My first experience with alternative medicine came with my first group therapy session. Along with the vociferous lady who claimed that Jesus cured her MS, I met a very quiet lady who, when questioned, allowed that she had chosen to cleanse her body of all toxic substances including all medications, and was following a strict vitamin therapy. As a result, she had been free of symptoms for some time. She wasn't confrontational about it, but her disdain for conventional medicine was clear. "More power to her", I thought. The moral to the story is this:
Rule #1: If somebody is suffering from the delusion that Alternative Medicine has cured his or her MS, it is not your job to disillusion them. Listening to them will do you no harm that a competent psychiatrist can't fix.
Since then I've met several people who I would categorize as vitamin freaks, but she wasn't one of them. My mother-in-law soon jumped on the bandwagon and insisted that I try some nutritional supplement that I won't name here for fear of legal retribution, but whose ingredients, though many, various, and vaguely troubling, included grape seed extract. She bugged me for months and eventually shipped a large supply of it for my daily use. My wife nagged me into trying it. Henpecked that I am, I did. It didn't do a damn thing for me. Hence:
Rule #2: If somebody is suffering from the delusion that Alternative Medicine will cure your MS, it is your job to disillusion them. Listening to them is a waste of time and will only encourage them to greater excess.
My poor mother-in-law had her heart in the right place, but her brain in another. She tried over the course of several days to fax me 200 pages containing approximately 2000 testimonial letters. I eventually unplugged my fax machine in desperation, an act which I will mention in passing has completely revolutionized my life. I should have unplugged it sooner. You've seen testimonial letters, right? They usually look like this:
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I've found the most incredible way to cure MS! My wife told me about your newsletter recommending that I eat worms. And it worked! I was able to get up out of my wheelchair and walk for the first time in over 20 years! I can't say enough about it!
Darren Peebles, Potown Indiana |
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Eating worms is the best thing that happened in my life. My MS is entirely cured now after 5 years of going from doctor to doctor in search of relief. I'm a totally new person now. My husband even came back to me, I got my old job back, and my brother got out of jail. And that embarrassing itch is gone! Worms for me!
Betty Betterson, Bettertown Wisconsin |
I have three nagging doubts about testimonial letters.
Rule #3: Testimonial letters are worthless. If somebody is trying to sell you something, they're not going to show you the all the letters.
The next thing my wife nagged me into trying was acupuncture. That's the Chinese thing where they stick needles into seemingly random places in your body, like your left ear, and claim that that will cure some apparently (to us heathen Westerners) unrelated area of your anatomy, say, your gall bladder or the inside of your right knee. Believe it or not, I actually started getting results with that. It seemed to reduce the spasticity in my legs. I'd go into the acupuncturist's office and lie in an air-conditioned room on a table for half an hour while the acupuncturist stuck needles in me and engaged in an entertaining repartee. (For all you Texans out there, "repartee" is French for "They talked real good.") I was skeptical at first, but my wife persuaded me with the argument that 2 billion Chinese wouldn't let people stick needles in them for 2 thousand years unless it really helped. There has to be some payback.
Now you might think that getting the hedgehog treatment is not your cup of tea. It didn't really bother me though. MS has robbed me of so much sensation that I honestly didn't feel a thing most of the time. And when I felt pain, at least I could feel something. Better pain than numbness. Or maybe I'm just weird that way. Eventually I got tired of trekking to the acupuncturist and my skeptic gene and my laziness gene kicked in. (For the curious, my wife has informed me that these are located on the Y chromosome alongside the doofus gene.) I tried lying flat on my back resting at home with the air-conditioning blowing on me for half an hour chatting with my wife. Just as an experiment. The same as the acupuncture, but without the ouchies. The result: it seemed to have the same effect, and it cost me less.
Rule #4: Sometimes lying flat for 30 minutes having somebody young do something nice to you will help, and the details of what and why really don't matter.
I eventually tried two acupuncturists. I stopped seeing the second one after having an out-of-brain experience in her waiting room. Her receptionist offered me some water from a "special" container. She told me that it was a very healthy kind of water. Being curious I asked her just what she meant. She laughed and told me to talk to the "expert", another woman who was sitting in the waiting room. Gushing with authority, the "expert" told me that the water had been treated with "radiation". "Oh," I said, "What kind of radiation?" "Infra-red radiation," she responded. "Oh, you mean heat," I said. And then I said something pretty facetious along the lines of "This water's pretty cold now, so it must have worn off." I definitely got a frozen response. I started questioning her seriously (believe me, when I question somebody they stay questioned) and established pretty quickly that she hadn't a clue what she was talking about. She'd apparently read some buzzwords off a brochure and could spout them but couldn't think or reason or argue. When she learned that I am a computer scientist she made a huffy remark and the three women in the waiting room made it clear by posture and gesture that I was somewhat unwelcome. You know how women get. So I walked out the door and I never went back.
Call me a hopeless male, but eighteen years of teaching in higher education has taught me to tell the difference between somebody who understands what they're talking about as opposed to somebody who's parroting off some facts that they're memorized. There's no substitute for the oral exam!
I had a similar experience with a woman who charged me $30 for waving a tuning fork around my body to align my forces with those of the Universe. She couldn't explain exactly what that meant, and if anything I felt worse afterwards.
Rule #5: Demand that your medical practitioners be at least as smart as you are. Practicing "alternative" medicine does not excuse anybody from this rule.
I've resisted herbal supplements and probably will continue to do so. Herbs are drugs. There's no telling what interactions they'll have with my other medications. I've tried chiropractic too, and while it seemed to improve my general health, manipulating my spine seemed to trigger MS incidents which is not surprising when you stop to think that slamming about with the lesions in my spinal cord is probably not a good idea. So I leave you with the final two rules:
Rule #6: Before you put it in, on, or around your body, make sure it doesn't bite.
All is not lost, however:
Rule #7: Sometimes MS will go away in spite of all your best efforts.
Eschew those who try to take credit for stuff that "just happens". MS is like that. For any Texans that didn't pitch a hissy fit and leave when I insulted them earlier in this page, "eschew" means that you can bite them. It isn't the noise an Englishman makes when he sneezes.