Alternatives

Today I am busy shredding paper. Old financial and medical records have piled up gradually over the years and it has been easier to just store them away than to go through them in detail to see what needs to be shredded. Now that we may be moving out of the country for a period of time it doesn’t make sense to pay to store useless paper. I’ve been shredding medical records that go back to the early 1990s. It is a mindless task to look at each piece of paper to see if any significant data, particularly account numbers and social security information are shown. If so, that piece of paper goes into the shredder. Mindless tasks are invitations to reflection as we well know. “The idle mind is the devil’s workshop,” as my mother used to tell me. The devil has always had a fertile ground in my head.

Having handled all that paper at one sitting I have an insight about my health. There is a lot more paper dealing with alternative medical treatment than standard allopathic medicine. That doesn’t surprise me since I have generally avoided Western allopathic medicine as much as possible. I like to think that my current excellent health and relative youth are the direct result of these choices. Perhaps I just have excellent peasant genes and the medical care has little to do with it. But my betting is on my choices of treatment.

I have made many different alternative choices in the past fifteen years and I won’t tout any of them as being miracle cures. But here are some of the choices I’ve made and how I feel about them. As you will see, I’ve had some pretty far out treatments.

I have used the services of chiropractors for most of my life. I can remember that when I was in high school I would get what I called a “stiff neck” where my head would lean to one side and it was very painful to turn my head. I always went to the local bone cruncher and he or she would put me right in a single treatment. Later I would go when my back wasn’t working right and I could get freedom from pain and better flexibility in a few sessions. After the M.D.s fought them for many years, chiropractors have been reluctantly accepted into the standard practice of medicine and their treatments are generally covered by health care plans. I learned a significant lesson in watching these “wars” against what the M.D.s called “quack medicine.” The real war the M.D.s were fighting (and continue to fight) is a war about profit and exclusive access to the money we are all willing to spend to maintain our health. It is a turf battle, pure and simple. A similar battle has been waged by the drug companies, who want to outlaw any medical preparations they don’t make a profit from. Make no mistake about it—when it comes to maintaining our health and well being the medical establishment and the drug companies are not on our side.

Here is a list of some of the alternative treatments I have used in the past fifteen years. In the area of body work I’ve had chiropractic, traditional “Swedish” massage, deep tissue work, erotic massage, Heller work, prostate massage, Rolfing, Phenomenal Touch, cranial sacral work, etc. Among other healing modalities I’ve used tai chi, yoga, rebirthing, holotropic breath work, acupuncture, homeopathy, colonics, herbal medicine, light therapy, sound healing, dance, and movement therapy. In future postings I’ll go more deeply into some of these modalities.