Judith Cobb, MH, NNCP, CI, CCII
I’ve been studying iridology since 1980, practicing it clinically since 1981, and teaching since 1985.
Health and wellness have been keen interests of mine since I was a teenager.
As a teenager, I was particularly interested in nutrition. My parents owned a grain grinder and had buckets of wheat, but Mom and Dad didn’t know how to use them. Back then whole wheat was considered to be a more nutritious option compared to white flour, so I taught myself how to use the grain grinder and started making whole wheat bread by hand.
All through middle school and high school I dreamed of being an obstetrician who delivered babies naturally. I followed the story of a local doctor in the 1970s who believed that childbirth should not be treated as a medical crisis. The doctor attended home births, which was illegal at the time, and she was ‘run out of town’ for doing so.
Still, I wanted to have an impact on women’s health but was unsure of how to proceed.
By 1977 and the end of high school, I realized that I wanted to get married and have lots of children. I couldn’t see how it would work to have a big family and go to medical school so I decided to pursue a dream I’d had since starting Grade 1 - to become an elementary school teacher.
After three years of school, I met the man I would eventually marry. Howard had some knowledge of herbs, nutrition, iridology, vita-flex, and biokinesiology, as his mother was lay-trained in all of these. Our dates consisted mostly of Howard teaching me what he knew. I was so intrigued by him (truly smitten) and by what he knew that I started reading anything I could find about herbs, nutrition, and holistic health.
At the end of that school year, with enough credits to graduate but not enough in any major to graduate, I made the best decision of my life - to quit university and marry Howard.
Getting married spiked my interest in all things pregnancy-related, including infertility. I continued my holistic health studies, completing several courses in iridology, herbology, and nutrition, and started seeing clients and coaching them to better health. I earned a Master Herbalist and Fellowship in herbology in 1983.
In 1985, I noticed my clients were hungry for information (this was pre-internet days), so I started creating and teaching holistic healing courses privately and through the City of Calgary Leisure Learning Department. The courses were so successful that there was often a waitlist to get in.
It was shortly after this that I became disenchanted with the iridology I had learned. I had been taught that eyes would change, yet none of my clients’ eyes changed even with rigorous dietary work and supplement programs that lasted months.
My own eyes didn’t change either. Based on what I had learned, my body was very toxic, my liver was a mess, and my digestion was in trouble. Yet, after five years of really focusing on my health and taking supplements, I felt better than I’d ever felt and had had two babies - but my eyes had not changed one little bit.
I always wanted to offer the best care and most accurate programs to my clients, so I started looking for alternate ways to assess my clients’ health that would complement the work I was doing with biokinesiology.
Then, when presenting a keynote address at a health fair in a city in the far north of Alberta, I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by another iridologist. This presenter had an iris map that was not like the one I used from Bernard Jensen. I noted the map had been created by Harri Wolfe. The map referred to ‘constitutional iridology’ and an organization called the National Iridology Research Association.
There are no coincidences. Back in Calgary, I was reading an article about iridology in an herbal publication for which I wrote, and noted the author was also affiliated with NIRA and was promoting Constitutional Iridology.
I wrote off to the address that was listed (remember there was no internet), and got back a brochure listing the educational materials they had - three VHS video tapes and five ‘books’ of slides with descriptions. I ordered everything.
When they arrived I watched the videos repeatedly, making notes every time, and studied the books of slides. This Constitutional Iridology made sense!
After spending a few years studying the materials on my own, I made arrangements to bring Bill Caradonna (then a licensed pharmacist and business partner of Harri Wolfe’s) to Calgary to teach the first Canadian Certification course in Constitutional Iridology.
From that course I became an NIRA Certified Iridologist in 1992.
NIRA eventually became the International Iridology Practitioners Association.
I am a proud member of IIPA and became a Certified Instructor under the IIPA banner in 2016.
Over the years, while continuing my studies and while building my business, my husband and I also ‘built’ our family. We have seven children and eight grandchildren.
