Save Planet Thrive, Buhner Healing Lyme, ESH

I created Planet Thrive in 2006 - almost 20 years ago - after being misdiagnosed and struggling to manage confounding and debilitating symptoms that the allopathic health care system was not helping me with. I wanted to create a place where people with mystery illnesses like my own could find each other and help bring clarity, guidance, information, and a ton of support and understanding to those whose lifelong support systems crumbled beneath them almost overnight.

Over the past twenty years, Planet Thrive has hosted important Q + A columns with renowned leaders in their fields, like the late herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner of "Healing Lyme" fame and the late Dr. William Rea, one of the preeminent environmental medicine physicians in the world. We also provided many helpful + practical articles on how to live with severe chemical and electromagnetic sensitivities -- how to stay warm, how to cook, how to read printed books and magazines, how to wash clothes, how to choose a bed, and more.

When brain retraining programs specifically marketed to those with MCS and EHS were first introduced, there was a huge backlash against those programs and their creators by those fearful of being around chemicals and other triggers. I was a huge proponent of giving these programs a fair chance, and I spent years writing articles and missives online in response to posts about the creators of these brain retraining programs as being "snake oil salesmen" and taking advantage of the sick. Today, these programs have not only been accepted but are promoted by some of the top physicians practicing Environmental Medicine.

Planet Thrive had a healthy private community of hundreds of brain retrainers who supported each other, shared succcesses and tips, and ultimately, healed and moved on from our website. The Planet Thrive website has a library of articles including an interview with both Annie Hopper and Ashok Gupta, creators of the DNRS and Gupta programs, respectively.

At one point our site also had housing listings, and I eventually made a stand alone site for housing listings which has helped many people connect with safer housing opportunities.

During all these years, I personally became a focal point for questions, support, help, you name it. I helped many members start fund raisers, letter writing campaigns, and even get family funding to buy an environmentally safer home. What I found over time is that most people really just wanted to be seen and acknowledged in their struggle. I would listen to their stories, and validate their realities. Most of the time, I could offer no practical help. But the gratitude I received in return for just being a compassionate witness was triplefold.

I have absorbed all of the overhead costs associated with building and maintaining Planet Thrive, MCS Safer Homes, Buhner Healing Lyme, Limbic Retraining, and now Environmentally Safer Homes. From the beginning, I tried to monetize the sites so they would at least pay for themselves. But I never made much of a profit and keeping Planet Thrive and Environmentally Safer Homes, the only two current websites from that list, alive is now keeping me from personally getting needed medical treatments for my own serious and debilitating health issues. I can no longer carry these costs on my own.

I am appealing to the greater community of those who have benefited from my websites over the years, in the hopes that you will be able to contribute something to keeping the websites alive. I hate the thought of losing all of the amazing and helpful information stored on the site. If you would like to keep Planet Thrive, the archived Buhner Q + A Column, Environmentally Safer Homes and all of the articles we've produced that have gotten hundreds of thousands of page views over the years, please consider donating even a small amount. Thank you so much.