Santa Fe Living Treasures – Elder Stories

Dr. Hazel R. Parcells

HEALING PIONEER

Honored August, 1986

Dr. Hazel R. Parcells

Parcells set out on her journey in self-healing more than seventy years ago. When Hazel went to see her doctor in 1931, she was told she was dying. For fifteen years, she had been given drugs for heart problems. Most of her right kidney had been destroyed, her lungs were hemorrhaging daily, her heart was enlarged, and she had advanced tuberculosis.

Doctors recommended that Hazel enter a sanitarium for three years. She chose to keep working at the beauty parlor she owned. A diet of milk and eggs was recommended. She didn't follow it. "I had a desire for something green," she recalled. She purchased spinach. "Suddenly, all I wanted was spinach. I ate that green spinach raw, cooked, hot and cold, for breakfast--for every meal."

Six months after Hazel had been declared a "medical reject," doctors couldn't explain her remarkable recovery. Her kidney was healing, and " ... there wasn't even scar tissue in the lungs," she recalled. "I hadn't taken any medications. The heart condition had cleared up. At that time, no one knew anything about electrical energy in healing, and certainly nothing green as part of it. Spinach, at that point, was our commercial source of folic acid. No cell can be rejuvenated or rebuilt without it."

As her quest for wellness continued, Hazel became a doctor of naturopathy. She earned chiropractic certification, studied homeopathy, and received a doctorate in comparative religions. Hazel arrived in Albuquerque in 1968. She didn't advertise. She didn't solicit. She didn't distribute any information, yet many people sought her counsel.