Influenced by the 'back to nature' theories of Maximilian Bircher-Benner, she maintained that plants concentrated more solar energy ('Vital Force') than animals, and that wheatgrass could detoxify the body.

Wigmore was inspired in part by the ideas of Maximilian Bircher-Benner (1867–1939), who was influenced as a young man by the German Lebensreform movement, which saw civilization as corrupt and which sought to go "back to nature"; it embraced holistic medicine, nudism, various forms of spirituality, free love, exercise and other outdoors activity, and foods that it judged were more "natural".

[1]: 31–33 In 1904 Bircher-Benner opened a sanatorium in the mountains outside of Zurich called "Lebendinge Kraft" or "Vital Force," a technical term in the Lebensreform movement that referred especially to sunlight; he and others believed that this energy was more "concentrated" in plants than in meat, and was diminished by cooking.

[1]: 31–33 She also was inspired in part by the biblical story of King Nebuchadnezzar, recounted in Daniel 4:33, in which "he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws", and by the examples of dogs eating grass when they were unwell.

[7] In 1974, Rising Sun Christianity applied to the city to convert the building into a church, a holistic school, and apartments, which was granted for five years, and was extended in 1980.

[8] Brian Clement obtained control over the Hippocrates Health Institute and moved it from Boston to West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1987.

[11] Brian Clement, who later earned a nonmedical PhD, and the Hippocrates Health Institute which he then controlled, eventually obtained 60 acres of land in West Palm Beach and have become known offering residents "wheatgrass, IV injections of vitamins, dietary supplements, foot baths to remove "toxins," raw foods diets and assorted other treatments, some of which may have been considered alternative cancer treatments.

[14] In 1980, the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Aging began what became a four-year investigation into health care scams that preyed on older people.

[19] Health educator William T. Jarvis has noted that: In 1988, the Massachusetts Attorney General sued Wigmore for claiming that her "energy enzyme soup" could cure AIDS.

Suffolk County Judge Robert A. Mulligan ruled that Wigmore's views on how to combat AIDS were protected by the First Amendment, but ordered her to stop representing herself as a physician or as a person licensed in any way to treat disease.