Otto Greither was born on 21 November 1867 in Munich, in the Knödelgasse, which is the present Hartmannstraße. After completing high school, he studied Human Medicine at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich (LMU). The young medical student, thirsty for knowledge and interested in; what was then, still a new research field of hygiene; went on to work as an assistant to the two renowned Munich hygiene researchers, Max von Pettenkofer and Rudolf Emmerich.

After his promotion, he launched his remarkable career, first working as a surgeon at the Hospital of Munich. Based on his good examination results, he received a "special state scholarship" for the Vienna Clinic and he then went on to have a good practice as country doctor. However this work did not fully satisfy him and he made a decision to train further as a neurologist. He started learning again under eminent doctors, this time in Görlitz, Prague and Berlin. In Berlin, he added another field to his knowledge, that of dentistry.

Until he was 30, Dr. med. Otto Greither had always been healthy, he had said. Then began his period of suffering, "I became nervous, suffered from physical weakness […]. I felt miserable and could only recover slowly due to my chronic weakness", he had described his condition. Confined to his bed, he thought a lot about his illness. His extensive medical knowledge helped him in this regard.

His experience with the previous illness made him believe that there must be a connection between his nutrition and his poor health. He did not rule out the possibility that inadequate digestion might also have triggered the illness. So he went on a diet and further developed stomach massage, coining the term "abdominal thrusting". He used this to mean the rhythmic retraction and extension of the abdominal wall. After healing himself, he set out on a migratory life as physician and researcher. He substituted in colleagues' practices throughout Germany. Later on, he travelled far-distant countries.

Due to his medical history, Greither developed the SALUS cure and founded the SALUS works in 1916 in the centre of Munich, on the Türkenstraße. A cure pack consisted of SALUS oil for cleansing the intestines and Greitherna pastilles to remove waste products. Sometime later came healing clay, the "Munich health tea" and SALUS herbal drops as well as the abdominal thrusting belt, to intensify the "abdominal thrusting". The fundamental principle of the treatment was "Healthy by yourself". The patient had to become pro-active, exactly as Greither had been at the time of his own illness. In 1930, Dr. med. Otto Greither died at the age of 63, of pernicious anaemia, red blood cell deficiency, due to previous exposure to X-rays over several years as a doctor. His wife Thea, who had completed her commercial training, initially continued to run the company.