data or test something else.

In big studies, researchers go through great lengths to isolate and test only one variable at a time. If you test two drugs at the same time for the same person, you can’t know for sure which drug is delivering the results in the end. When performing a one person study, you can be much more flexible.

To get quicker, more drastic results you may want to test several things at the same time. Maybe you use the blood pressure exercises AND add 250ml of fresh beet juice every day, too. After all, it won’t hurt and if your blood pressure goes down, you know for sure that natural methods were helping. You can later give up one thing and see if the blood pressure goes up again.

You may also test a complete program in the same way. Let’s say you want to beat your arthritis. You may commit to following every step of our arthritis guide for 30 days. The guide includes diet changes, exercises, herbal remedies and other natural methods to beat arthritis. Most people succeed in completely reversing their arthritis using this program. At the end of 30 days, your arthritis may be completely gone but you’ll not know for sure what exactly in the program made the biggest impact or if you could have skipped some steps. I think you agree since most of the steps don’t take much effort, it’s worth investing 30 days to get real results.

The natural researchers have often spent months and years testing single methods over a period of time. Sometimes they work and we keep on using them; sometimes they don’t and we try something else. Then we add another thing we test and little by little build up a body of evidence supporting techniques that help for a particular condition till we’ve developed a complete cure.

You can use the same steps when testing complete programs as single variable like we explained in this article:

1) Determine your general goal
2) Make your hypotheses
3) Determine how to measure
4) Find your baseline
5) Perform experiment
6) STICK TO IT!!!
7) Process your data and determine accuracy of hypotheses

Now, of course, if whatever you tested worked in positive way, it’s imperitave to keep on doing it. Oftentimes things like the blood pressure exercises eventually cure blood pressure permanently (not just keep it down), and you technically don’t have to do them again but what’s the harm of investing nine minutes a day in your continuing health?

Also, if you manage to cure whatever health problem is bother you, the tendency is sometimes to stop there. However, I’d suggest you keep on going. Why not test things to increase your energy even further, such as trying to improve endurance and strength? Have 2 or 3 tests going all the time not only to cure or fight issues, but to improve health and physical wellbeing.

But before doing anything else, please let us know what you think in the comment box below. Maybe share a test you’d like to start.