The Choices We Make + Link Love

Eastern/Western medicine, indoctrinating kids, rewilding the Internet, writing about our pain and more

I lay on the table with needles sticking out of my forehead and ears, wrists and knees, and one that particularly stung going in on the top of my left foot. I lay here every other week or so and have since earlier this year, the sounds of waves rolling over around me, the feeling of the heat lamp above me. The hands of Jennifer, my acupuncturist, touch my skin lightly as she leaves the room waiting for the needles to do their work.

No matter how many times she’s explained it, I still can’t compute the work these needles are doing. I come in feeling squeezed or rushed or weary, she asks me about inflammation or my bowel movements, my cycle and my pulse, she writes everything down and then chooses the needles and their placement, and when I leave an hour later, I feel spacious and open, drowsy but also calm.

I grew up with what was called alternative medicine in those days. There was a lot of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” which once meant that a minuscule broken bone between my thumb and forefinger, unseen to human eyes, never healed correctly, but mostly meant we did a lot of non-interventionist work. Lots of zinc and colloidal silver, caster oil and homeopathic resolutions. No vaccines and rare doctor’s visits. The idea of eastern medicine was like satanism to me, but western medicine was suspect too. Question it all was the dominant position toward the hippocratic vocation as a whole.

When I grew up, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps out of rebellion, perhaps just because castor oil never did me much good, I turned my back on all of that. I didn’t have health insurance from my late teens until I was 34, which meant I didn’t get my torn meniscus and crushed knee x-rayed, I didn’t get antibiotics for a bladder infection, I never went for a physical or a pap-smear or a mammogram. It wasn’t like I turned from naturopathic medicine to western medicine. I just . . . did nothing.

Then when I finally had health insurance, it just felt like everything that could go wrong, went wrong. I spent a week in the hospital with an ectopic pregnancy, had a burst appendix, cysts on my ovaries, a freak fire at our house that resulted in burnt feet and hands, needed medication for anxiety and depression, had a root canal, and more. It was like my body had been holding its breath for nearly twenty years and when it let it out, it showed the score it had been keeping all that time.

You know that 2023 was Year of Health for me, and a lot of that was just getting routine check-ups, and a lot of that revealed there was actually a lot more going on in my body than I knew of. Maybe 2023 should have been Year of Diagnoses because 2024 is turning out to be more of Now You Know, Whatchu Gonna Do?

I find myself turning toward some of the eastern medicine I never understood and, in my ethnocentricity, just labeled as evil. I find that it is just as good, and in some areas, sometimes better, than western medicine. Can’t it be too halves of a whole? This is what Jennifer my acupuncturist tells me. Sometimes we need the thyroid medicine, but also, there’s a pressure point to support our thyroid too, and why not stick a needle in it? Besides the obvious, what could it hurt?

Sometimes I think we define ourselves by what we’re against, more than what we’re for. We’re anti this or against that, thumbing our noses at this and turning our backs on that. It’s probably in our nature to be that way, so black and white, so for or against. But the older I get the more I realize I need the wisdom of sages, the wisdom of the ages, I need the black and the white and all the colors in between.

I’m learning that it’s not an informed decision if I’ve already decided the other side is always wrong.

Maybe this isn’t about healthcare. Maybe it’s about politics or denominations or the books we like or don’t like. Maybe it’s about the ways we get offended at people we haven’t tried to understand or the ways we assume evil intent of those who messed up once. Maybe it’s about trying new things. Maybe it’s about not being anti-establishmentarian in all things just so we can say we are, but being deeply curious about all things simply because we care more about healing than being perceived as right.

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