Who Do Voodoo?

Another beautiful, heavy snowfall today. Perhaps the last of the season. At any rate, my yard looks clean again! This photo is not my yard (I wish). It's where I went sledding with my grandkids.

Today I visited the office of an "alternative medicine" practitioner for the first time. I was not there for myself; I went with S. and the three grandkids. Zoe came home from the hospital yesterday, but still is not feeling well. S. attended some type of wellness lecture or workshop a couple weeks ago where she learned about this new procedure to cure people of allergies -- the concept being that many of our medical problems are actually due to allergic reactions to something (or several somethings). While traditional medicine would treat this by prescribing drugs to suppress the allergic reaction, this technique "clears" the body from specific allergens, so that the body no longer reacts to them. S. brought home some literature and told me what she learned from the speaker -- a chiropractor. This procedure was developed by a doctor in California and has been used for 20 years with remarkable success. The process is called NAET (Nambudripad's Allergy Elimination Techniques) after the doctor that developed it. Only 8000 doctors around the country (or world?) are trained in this procedure, and we have one here in town. So one day after the lecture S. and her friend went to this doctor's office and spent quite a bit of time talking to her and learning about the procedure. Today she took Zoe there to see if she could identify the source of Zoe's illness.

I am not yet 100% sold on this procedure -- my son says it sounds like voodoo. But I am keeping an open mind -- for several reasons. I believe that there are many, many things about our bodies that traditional medicine does not understand and cannot control. I believe that our bodies have remarkable powers of self-healing and regeneration that we have not yet tapped. I believe that an eternal spirit exists within the corporeal frame of our bodies, and that this spirit gives life and intelligence to every single cell. Each cell has its own "brain" -- or nucleus -- that controls its activities. We know that different body systems "communicate" with each other to maintain homeostasis. Who is to say exactly how that communication takes place? Scientists and doctors tell us it happens through chemicals or nerve impulses -- because those can be measured and documented. But those of us who believe in a Supreme Being know that there are some things -- real things -- that simply cannot be measured, witnessed, or "proven."

Do I really believe that there are "meridians" of energy running throughout the body? Why not? We know that every body exerts a magnetic field, even though we can't see it. We've all heard or read stories about people undergoing painful medical procedures or surgeries with nothing but hypnosis or acupuncture as an anesthetic. No one really knows how it works, but it works. What I do know is that I have tried traditional medicine, and it has not helped. It cannot help, in fact. Doctors do not even understand what causes fibromyalgia, and they certainly don't offer me much hope for the future. I just know I hurt -- everywhere. And I'm tired of it. No one else has been able to help me, and maybe this doctor can. The literature claims that FM is caused by allergies, and that "clearing" those allergens will relieve the symptoms. If that is true and she can make me feel pain-free and mentally alert again, it's worth the cost of the treatments. For now, I will just have to go on faith.