Free The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen Page A

orifices during all-day bus rides on bumpy mountain roads. But now he groped his way out of the cave, and there on the cobble below, heaved a torrent of green sludge. The beast was exorcised.
    Tears in his eyes, Suelo began to grin, then laugh. The burning in his body was washed away by a cool wave of bliss. He wasn’t going to die after all. He was alive!
    …
    S UELO LAUGHS AGAIN when he tells the story of his near death by cactus. But it raises the question of his health, especially as he ages; Suelo recently turned fifty. Medical care is expensive and difficult to obtain even for those of us with money. Food and shelter come easy by comparison.
    “He’s in a dangerous position,” his father says. “In old age we won’t be here. Things get tougher. He don’t have any means of support.”
    Like a quarter of all Americans, Suelo lacks health insurance. He does not get Medicare. He does not have a regular doctor or dentist. Nonetheless, he is by all appearances in excellent health—far better than most people his age. He’s lean and muscular, without a ripple of fat. He hadn’t been sick in years when I met up with him. He can walk fifteen miles a day without fatigue. Basic tasks like packing food into the canyon or hauling buckets of water from the creek require and build muscle tone.
    That said, Suelo doesn’t perform anything that looks like exercise. He does not belong to a gym. He doesn’t jog. Despite living in the outdoor sports capital of the world, he doesn’t mountain bike or rock climb or kayak or ski. After meeting Melony Gilles, the watermelon eater, Suelo began attending her free yoga classes. (He arrived in rolled-up jeans and a dress shirt, but removed his hat for the postures.)
    One reason for his good health is his fairly nutritious diet. Before quitting money, he had experimented with vegetarian and vegan and raw and organic diets, but these days he eats pretty much what he can get. Although the fried chicken andgummi bears are junk, he also eats plenty of rice and grains and fruit and vegetables. Being a scavenger doesn’t exempt him from the basic dietary issues of our times: Suelo is convinced that he has a mild allergy to wheat and dairy, and after feasting on donuts or pizza, he complains of feeling drowsy and unfocused.
    Suelo takes no pharmaceutical or recreational drugs and drinks very little alcohol. Instead he employs a number of home remedies to keep healthy. His friend Dr. Michael Friedman, a naturopathic M.D., thinks Suelo has probably contracted giardia, a water-borne parasite, from drinking out of wild streams—a common affliction in North America that causes diarrhea and stomach pain. Suelo follows the naturopathic principle of using the most natural, least invasive, and least toxic treatments available. He has found that swallowing a small portion of pine sap is a good cure for gastrointestinal distress.
    One time while Dr. Friedman was camping with him in the canyon, they began discussing the medicinal properties of bee venom, said to contain an anti-inflammatory one hundred times more powerful than hydrocortisone. Some believe that it relieves arthritis, as well as the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Suelo had been suffering joint pain of late. He and the doctor pondered the best way to experiment. Finally they decided to keep it simple. The two men marched up to a nearby hive and let the bees sting them. “It feels better already,” Suelo reported, admiring his welts. He reported moderate pain relief, but did not repeat the treatment.
    To the subject of eyeglasses, Suelo has devoted a few pixels in the Frequently Asked Questions section of his website:
    My old eyeglasses broke several times, and I rebuilt them several times with melted plastic until they looked pretty goofy. Then theyfinally disintegrated a couple years ago. I was kind of happy about it and decided I didn’t need eyeglasses. It would be like I was in a Monet painting, I thought. It was, and I was okay