Journaling About A Miracle

Maybe The Body Really Does Keep Score

I appear to be being healed from a chronic illness by magic.

---

I’ve not had faith in any institution, religious or secular, for at least fifteen years now. Even so, I did not imagine that my opinion of what passes for Medicine and Healthcare could get any lower, and yet it has. If I had listened to doctors, nurses, and all the other Experts, I would, right now, be recovering from one of perhaps several surgeries. Instead, I am sat here, rapidly getting better, by adhering to a protocol that should, by every dictate of Science, be nonsense and hokum.

I hesitate to speak about it. You can cheat a casino, you know, if you’re slick and very clever, but nobody’s ever gotten away with purposefully revealing all their hidden aces at the poker table. In like manner, a small superstitious part of me worries that talking about this out loud will somehow break it, as though maybe Reality itself will catch on to the fact that I’m counting cards, cheating biochemistry and physics. Moreover, saying something like this can subject you to intense scrutiny. Everyone watching, waiting to see if you will relapse so they can pounce and point out your stupidity. “Of course that was never going to work you idiot. You utter buffoon. Why didn’t you just do what the doctor said? The actual doctor. Things are worse now that you’ve waited, and you know you’ve only yourself to blame.”

People love that sort of thing.

“I Told You So.” Everyone’s comfort genre.

As I write, I knock on wood.

My condition isn’t serious. Let’s get that out of the way. I’m not here to tell you a story about a miraculous recovery from Death’s door. What I have had is not life threatening, only life annoying, but, even so, after years of dealing with it, one begins to get worn down.

You see, for the past forever I have had nasal polyps. Numerous bulbous outgrowths of the mucosal lining up inside my right nostril which have given me, essentially, a multi-year long cold.

It’s not actually a cold, mind you. Not an illness caused by bacteria or a virus. It produces all the same symptoms though. A constant stuffy feeling up in the nostrils, a semi-permanent runny nose. I have had to blow my nose more times in the past year than most people will in a lifetime or perhaps two, and gone days and weeks without being able to inhale through one side of my face. Nobody knows what causes these polyps and, as far as The Medical Establishment is concerned, they are incurable. The ENT told me that the only course of action was to begin a years-long allergy shot routine, to have surgery to remove the polyps, and to thereafter flush my nose with steroids every day to try and slow their recurrence, which would probably happen anyway, necessitating another surgery.

That’s the treatment.

Cut them out, wait until they grow back (which they very often do within six months to a year), and then cut them out again and repeat.

Essentially, have your mucosal lining cut out every year, forever.

That’s the “solution.”

Couple that with the fact that this surgery has a risk (admittedly small) of damaging your eyes or brain, and frankly it just didn’t seem worth it.

I just lived with the discomfort. Being Mr. Sniffles.

And yet, I’m now roughly six weeks into a homeopathic protocol designed for me by my friend Reinhardt and somehow, I’m probably 70-80% better. I can breathe through my right nostril most of the time, my runny nose issue has all but stopped, and I’m just dealing with the remaining issue of on-again off-again stuffiness, and even that less severe.

I say “somehow” because, of course, homeopathy doesn’t make any sense. It’s a kind of magic. It shouldn’t work if the Universe operates the way we’re told it does in school and I would’ve never tried it if not for Reinhardt’s urging and my own desperation. The fact that it does seem to be working throws, for me at least, a considerable number of wrenches into the “Scientific Model” of the cosmos.

If you’re not familiar, homeopathy is a system of alternative medicine started two-hundred-ish years ago by a German physician by the name of Samuel Hahnemann and operates on the seemingly esoteric principle of “like cures like”. In his practice, Hahnemann noted that oftentimes the drug used to treat an illness would, if given to a person not exhibiting that illness, produce the symptoms of that illness in the healthy person. The drug for malaria, in other words, would produce many of the symptoms of malaria if taken by someone who was healthy. The drugs for stomach aches, likewise. The drugs for headaches, same. He concluded based on this that medicines worked, at least in part, by focusing the body’s “life force” or “vital energy” against the disease. The malaria drug caused fever, getting the body to respond to that symptom with corrective action. The drugs given to people for upset stomach themselves caused upset stomach, triggering the body to, once again, course correct. Hahnemann did not, technically, believe that doctors could cure anything, and that all they could do was show the body what needed to be done so that the body could cure itself.

This is, at least, my understanding of his work. I am not a Hahnemann scholar. It’s possible I’m unintentionally misrepresenting him.

… …

You will note that this theory of healing leaves a lot to be desired.

A great deal goes unexplained.

What, for example, exactly is this “vital energy”? Can it be measured? Where is it? What properties does it have? Hahnemann didn’t explain it and I doubt if he thought it needed to, or even could be explained. At the very heart of this discipline is woo-woo and vagueness. The thing which every kid with a STEM degree everywhere has been taught to despise. To make matters worse, homeopathic medicines (called “remedies”) themselves are, from a chemistry perspective, absolutely nothing but sugar water. Not wanting to give people more of any medicine than was necessary, Dr. Hahnemann experimented with seeing how heavily he could dilute a medicine with water and still have it remain effective. Whatever medicine was prescribed for a patient based on this “like cures like” principle, Hahnemann would dilute with water and then vigorously shake, believing, for some unknown reason, that the shaking would transfer the properties of the medicine to the matrix of water surrounding it. He’d then do this again. And again. Diluting the medicine over and over with repeated shaking until finally, after ten or twenty times, there couldn’t reasonably be said to be even one molecule of the original substance remaining in the solution.

It was just water.

This remains the practice of homeopathic pharmacies to this day. If you order a remedy from one, what you will get is a vial of pellets of milk sugar which have been infused with medicines so dilute that they’re basically no longer present at all.

The whole thing is absolutely, totally irrational.

And yet my nose is better.

So much so that, whereas just a few months ago I thought I’d live with my issues forever, I now reasonably expect a total cure within a few more months of treatment.

…

“Let Reason be silent where Experience gainsays its conclusions.”

---

I don’t quite know what to make of this. I was already predisposed to think most of what “The Experts” say is wrong-headed but if, indeed, they were prescribing me a lifetime of operations and treatments to provide only palliative care to a condition that could be solved with a few months of sugar pellets… then I must conclude the entire enterprise of Science itself to be off the rails and barking up numerous wrong trees.

And that’s disturbing because… why?

If that’s the case… how could that have happened?

Well, it’s tempting, of course, to chalk it up to nothing more sinister than the Capitalistic Imperative. As with Planned Obsolescence, if you provide people with a product that they buy once and which works forever, you make only one sale, but if you give them a shoddier product that breaks routinely then you have a customer forever. Maybe that’s it? Maybe it’s simply that there’s little money in Cures and near infinite money in Treatment Plans.

It is odd.

It may be that The Medical Establishment is simply unable to create them, but the definitive lack of cures coming from that enormous pile of research money we throw them is getting rather suspicious. Irritable Bowel Syndrome? No cure. Asthma? No cure. High blood pressure? No cure. Depression? No cure. Heart palpitations? No cure. Cancer? No cure. For each and every illness that can afflict the human body, Doctors have come up with an endless litany of treatments which manage symptoms and “enable you to live a normal life” but which require constant routine intervention (and health insurance charges) to maintain. The idea of just fixing a problem in the body is sort of never brought up outside of specific, routine circumstances, like mending a broken arm. Could it be that if the Incentive Structures in our society were different we might, almost overnight, discover a cure for some of these conditions? That all that money poured into cancer research might stop simply disappearing into a black hole?

Maybe.

Probably.

I think that’s part of the problem but I also think it goes deeper than that.

Medicine is suffering from a theological malady. A lack of belief in God.

Hear me out.

---

The Basic Assumption within Medicine is that you are a machine.

That’s the assumption. The starting point of every doctor’s education.

You, reader, are, to a doctor, nothing more than a machine made of pipes, valves, and wires. You can tell because that’s where the analysis of your body always ends. “Clogged pipe”. “Misfiring wire.” “Faulty valve.” Everything is attributed to mechanical, chemical, or electric failures in the human system. You’re having trouble digesting food because your gut chemistry is off. You can’t be happy because you’re lacking the requisite serotonin. Your blood vessels have blockages and you’ve got bad DNA which makes you have allergies. “Genetically Predisposed” they say, hand waving over why some women get breast cancer while others don’t.

The assumption, the base assumption, is that you are a machine made of meat and that machines are dumb.

Machines don’t act intelligently and they can’t fix themselves.

The possibility that The Body might be exhibiting an illness for a good reason is never really considered. Everything is just a random event. A misfortune.

But what if that’s not the case?

What if your IBS or your Depression or, even, perhaps, your cancer, is a rational response to something in your life by a Body that is smarter and more calculating than we ever gave it credit for. This is going to sound “woo” but, (again, I’ve been breathing through my nose for the first time in ages thanks to sugar pellets so, for me, everything is currently on the table) is it possible that what we consider “illnesses” are not something “from the outside” inflicted upon us, but something that we, ourselves, generate as a protection mechanism? As a sign maybe? As symbols?

An example.

I know a woman who’s suffered horribly from hip pain and night cramps in the buttocks. The side of her butt, on her right side, just where it connects to the pelvis, has been causing her terrible pain and waking her up at night with involuntary contractions. There doesn’t seem to be any physiological reason for this. No injury has been sustained. No notable sudden spinal misalignments. The onset of this condition occurred suddenly without precedent or warning, and came after a large blowout with her mother and father. She was very stoic about it. She’s not one to let herself get overly emotional and upset.

It might be psychosis but (again, forgive me, I’m currently dealing with magic) the connection between the place where she herself carried her own children (her hip) and the breakdown of a parent-child relationship was immediately obvious to me. I cannot help but think that Emotions are in some sense “Real” and that her refusal to let herself feel them did not result in them going away and disappearing… but simply in them being relocated. The pain she refused to allow into her heart expressing itself instead in her behind.

Is this valid? I don’t know. I do note however that such a hypothesis, while absolutely absurd if we are just machines, is immediately plausible if we are spirits. If we have existence beyond the nuts and bolts of the physical and extend outward into some sort of (again, ill-defined) psychic or soul-based dimension. If bodies are not meat-machines programed with DNA instead of C++, but are rather physical expressions of spiritual entities, then of course the pain and dysfunction of the spirit could be made manifest in meaningful or symbolic ways within the body. In fact, if we are spirit, we’d almost expect them to. If this woman allowed herself to consciously feel her emotional pain and disappointment, and if this led her to reconcile with her parents… would the physical pain likewise settle?

Worth a try maybe, if you’re suffering.

We accept, already, that psychic conditions can produce physical effects. Who amongst us hasn’t had anxiety express itself through an upset stomach, or fear through a raging heart rate and high blood pressure? The reverse is also true and plainly evident. Physical symptoms can create mental illness, as a man with a prolonged disease may experience depression, or a woman with a deformity a lack of self-confidence or self-esteem.

Why not take it a little further? Perhaps body and mind are not so separate as we imagine, but deeply, profoundly, intertwined.

Or again…

I knew a man who was constantly and forever trying to “get ahead” whose foot got broken. No acute moment of injury, no accident or anything like that. He just woke up one day with a swollen foot. “Stress Fracture,” they called it. One of the medial cuneiform bones cracked. “Must have hurt himself and not realized it at the time” people said.

Maybe.

Or, maybe his body was telling him to slow the hell down. To stop running. You know, “Chill out bro, we’ve had enough.”

I don’t want this to sound like victim blaming. I realize it could easily be seen that way. Please don’t take this as me being like “Oh, you’re sick because of your sins and personal dysfunctions” or something like that. I intend it rather to be empowering. Opening up the possibility that maybe your health isn’t completely at the mercy of random chance and that you, a spiritual being, have a reasonable hope of influencing your own health by facing up to spiritual challenges.

In my own case, whether prompted by the homeopathic remedies or no, I cannot say, I have found that as my nose has healed I have confronted some real personal demons about my own judgmental nature towards myself and others. Is it related? What would that have to do with my nose? I don’t know. My best guess under this hypothesis (and it is just a guess and just a hypothesis) is that I had a judgmental disgust to other people’s behavior, they “smelled bad” in a metaphorical sense, and so I stopped myself from having to physically smell them. Maybe that’s nonsensical. It nonetheless rings “true enough” to me that I don’t consider it totally outlandish.

As you can see, what I’m putting forward here is not either-or. I legitimately do seem to be being healed by homeopathic remedies and, also, that healing process is prompting in me psychological reevaluations of my own morality and behavior. The physical state of my body and the spiritual state of my mind seem to be connected, hand-in-hand. I cannot therefore say that the current Standards of Care given to us by The Medical Establishment are without merit… only that they are incomplete. I believe they’re lacking something vital. They’re treating only part of the picture but the part they do treat may have knock-on effects to the other parts, leading to a more holistic healing than even they propose.

It’s complicated.

Organic beings aren’t machines.

We’re rather hopeful (instead of hopeless) tangles of body, mind, spirit, and social interactions, my falling out with a friend connected intrinsically to the chemistry in my gut, and the dopamine in my brain inseparable from my faith in God. Physical interventions can heal the soul and spiritual interventions can heal the body. Indeed, I no longer believe that so sharp a distinction between the different aspects of myself exists. The spiritual is material. The soul concrete and the body just a metaphor.

Prayer works, and also, works are prayer.

---

I’m about to take another dose.

Thuja Occidentalis. A homeopathic remedy primarily prescribed for removing warts.

“How does it work!? What’s the mechanism!? It doesn’t make any sense!”

I don’t know. I don’t need to. I’m breathing better. Let Reason be silent where Experience gainsays its conclusions. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Until next time. Peace out.

-Sumo

Reinhardt’s Homeopathic Website.

mapsoc.org