Physicians?? Heal thyself.

I do not like the doctors.
They seem to make me worse.
Kudos to the nurses in white
who manage to put up
with all of their shite.

I wrote this some time last year, when I had just about had it with allopathy. I was sick and tired of side effects, of prescriptions that I was told I would have to continue for the rest of my life, of swallowing cocktails of pills that could not live in harmony with each other inside my stomach.

You know the feeling?

And yet, here I am today, still on some of those medicines - because, after all, some of them help sometimes, and some of them have kept me alive. In a life-and-death emergency, it's the allopathic doctor and his drugs that I'd want. Aggressive, quick, powerful and certain; other consequences be damned. (Kind of like bad boys, which might explain why so many of us think doctors are sexy. It can't be the white coats or those floppy green pyjamas they wear in surgery).

But moving on, or rather, back, to my original train of thought:  there are other schools of medicine. I've discovered two of them only recently:  siddha and homeopathy. Siddha is an ancient Tamil system of healing, plant-based like ayurveda. It involves some very ghastly-tasting pastes, pills and concoctions. And your prescription is only finalised after your siddha doctor closes his eyes and apparently consults with his rishi. Who, as far as I can tell, died some centuries ago.

The thing is, it appears to be working. I don't know how, but it does. And so does the homeopathy. How is that possible, I still wonder. I had always assumed that the people who raved about how wonderful homeopathy had been for them, were experiencing some kind of placebo effect. But here I am, someone who thought it was ridiculous and illogical for a super-diluted dose of medicine to have any tangible effect on me, gagging down my siddha concoctions and munching happily on my alcohol-doused sugar pills, and I am getting better.

Or am I just "feeling" better? I suppose my blood tests in March will tell me. And even if so, what is wrong with "feeling" better, if it enables me to get out of bed and live a life of more quality, to have more energy and less pain?

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I think I just want to say:  be open. We seem to have trained our minds to think narrowly about our health and our bodies. It's good to wander off the path and explore other possibilities, other trails. We don't have to restrict ourselves to one way, and we don't have to get totally lost in the wilderness of all the others.

I'm meandering. It's good.

Still here.

I am still here! But have so far been too blocked and distracted this new year (which reminds me - Happy New Year!) to sit down and write or draw. The best thing I can think of saying right now is "I am still here!" and that actually means a lot more than you'd think. I'm still here, and you're still there. Is this statement not thrilling enough? Think about, because it is.