If it's all in the mind, he has a gold mine.

• Position: Monty Jones to market Elixir of Life Cure All through New Orleans Snowballs - Company Profile

Monty Joynes is about a century too late to climb on the snake-oil bandwagon. But the inventor of Doctor Monty's Elixir of Life Cure All has a new - and New Age - spin. He doesn't claim to be a real doctor. He makes it clear his tonic has no medicinal value. So what's the point? It's right there on the label. The cure-all works "by virtue of the love and spiritual power that the individual and the well-wisher brings to it."

He started selling the tonic in October by mail for $6 to $7 per 12.7-ounce bottle. He also wholesales it to gourmet and gift retailers. The 5,000-bottle first run sold out in March. His Boone-based company, New Orleans Snowballs, distributes machines from the Big Easy that make snow cones. The company also sells gourmet syrups called Carolina Flavors. It grossed between $300,000 and $400,000 last year, largely from its best seller, Carolina Cinnamon.

But that wasn't enough. Joynes sold the recipe for Carolina Cinnamon in 1986 to put his three daughters through college and was competing with his own product. The competition was winning.

The idea for the cure-all came in August after Joynes and his wife, Pat, visited Unity Village meditation center, outside Kansas City, Mo., on their way to a trade show. Joynes woke up with lots of energy and a new idea the next day. For two weeks, he felt obsessed. He had to pull off the road four times driving back from work one day "to record words for a specific label," he writes in a release. It came a few sentences at a time, but by the time he got home, "it was complete."

Sounds a lot like a process the layman knows as "thinking," you say. But Joynes, 54, doesn't take credit for the cure-all. He's had his share of ideas. Before moving to Boone in 1985 to sell flavorings, the Norfolk, Va., native was a jack-of-all-trades. He got a bachelor's in psychology from the University of Virginia in 1963, started Metro magazine in Norfolk, Va., worked as associate publisher of Holiday magazine out of Indianapolis, even anchored a radio show in New Orleans. His first published novel, a piece of "visionary fiction" called Naked Into the Night, will come out from Charlottesville, Va.-based Hampton Roads Publishing next spring. But the cure-all was different, more spiritual.

"Metaphor is more powerful than medicine," he says. The syrup tastes of black raspberry and buttered rum, fruity but medicinal. It can be drunk a teaspoon at a time or mixed with apple juice, tea, lemonade, even ice cream.

He...