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Bernard Jensen (1908-2001) was a chiropractor and proponent of alternative medicine, including holistic health treatments and the pseudo-medicinal diagnosis method, iridiology.

Early Life and Education
Jensen was born on March 5, 1908 in Stockton, California. His father, Eugen, was a chiropractor and his mother, Anna, died while Jensen was young. Jensen himself graduated from the West Coast Chiropractic College in Oakland, California in 1929. Jensen continued his studies at the American School of Naturopathy, where he studied under Frank W. Collins. He went on to study naturopathy under Benjamin Lust and iridiology under Richard Murrell McLain. Jensen spent much of his career treating patients in private clinics and, after retiring from active practice in 1978, focused on writing commercially available books on alternative medicine remedies and iridiology diagnosis. Jensen died on February 22, 2001.

Alternative Medicine
Jensen's works on iridiology lead to the popularization of the diagnostic technique among practitioners of alternate medicine. Bernard claimed that the body ought to be treated not as a unit of disentangled parts, but rather as a cohesive whole. The health of the body, Bernard claimed, can be best observed by examining the various networks that run through the body like the nervous system, the blood system, and the lymph system. The best way to observe those networks, Bernard claimed, was through the changing state of the human iris, where Bernard claimed that imbalances in the body could be observed long before other symptoms manifested. Bernard's iridiology involved examining the depth and color of the iris. He claimed that all living cells constantly produced some vibration, and this vibration would propagate through the body to affect the delicate blood vessels attached to the eye, affecting the coloration of the fibers of the iris. Dark lesions in the iris were an indicator of some problem in another part of the body while lighter "healing lines" were indicators that the balance of the body had been restored. Generally speaking, Bernard thought that the lighter in color an iris was, the healthier that person was. Bernard also produced many diagnostic diagrams to aid practicing iridiologists in identifying which imbalances different discolorations could be signalling.

While extolling iridiology as a diagnostic method, Jensen also advocated for the use of nutritional science as both applied and preventative treatment for the toxin imbalances detected by iridiology. He claimed in one publication that following his dietary regimen would improve the effects of iatrogenic disease and reduce a person's likelihood of developing cancer. Besides the widely accepted dietary advice of varying your diet and maintaining a diet rich in vegetables and fruit, Jensen also reccomended consuming more raw foods, including uncooked eggs, balancing the alkalinity of one's diet, not consuming starch and protein in the same meal, and avoiding cooking food while exposed to water, high heat, or air. Jensen additionally promotes the importance of eating a diet rich in calcium, sodium, iodine, and silicon, the four chemical elements he claims nearly every patient is deficient in. He nicknames calcium the "knitter" for its role in bone development, sodium as the "youth element" for the role Bernard claims it plays in joint health, iodine as the "metabolizer" for its use in making thyroid hormones, and silicon the "magnetic element" for the role Bernard claims it plays in transmitting information from the brain to other body parts.

Jensen participated in a 1979 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in which Jensen and several other iridiologists were deemed incapable of diagnosing kidney disease in a sample of patients with any degree of accuracy beyond blind guessing.