There are two very real reasons why I cannot get myself to write a chipper post:
1. The pernicious rain did not creep up the un-solarium floor. It did not flood the basement. But it did crack the roof and is currently flooding the house from above. As it’s a holiday week-end, all we can do is run with buckets. Unless someone has a more clever idea?
2. I had been talking to a friend about an article that I’d read on Friday about alternative medicine. It was suggested that I blog about it, though I put it off for a while, what with the rain and the market and all sundry issues.
The study attempted to document how Americans are increasingly turning to alternative medicine for relief from life’s aches and pains. It was a curious study in that it listed a number of “holistic remedies” that I would not myself have thought to include under the rubric of alternative medicine: “prayer,” for example. If you pray for relief, is it really that you regard this as the equivalent to (or a replacement for) popping a pill with medicinal properties? It doesn’t take much to imagine that many pray for any number of convoluted reasons, perhaps too complicated to untangle for the purposes of a simple survey.
Or, another curiosity: “yoga.” A friend asked me to go with her to a yoga class this coming Wednesday. I balked: why invest an hour and a half to stretching? (Truthfully I balked because she is almost 20 years younger than I and the idea of us stretching together was … disheartening.) Ultimately she prevailed and so we’re set to go Wednesday. Which means I probably wont have time for my regular gym and/or walking. There’s only so much time one can invest in body repair in the course of a day. But are any of these “alternative healing?” I didn’t think so. I never hum meditatively when I walk or run, I do not focus on finding an inner sanctum, nor do I seek to eradicate poisons that that have seized control of my body.
But then, yesterday, something terribly sad happened and suddenly writing about all this became hugely more complicated.
I received an email from a very good friend who lives across the ocean. And I am hoping that he does not mind that I include just a fragment of his message. He writes:
My father passed away on the 30th of April, three weeks short of his 83 birthday, 59 years to the day after he was liberated from the Dachau concentration camp…But there is a more tragic side of this story. As I have told you my parents have been Christian Scientists for the last 15 years. Never went to see a doctor (except when my mother broke her leg), did not take any medicines and did not ever want to talk about their health. They believed in spiritual healing, God's ever-present love and harmony. Material world is an illusion. Mind not just over but instead of matter. Beautiful ideas and they do work - as I have witnessed several times. But perhaps not always...
You can tell where this is heading. The old man died even though he should have, could have lived. Here, prayer was indeed used as an alternative form of healing. And it became not an addition to, but a substitute for scientifically-driven medicine.
Perhaps one of the problems is that we have created this dichotomy of ‘alternative’ and ‘conventional.’ We now know that many of the alternative forms ought to have been studied and incorporated into conventional practice, but for any number of economic, social and political reasons they had been pushed to the side. Yoga may well be on that list. Certainly herbs and other non-conventional therapies have medicinal benefits that have been ignored for years. To me, alternative thus simply comes to mean “scientifically untested.”
But insofar as science cannot run tests for all illness and every permutation of every therapy, there appears good reason to try untested cures especially under desperate conditions. This would include conventional medicines used in unconventional ways (who would have thought, for example, that aspirin may decrease the likelihood of breast cancer?). My mother pops some ten or more non-conventional pills every day. She is strong as a horse for her age. She swears by her various remedies, though she also has another ten or so conventional medicines that she takes. She is a walking pill machine.
It becomes complicated when spiritual matters enter into the equation. Science is only now beginning to investigate the relationship between spiritual well-being and the likelihood of healing (the most recent research that I’ve come across does not support a link between positive thoughts and healing: cancer patients who had a better, more hopeful outlook about their prognosis were NOT more likely to overcome their illness; and, those that could not improve their outlook, were doubly burdened by their depression and their guilt for not overcoming their depression).
So, here I am, on this wet, drippy day, thinking about all this and feeling terribly sad for my friend who is so unhappy. And for the roof that is leaking. These two issues are not at the same level of sadness, to be sure, but they coincide to make me want to go out and do some brisk walking right now. Not for spiritual healing purposes, but to distract myself from the realities that are before me.
A climbing rose bush (which technically is a misnomer because roses never truly ‘climb’) can make a yard come alive so quickly! So why not just stick these devils in every nook to give life and color to bleak landscapes? Because, like everything else in the growing world (people included) it is an unpredictable little thing. A little disturbance and it will falter, wither and die.
