Alternative Medicine

I went to a naturopath for a cough. This was a weird cough, not something I’d dealt with before, and I was ready for a weird, or less orthodox, treatment. Or so I thought. The good doctor was a gentle person, kind, and with a fantastic chair-side manner. As we talked, he determined a cluster of symptoms that pointed mostly to my diet.
My diet? I don’t diet. I believe that it’s all good, in moderation.
“It’s not all good.” he quietly asserted, amused at my simpleminded approach to life. Apparently there is a hierarchy of goodness in foods. I had forgotten that, having given up dieting for a lifetime of eating when I’m hungry and stopping when I’m full. Until I started eating for comfort and stopping when I couldn’t fit in any of my clothes. That’s about the juncture where I met this doctor, just when I was wondering what I was going to do in order to have clothes to wear.
He put me on a cleansing diet: no dairy, sweets, or alcohol while I had the cough. I was also to limit my intake of carbohydrates. That’s when I started whining, when he mentioned my precious carbs.
I whimpered for a while, “I crave them, my preciousssss.” and he looked at me like I was the golum I had become. How embarrassing! Then I decided he wasn’t going to crack. So I carried on the argument inside myself.
“Two slices of bread are less carbs than a wrap,” he was saying.
“Flatten those two slices of bread with a rolling pin and you have a wrap,” I didn’t say.
“You can use soy, almond, or oat milk.” he continued.
“Why isn’t oat milk a carb?” I didn’t ask.
I have spent the last couple of years unlearning all the shoulds and rules that I grew up with. I decided it was time to question everything and go with a fresh start. I wanted to find for myself what I found to be true. Now here was this official gent telling me some rules, specifically rules that I didn’t want to hear. I also wanted to find my direction in life from within, so hearing this very firm, albeit gentle, directing from without felt forced.
But I had this pernicious cough, and I really wanted to get rid of it. In fact, he did address the cough with some formulas to address bronchial health: liquid dirt, and pills comprised of roadside weeds from the western united states. I smiled and thanked him.
And I obeyed his directives. I took the weed pills and drank the dirt. The cough remained, and I lost an instant five pounds. I decided to give him another chance, and a week later returned to report no relief from the cough. This time, he told me to eliminate wheat from my diet. I laughed, and he didn’t. Well, laughing seemed like the thing to do when he mentioned further dieting. Hadn’t I given up everything already? But no, he wanted my firstborn son: pasta. So I headed into week two, with further eating restrictions and some new medicines formulated for sinus health: pill made of weeds from the roadsides of the eastern states along with liquid sawdust.
I experienced some early relief from the cough, and stuck with the instructions I was given into the second week.
My thinking at this point went something like, “I coulda just gone to my regular M.D. and gotten a pill to cure this thing.” But I didn’t really know that, just wished.
Then I thought, “I coulda just taken a road trip across the states and grazed roadside for what this doctor is costing me.” And I almost kicked myself for not doing that except that I lacked the one element needed for such a venture: time.
And that’s when I realized what this was all really about. I wanted a quick fix. I want a cure that goes from day one miserable to day two well. Alternative medicine is on a slightly longer time line than the mainstream. I suppose the idea is that my body might actually be able to regain balance on its own if I feed it the fuel it needs to do so.
The wait is very uncomfortable because it requires change from me, and I have to ask in that process of change, “Who is this woman I have become?” In grocery shopping for my cleansing diet, I found that entire aisles of the grocery store suddenly became not for me. The periphery of my usual marketplace held a few foods that were in line with my diet, but not many.
My next fear was that I was going to become high maintenance. A woman in a restaurant last night ordered her salad of baby greens and insisted three times that the waitress assure her that the greens were baby. That’s what I mean by high maintenance. I went to Starbucks and ordered a coffee: decaf, soy milk, sugar-free mocha without whipped cream. It would have been easier to order a cup of hot water.
“I don’t want to live like this,” part of me wails. And I wonder if it’s going to come down to a decision completely for or against this new way.
How sustainable is alternative living for me? If I have to shop for groceries that my family will eat at one store and for myself at another, that’s not very likely to happen. It’s also highly unlikely that my family will change their eating habits. If I seem resistant to change from the outside, my family is the ultimate challenge.
I’m tempted to see this as a polarized situation, either I change completely or go back to my old ways completely. Although the good doctor may not like the idea, I wonder if there isn’t a middle ground. Can I graze on weeds from the midwest roadside as well as the grains from the same region? Maybe it was right for me to see it as all good, but I just forgot to exercise moderation. What do we do when we hit a situation that seems to demand either/or and we can see both sides?