untitled

homeopathy, my teacher, my friend.

we walk the soul together

turning over loyal stones of compassion

honest places of depth

daily we travel.

healing presence

Today, I spent a bit of the day amongst a few intuitive healers. Each healer sported a particular personality; each taught by being his true self. The oldest and wisest among them had a presence that could be felt from at least 50 feet away. Perhaps of Percheron descent, he stood tall, white-haired, and weathered like Gandalf or Dumbledore. His aged years meant that he connected seamlessly and more readily than the other teacher healers to us, the student healers.

He taught the lesson on being present and grounded in this work. Massive hooves planted. His strength and power most obvious, it was the stillness—the calm, quiet, presence that almost felt out of place for one of such stature. I’m not sure how he reigned in such seemingly disparate parts. The royal, stately, Duke, fit for a king, equally comfortable as the gentle soul allowing some weeping into his mane. He immediately honed in on the fact that I wasn’t fully present when I approached him, and turned away mirroring my absence. How did he know that I was holding tension in my gut? How did he tap into all of this without words? His intuitive powers almost seemed harnessed from the magical realm.

He, the teacher healer, didn’t speak at all. And yet he said so much.

Perhaps, I ought to hang out with a herd of horses more often.

unseen

It is the stories that one cannot write that most haunt the mind. The words that will not lend themselves nicely to the page. The ones that refuse to play out into some sort of tightly-knit Aesop’s Fable lesson. The ones that dig heels in and cannot be shaped or sculpted into something creative or beautiful. These images sit like space occupying lesions to borrow the language the Oncologists use.

Put it down for a while. Leave it here.

One had no idea something so simple could be so hard.

Put it down for a while. Take a break from it.

But, what if no one else will carry it? What if no one else will bear to look into the glow? What if no one else will search for answers where the questions are unseen?

tethered perspective

One of the key advantages of being a member of the helping profession is the opportunity afforded to observe closely, the breadth and depth of all sorts of human experience. Like peering at the whale of humanity from the bottom of the ocean, the underbelly swimming above, far off floating silhouette of your long lost boat, the murky dark edges do appear to go on forever.

I think I get why this perspective could make you feel anxious and sad all at once.

Or hanging upside down in the cave of bats while the blood rushes to your head, I think I get why it feels especially difficult to think and your throbbing head feels as if it might explode. In the sacred context of the doctor patient relationship, I often find myself on a journey outside of my own perspective, led around vicariously through dark experiences, by my patients.

Most of the time, I can’t help but come away from this sacred space a little bit transformed. Sitting with wounded people, my own perspective often has to expand to hold the space for things percolating beneath the surface of polite conversation, the place where you’re frightened of the dark, or scared of bears, and the monsters under the bed try to grab your feet when you dive under the covers as the lights go off. I feel privileged every time I step softly into this psychic space with my patients.

The oft cited words of my mentor echo, Your patients will teach you much if you allow the space for it.  I remember thinking before graduating that Obi Wan Kenobi was just trying to make me feel more ready for the shift to being a physician. He’s just trying to make me feel better as I’m lambasted with graduation and that overwhelming sense that levels most of us new doctors in a sea of feeling as if we really know absolutely nothing.

He’s trying to make me feel better about cutting the educational, umbilical cord.

The truth is my patients do teach me much. Every day. They teach with their individual perspectives on their collectively similar tragedies. Everybody bleeds this way, just the same.

Sometimes I think doing this helping work is a bit like living a bunch of different lives simultaneously. I walk around with a rolodex of others' experiences in my head. I hear the talk of people sitting around the table, walled in by their own narrow perspective, trapped by assumptions or stories they've told themselves for years. It can't be otherwise. He must not even care.

I realize I'm no different in telling myself stories. But, I get the gift of sitting regularly with the heavyhearted. I get the opportunity of gaining insight by being absent from my own perspective for a while, then returning. I get to be an astronaut drifting in space, looking freshly at the blue and green earth swirls. The Overview Effect its been called. My own story smacks me in the face in a new way. Gifts I didn’t see before stare back at me. Things taken for granted assault me.

I didn’t really have it all that bad. In fact, things were mostly, good in my childhood. My life is rich.

And sometimes the perspective transformation, the blinding re-entry burns a bit more radically and I’m left tumbling my way back into the atmosphere to some sort of spirituality that makes sense of experiences so far from my own. I have to rely on the bells that have stopped jingling from my ankles, praying that the tether to Big Oak Tree on the edge of the forest somehow holds well enough for someone to pull me back and help me land.

weeping at the moon

artwork by Raina Gentry http://www.raintree-studios.com/birthofthemoon.html

I don’t know why I sit here tears dripping, under the moon. Crickets scratching their legs, the sound of the freeway in the distance. I have no reason to be sad. No badness of a day, no complete and utter failures, nothing went all that wrong, today. In fact, things went mostly right.

I haven’t really thought of my brother in a long time, even thinking of him now, that’s not it.

Instead, there’s the cool night air, Seussian silhouettes all around.

Looking up into the sky, halo around the moon’s fullness, little dark spots on it’s circle, I feel something, I know not what. And that something feels like sadness. And I have no idea why I’m weeping at the moon.

  

cold as it gets

When my soul aches singer-songwriter Patty Griffin often has ways of capturing apt expression of that ache. This song feels about right, now.

To the end of the earth

I’ll search for your face

For the one who laid all of our beauty to waste

Threw our hope into heaven

Our children to the fire

I am the one who crawled through the wire

I am the one who crawled through the wire.

There’s a million sad stories

On this side of the road

Strange how we all just got used to the blood

Millions of stories that’ll never be told

Silent and froze in the mud

Silent and froze in the mud.

I know a cold as cold as it gets

I know darkness that’s darker than cold

A wind that blows as cold as it gets

Blew out the light of my soul

Blew out the light of my soul.

I dream in my sleep, 

I dream in my days

Some sunny street now so far away

Where up in a window

A curtain will sway

And you and I’ll meet down below

You and I’ll meet down below.

I know a cold as cold as it gets

I fight a war I may never see won

I live only to see

You live to regret

Everything that you’ve done

Everything that you’ve done

Everything that you’ve done.

-Patty Griffin 

dear front desk girl

I wrote this as a student. As a conscientious student, I remember feeling the angst of how annoyed the front desk girls were with me. As weird as it sounds, they were most angered by the students who actually did their homework. Because it demanded time and energy from them. They had to pull the charts. They had to work on Saturdays to help us. The ones who showed up on weekends to research their patient's charts...This was me working out my angst in poem form. 

I know it must seem that I’m always at your window

waiting

to bug you,

asking for a chart, or even for a stack,

or for you to access

that all-powerful schedule that reigns over both of our lives.

my furrowed brow might seem to convey anger.

in reality, 

I’m concentrating

on the next thing

Mr. Attending asked me to do,

after he told me

how wrong I was

the last time.

forgetting

might suggest

that I’m not taking the teaching seriously, enough.

and sometimes, only sometimes,

furrowing my brow

making it harder 

for the tears to stream

down my face

when I’ve fucked something up, 

yet again.

I know it must seem

I’m demanding so much

on the days 

when I come back

like some adolescent.

pulling up to the drive-up In and Out.

I imagine 

it is rather annoying.

what now?

you must think

as I approach for the umpteenth time.

in reality, 

some days the demanding weights

almost crush.

world full of Attendings

residents

patients

professors

pulling,

in multiple directions,

usurping or contradicting one another.

never doing enough.

never learning enough.

chart note, never quite right enough.

sometimes, crazy as it is

I lighten my load

creating a delusional reality

where

I’m not the one being pushed around.

I know it must seem that I’m moody as I stand here

waiting.

in reality,

I'm pausing,

catching my breath
as my patient just left.
the conversation we had took effort.

wanting

to get it right,

to communicate 

support,

to not fall down in a puddle on the floor.

maintaining,

appropriate expressions,

did not come easy.

new to this realm

of carrying other people’s burdens,

I’ve never had to tell someone

of the cancer

found inside the walls of ovaries.

now I’m standing at this window,

resting,

my soul.

letting my guard down

worrying not

about smiling.

I don’t know much,

but,

I have learned that ovarian is a bad one.

never met someone like that

I’ve never actually met someone in recovery, he said…

I’m not sure how one raw statement could capture so much and at the same time embody such haunting emptiness.

Part of me heard. Part of me couldn’t believe. Part of me wanted to weep. Was this hyperbole for emphasis? Hyperbole for blogger’s sake? Some kind of strange juxtaposition to keep me grounded in patient’s reality? I forget too easily. I forget that no one is supposed to get better.  I forget that no one is supposed to be in recovery. I forget that no one is supposed to be cured.

No one in recovery. Oh, yeah. Right.

And yet, it captured the essential brokenness of the system.

No one in recovery.

It took me to the gut wrenching pain of watching an extraordinary boy be told that this diagnosis meant a lifetime of blunted creativity, a lifetime of a nuanced cocktails of Lithium, Seroquel, or some new sexy drug with its very own marketing minions. Walking past the day room parked full of rockers seemingly keeping rhythm with unseen inner worlds. Visiting meant, tolerating scowls from hardened psych nurses thinking that family members might be part of the dysfunction. Visiting meant, suppressed tears held back by hopelessness, seemingly reincarnated as my brother’s mouth ran with drool after the heavy sedations.

No one in recovery.

It captured the plight of so many forced to put up with so much, already.  The diagnosis morphing into strange stares upon returning to college.  The shame and stigma morphing into the court ordered treatments and outrageous removals of human rights hiding behind the hollow legs of patriarchal medicine. The disease that affects your brain must be causing you to not want to take your meds. It can’t be that you want something different because you are an autonomous human being.

No one in recovery.

On so many levels it captured the essence of the case of the mental illness of the system. The failed American mental illness system that parades about destroying hope. Swallow the pill. Do not ever quit your meds. Do not question. You have a serious mental illness.

Certainly, no one cured. No one in recovery. No, I’ve never met someone like that.  

cutting a line

My brother is a Surveyor. As in cutting lines through the backwoods of VA. No hacking through jungles. No, rather he has a desk job, now. And not Upton Sinclair, though he reads Upton, I'm sure. (most surveyors, don't, FYI, but he is smart). But sometimes he cuts the line. I think that's what they call it, when you go out and hack through the Kudzu, et al. You cut the line.

Sometimes I think I'm supposed to cut the line.




    

No Exit Strategy

Dear Pristiq,

I know I shouldn’t blame you that your parents must have named you due to extraordinary proximity or ana-mana-pia to the word prestige.

I get it.

Pharmaceutical company birthed you in some effort to compete with the Wyeth family's Effexor XR. I suppose somebody got paid boo-koo bucks to spin your Robin hood like effort as reversing the stigma of depression. As in not merely helping but even going so far as to impart prestige in a world of mental health stigma. As in one might have prestige being on this drug. As in, look what we’re doing to help the depressed and anxious of the world—altruistic company that we obviously are.

Doing your part, little cash baby—only one hundred fifty dollars a month coming out of that small disability paycheck. 

I shouldn't blame you, that there is no exit strategy. That you only come in unbreakable, extended release tablets with your 11 hour half-life. Ready to ensure yo-yo symptoms in those who try to crawl out of your web with every other day dosing strategies.

There is no exit strategy.

But that’s not your fault. You’re just an enteric-coated baby released from the Pfizer mother-ship. I shouldn’t be angry that there is no smaller pill—no dosage available less than the 50 milligram suicidality inducing therapeutic dosage. I shouldn’t blame you that your mother tells us that we must taper the dosage to avoid withdrawal—I’m sorry, discontinuation syndrome side effects, when there is nothing smaller to taper to. No smaller pill has even been a twinkle in the mother-ship's eye. And then when the withdrawal effects manifest, pompous arguments can be made about depression relapse. When suicidal thoughts appear, fear motivation can be harnessed for further entrapment campaigns.

No. I shouldn’t blame you. You’re just the greed-powered-wind-up-doll-drug mechanically going through the motions, screwing patients on cue.    

most insincerely,

a physician

thanks Denny

Everyone needs a Denny. Some character, perhaps a little rough around the edges that introduces you to the idea that, sometimes, Typhoid only disappears with the disappearance of the sewer. Some character that helps you see the reality of small towns laden with bureaucratic, red tape. Some character that tells the truth—raw and painful though it may be to hear that your new employer isn’t actually going to be able to teach you much from his deathbed. Some character that tells you how things are actually done in the real world.

Especially in medicine, everyone needs a Denny.

Sometimes that Denny role turns out to be played by a different actor than the one you thought you cast. You know—the mentor who seems polar opposite? It turns out that therein lies the balance for your stage play where other characters foil you and end up teaching you something, precisely, because they aren't like you at all.

Everyone needs a Citadel. A shelter or stronghold to which one goes during battle. A place from whence you retrieve your soul stored under a big rock.

Sometimes that Citadel is an old novel from the 1930’s, written about some green doc establishing a medical practice in a coal mining town across the sea. A far away tale of medicine travelling your own soul back to you. An old tale curiously parallel and strangely relevant to your own little world.

on writing as physician

Somehow, writing takes on an almost hazardous tone, in the role of physician. HIPAA protects patient confidentiality even down to the seemingly mundane details. Are you scheduled for Wednesday or Thursday? Protected. Are you my patient? Protected. What are you being treated for? Protected. Etc. Sure the goal is to minimize the information leakage. And in the day to day running of a medical practice, you might see Joe Blog’s name on the sign-in sheet above yours because you arrived 30 seconds after him. Some of these security breaches are unavoidable. The point of HIPAA is to minimize them to the extent reasonably possible.

Guarding the sacred space of doctor-patient relationship, HIPAA cozies up, seeking to embody trust. Of course, trust isn’t something easily embodied, especially when it comes to mental health. And of course, HIPAA regulates only one side of the relationship—the physician’s side. It is a somewhat one-sided venture, since as patient, you can share whatever the hell you want about your health with whomever you choose. It’s your business, after all. The spirit of the law is to essentially regulate trust. Of course, information has to be shared sometimes, for insurance purposes, or to foster high quality care, and in a general way it can be shared for educational purposes, as long as it is divorced from any identifiers, with relevant details changed.

But following the spirit of HIPAA is easier said than done. Sometimes it feels paralyzing from the Physician side of things. A significant part of one’s life, one’s being, the core and soul of what one does every day, always needs to be sifted through a HIPAA sieve of perpetual censorship.  In constant flux, one vacillates, share this, not that.

Complicated by people’s perceptions, falsehood or truth matters not. As patient, you know not that one in four people has a mental illness. You know not that depression is the “common cold” of mental illness. You know not how many people have suicidal thoughts or intense anxiety. You know not that everybody bleeds this way, just the same. To you, these are the intimate details of your story—not humanity’s. And this is how, even amidst mutant sifted details on a blog, you might see yourself in the story. In the composite, with the humanity peering out through the words. Hey that’s me you are talking about. And therein trust gets snuffed out. The sacred space darkens, as it warps and twists into something a bit different.

Even if HIPAA hasn’t been thwarted at all, the fact that you think it might have been, undermines one of the most critical elements of the doctor-patient relationship. Next time, you might struggle to tell what needs telling. Because of a perception—a false one at that. Something uttered might snake its way into the ether regions of your story. Your experience of life. The words said might be lifted from context, or might be misunderstood as some personal message. Across my desk, this thought is sometimes both frightening and inspiring.

I’d love to write more directly about my healed patients. How they don’t really recognize themselves anymore. How so much of the old has slid away. How we’ve avoided mood episodes of deep darkness. Or just how life feels so different gliding through it with a homeopathic Gortex suit. I’d love to emote for hours on just how beautiful a person can be when healing via Tuberculinum,

Stramonium 

Natrum Mur

Belladonna  

Sulphur  

Sepia    

Ignatia  

Carcinosinum  

Thuja 

Staphysagria 

and Nux Vomica.  These remedies and many others, foster an almost nostalgic feel in the prescribing physician. They are like old friends as Margaret Tyler used to refer to them. Even their names roll off the tongue and hang in the air, like the art that they make out of life. I suspect with my going on about remedies, I've waded away from the point. Which is simply that these miracles aren't exactly my stories to tell. Sure, I can tell unidentified snippets and fragments. Sure, I can tell pieces while ever conscious of my pet snake, HIPAA. And truth is, you probably won't believe me, anyhow, dear reader. For the stories almost sound made up. Hyperbolic. Ridiculously exaggerated. As Tim O'Brien once wrote, Fiction is often more honest than the truth, and the truth often rings false--something to that affect.  

In this case, the facts seem false. Such as the fact that somehow Patient C can’t remember the time when she didn’t have Problem X. All my life, she says in the intake. And there it is gone. Almost insulting. Can she really have had that symptom gone away in a few months with a few sugar pellets under tongue? I don’t think so. Can he really be feeling that much better? You must be exaggerating, Jenn.

Except that I try quite hard not to exaggerate. To be accurate. To understate. I lean so hard into that wind of transparency and attempted honesty that sometimes I think I might fall over. One of my mentors says I’m too honest.

And this puts things in a quandary when it comes to writing, in this role, as I see it. The intersection of HIPAA, transparency, and trust unfolds. I am left to struggle with the balance: how to reach toward the catharsis of writing. How to share the powerfully inspiring stories that remind me of the joys of being a physician, yet protect the sacred space of doctor patient relationship. Above all, I struggle in holding the sacred trust tightly enough so as to not drop it, yet loosely enough so that it doesn’t wrap around and strangle the very relationship it is supposed to protect. Easier said than done.

ode to ignatia

Ignatia amara is the name of a homeopathic remedy often given to those that grieve. I wrote this piece a while back as a student… My apologies to those that have read this before.

Oh healer of closet weeping,
bulging doors
holding at bay suppressed avalanches
issuing forth
at inopportune moments
burying recipients in old sorrows.

Shaking trees of endless anguish,
rooted deep in the dry, crystallized earth
shattering time forever.

Oh Sire of desired loneliness,
choking back pain
pretending ease of speech
while bearing apple-sized lumps in throat.

Cloaker of sadness heavy and long,
Oh that You should be needless
disappointment ailing none
death
mere figment in the minds of men.

miles

It was the middle name that he dutifully carried like a good son for 22 years. Not an easy task when the namesake you bear lived life as mythical character, as in Herculean sized standards. Named for Dad's mentor--a bald, little spitfire of a guy wielding Bible verses on street corners, holding a small college together by the seams, inspiring many even into his 80th year. The shoes were definitely big.

We needed for him to be epic. To back up the carrying on of the family name after a decidedly long line of X chromosomes. The even longer line of five older siblings claiming niches in life complicated matters for my brother. He needed to be epic and distinct. We needed a knight.

Did our needs and expectations somehow contribute to the creation of the epic adventures? To the creation of this Bipolar Disease as foe? No. But sometimes my mind wanders there. To the place where guilt and shame and blame throttle you and wrestle you to the ground.

In particular, I wonder sometimes at how mania made him larger than life. How the mania granted the opportunity to be epic. Grandiose. O Fortuna. It was the mania that birthed the Knight, or the Phantom of the Opera, or the Prophet, or Jason Bourne and his identity crisis. It was the mania that made him invisible as he danced around the block on the run from the government conspiracy.

The Knight.

I'm not sure he ever knew that the Latin word for Knight is Miles.

And he'll never know that my medical practice names him as it treats mental health patients.

Miles.

His namesake. Favored piece on the chess board, L mover, plunderer of Queens and Kings alike. Good at chess, because he knew how to use the knight to such advantage. And because he studied to the point of obsession.

Miles. Suggestive of a journey. Travels. Epic. Knight. Brother.

What's in a name?

A memory. History. The boy that never ages finally reaching knighthood.

how the story goes

I spend a lot of time hearing stories. Leaning back in my chair, I listen for clues of emotive content steeping beneath the surface--the song beneath the song. Waiting for the pieces that make sense of it all. The pieces that tie all the lines on the face together, wrinkling seamlessly into one another. The pieces that make my patient’s choice seem, the most logical thing of all to do. The point in the story, where I think I might have done the same thing, responded in some similar way, that place where I’m caught up in the moment of the story and thoughts of what-to-have-for-dinner, or if-I’ll-make-it-to-the-bank-before-closing, recede into the background. The place where I stop having to say, tell me more about that, because the story spills out like the yolk of an egg, my patient and I seemingly second string teammates on the sideline, watching the game. Almost as if the story breathing a life of its own, flows like current toward the falls.

This is the place, I intuitively struggle towards. The place where all the psychologists say good blending occurs and one manages to catch understanding. For me the moment is about finding the features that fit an appropriate homeopathic medicine.

But I’d be amiss to say that the moment is only about finding the most appropriate medicine. In many ways, the moment is part of the medicine.

Telling your story is powerful.

Most of my patients tell me so and mental health literature bears this idea out. Many of them tell me, I've never told anyone this... Much of the time, they feel better just telling the story out loud. If the story is particularly dark or messy, the telling of it seems to be even more valuable.

Indeed, telling your story is powerful.

A good friend of mine recently wrote on her blog about the act of writing, itself. Wondering aloud on the feed, she asked,  why do I  write, anyway? Not ready to quit her day job, and not really wanting to she blogs her own unique story. She doesn't think she's all that good at writing. Incidentally, she is--but that isn't why her story is so powerful. I think her story is powerful precisely because she writes to sort out the messiness of life on the page. To process honestly, sometimes painfully, the details of a struggling daughter or an elderly, Alzheimer toting adult with erased memories.    

James Pennebaker wrote a book entitled, Opening Up: the Healing Power of Confiding in Others. In it he discusses research demonstrating that talking about your problems—or not talking about them as the case may be—can have profound effects on your physical health. That’s right—physical health. According to Pennebaker, talking, even writing about our problems, our struggles, our traumas heals us.  And conversely, not talking about our junk harms—not merely psychologically—but physically. Of course, we know it's all connected, anyway. Chronic inhibition and suppression of our emotions and feelings, in particular anger, leads to increased risk of all sorts of physical diseases—heart attacks, hypertension, cardiovascular problems, asthma, diabetes, and cancer.  

For some of us, letting go and telling our story is more difficult. Parading our shadowy sides scares us. Climbing into the boat and letting the current take us places, makes us feel vulnerable. What if my friends think I’m complaining? What if I’m labeled “whiny?” What if they think I have a mental illness? What if my children don’t like who I really am?

And so we bind ourselves up. Thinking somehow, that we are protecting ourselves from the inevitable isolation of rejection. Telling ourselves that it’s the good, Christian thing to do. Telling ourselves we’re becoming better people by hiding our struggles, our griefs, the badness of our story wrought with flaws.

The truth is we do manage to protect ourselves. We do manage to cut ourselves off from venues of possible rejection. We do manage to protect ourselves from something that might get out of control--something that might take on a life of its own--sticky, messy, and difficult. In not sharing our story, we effectively cut ourselves off from the larger communal story, with its unique power to transform and shape our own story into something more. And that's how the story goes.

dear mental illness

I don’t need you

to help me be smart

or creative, thank you.

I don’t need you

ensuring that people

treat me

and my kind

any differently than they already do.

your stigma carries enough

shit

on its own, thank you.

I’ve had to battle

uphill for decades.

with families

abandoning

well enough on their own

without

your damn stigma

pushing further,

after learning

of habits

living under bridges and what not.

I don’t need you

guaranteeing

people assume violence,

or that I push a shopping cart, full of haphazard piles of random conspiracy laden stuff,

my M.O.

I don’t need you

telling your classmates

at community college

that

I’m not smart enough to finish anything.

assumptions happen anyhow

without your damn influence.

I struggle enough
trying to be normal without instructor's help,

or extra time

to make it through my 3 classes

on my own,

tutors smutors,

only make for more-what’s-up-with-him-attention?

that I don't need, ghostwriter.

I can do this.

without your damn stigma.

take your

false pity

elsewhere.

I may preach

on the street

of hell

fire

and brimstone

but

maybe I’m just trying to survive like anybody else.

they,

might expect me ready

to shoot up

youth in Norway or Tuscon.

maybe,

I’m dangerous

and

turning my apartment complex

into a luxury condos for high flalutin college students

with rich dads or moms

is obviously

a grand idea.

but
i must say,

its different when you’re the one left

moving  

to another part of town

for the umpteenth time.

because

you,

aren’t good enough

for borrowing

that cup of sugar for that gluten-free birthday cake.

on superheroes and villains

Sometimes I feel caught between two worlds. Stranger to both. I think I missed the memo from Madeline about how best to wrinkle between worlds. I suppose not being sucked into either vortex could be advantageous. Namely, the advantage of perspective on both.

To hear the naturopathic community and all its appendages, drugs are mostly evil. Look at how those Kryptonite laden Pharmaceutical companies are in bed with Lois Lane, MD! Existing to torment individuals on the planet, these toxic poisoning agents of some Lex Luther character in the sky, bring down the Clark Kents of this world, which conveniently happens to be an herb-toting, birkenstocked, crunchy doctor. Treat the cause, the root of the problem. We like roots and all in naturopathic medicine.

To hear the allopathic community and some of its quackwatch appendages, the naturopathic medicines I prescribe daily are either placebo or toxic agents bordering on the realm of negligence and my practice of medicine and admiration of the genius of Hahnemann harbors some similarity to following a cult leader. Hahnemann and his minions were some crusading characters insanely bent on--Like cures Like fighting the "dark aged" Regulars. 

And yet Naturopathic world misses the point. Fish the telephone pole out of your own eye. Isn't Clark Kent, ND in bed with Nutraceutical Company? How is that relevantly different from Lois and Pharma? Can't we admit that vaccines are rather naturopathic and save lives? Can't we acknowledge that Allopathic medicine does certain things like Emergency Medicine, amazingly well?

And yet Allopathic world also misses the point. Fish the telephone pole out of your own eye. Can't you see how the history of human kind is all about the history of human mistakes and the process of detecting and overcoming those errors in thinking? Isn't it possible that in waging this war against those that think differently from you, you've missed the point? If you aim to squelch the position that balances out your own, you burn the bridge to future growth and banish yourself to an island of your own idiosyncratic thinking?

Can't both worlds ingest a dose of humility? And, no I don't mean a homeopathic dose. Can't both acknowlege that extremism and polarization help no-one?

Unfortunately, all of medicine merely seems to mimic the culture at large. We live in culture of extremist sound bites. A culture that needs the boxing ring to keep the viewers interested. How will we ever get our message into the limelight without an evil villain character? Who is the foil? And so we polarize. We spin. We push the gap between two ideals wider and wider. In the name of spin or viewers or "ideals" we feature our opponent's ideal in a crossbow on a website or pronounce a democracy focused camp, a "Hitler Youth Camp." Really? Accuracy doesn't seem to matter so much as capturing that emotionally reactive content, placing our message center stage at Carnegie Hall.

In the meantime, outside polarized TV world, boys sucked into the story, show up with guns at grocery stores in Tuscon or youth camps in Norway, and blow up evil villain characters for ideals.

Taking our lessons from culture at large, maybe its time for medicine to back away from extremist-superhero-naturo-or-allo positions, acknowledging that at least some portion might be spin designed to harness emotionally reactive content. Our voice as medical moderates might not be as glamorous, might not take sweeps week, or win us roles on Jerry Springer Live, but it will be heroic nonetheless. For it will be our voice acknowledging that many of our fiercest idealistic battles are not waged in order to contend with some evil villain force outside ourselves. Rather, those battles are often waged when we can't aknowledge  the villain within who gathers strength precisely as we feed our superhero counterpart.

dallas divide

NAMI

I attended my first NAMI meeting tonight. I have no idea why I haven't been to a meeting until now. Per the confidentiality agreement I’m not allowed to talk about stated meeting. But I suppose I can talk about NAMI in general and my own personal response.

NAMI is a beautiful organization. The acronym stands for National Alliance on Mental Illness. They support people and families with mental illness. Aiming to reduce the stigma of mental illness, they structure support in a gazillion different ways, perhaps too many to count. Support groups, educational classes for families, community wide fund raisers to increase awareness, and more are all part of the NAMI package.

Of course, in going to such a meeting I couldn’t help but ruminate on my brother. I couldn’t help but dwell on the fact that I found a beautiful organization, six years too late. I couldn’t help but feel guilty for not finding these people--committed to plugging some of the holes in the treatment and service to the mentally ill after his death.

But that is not the point of NAMI. NAMI is not so much about wallowing in your guilt over what you should have done, or would have done, or maybe could have done to help someone. NAMI is about holding all of these should of, would of, and could ofs and deciding to walk forward anyways. Its about recognizing your own limitations, your own humanity, your own shortcomings, and still getting up in the morning to put your shoes on. And so I shall.


In case you are interested in checking NAMI out, here's the national website.

http://nami.org/

camp soul

Mt Sneffles peaks from behind the swaying evergreens. Tall and majestic, the contrast between Sneffles and our “lowly” valley camp spot on the edge of the meadow gives you the sense of a lower elevation than the known 9000 feet of the Dallas Divide. But, don’t let the weakened contrast and Sneffles less-than-impressive name fool you. Sneffles still boasts 14,000 feet and patches of snow in July.

Somehow, the aging Boss Hog (aka our embarrassingly-loud-beeper-in-reverse-circa-1993 conversion van) made it all the way up the lonely, dirt road to our ideal camp spot. We ventured all this way to strip away some of the clutter from our lives, making more space for the soul. Envisioning more soul in the everyday experience. Playing trolls on a little two logged bridge. Claiming portions of creek as six or eight or ten-year old real estate play properties. This is my house from this tree to that rock. Wading bare footed in barely melted mountain water til tiny fish startle you into racing your crocs for fun. Puffing dandelion seeds into the breezy light air. Finally getting a fire going after a long rain with wet, still-green wood. Hiking trails through a Yarnell sized botanical playground. Leading pet Llamas around Teepees and meadows yellow.

When it comes down to it, the clutter strips more readily and more drastically if you’re a kid. Fully engaging the rocks and caterpillars and matted, dreadlocked Llamas seems to become more difficult as we age.

Even so, up here among the clouds and flowers there is time to think. Time to ponder. Time to reconnect with all things natural, which few of us do enough. The machinery of life and concrete jungles begin to slip away. Stephen Harrod Buhner describes our disconnect from nature as western post-enlightenment thinkers in his book, The Lost Language of Plants:

Once the Universe becomes a machine, no longer alive, once human beings are defined as the only intelligent life-form, a unique kind of isolation enters human lives, a kind of loneliness that is unprecedented in the history of human habitation on earth. It is a source of many of the emotional pathologies people struggle with. In addition, people begin to judge themselves internally, to identify their level of value according to how much or how well they think. Any internal expressions, perceptions, or thoughts that come from older epistemologies—that are based primarily on feeling or intuition or aliveness in the Universe—they label as unscientific, irrational, unreasoning, or illogical. Such thoughts and perceptions, it is assumed, have less value, are based on improper assumptions about the nature of reality, and are therefore something to be discounted, dismissed, degraded. This dynamic has become so ingrained that people routinely monitor and censor perceptions that are contrary to universe-as-machine. And so people cut themselves off from the Universe in which they live; they become passengers on a ball of semimolten rock hurtling through the Universe. They internally denigrate and deny their most basic experiences of the livingness of the world in which they live, their connection to it, and the importance of that connection. The interior wound…

And so I sit watching, pondering and healing for a time. Struggling to reconnect as I disconnect from from the hamster wheel. Meditating on the biophilia infused words of Buhner and learning large from three small teachers that have no idea what soul is, yet live with soul so much of the time.