Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Acupuncture and Herbology

As medicines become to expensive and traditional western doctors are exclusively retained by the elite the common people will once again turn to the ancient arts of Acupuncture and Herbology.

I was talking to this kid a few weeks back about his majoring in information technology at college. He was interested in my twenty plus years of experience in the field and wanted to know what I thought of his career choice. My response was simply that information technology is a dead industry and that he should go into nursing.

In retrospect I should have pointed him to either acupuncture or herbology. These two proven areas of health care have been around for thousands of years and are only discounted by corporate medicine because they cut into profit margins. It is not good business sense to tell a depressed person to go eat a fifty cent raw potato when they are feeling down when you can hook them on antidepressants at forty dollars a week for the rest of their life. Would you go to Walgreen's and buy an eight dollar tube of burn ointment if you could break off a piece of aloe vera plant growing in your back yard and sooth the burn for nothing. Where would the drug industry be today if you could replace most of their products with plants grown in your home garden?

I have two small dachshunds that I love very much so when a friend of mine told me her small wiener dog Joey hurt his back and could not walk it put me in a slight panic. She took Joey to the vet and was told it would run about twenty five hundred dollars for surgery which, she was informed, might not work. The vet suggested putting the dog to sleep. My friend then took Joey to a pet acupuncturist to see if anything could be done.

Now I admit that when she told me this I dismissed it as grief. A month later after four visits and four hundred dollars Joey was running and playing like nothing happened. He was cured without invasive surgery or extensive drug therapy at a fraction of the cost. Think about that.

The next time my back goes out rather than spending a week laid up on muscle relaxers and pain drugs I will be going straight to the acupuncturist. My partner had a recent health expo at his office. They had an acupuncturist there who stuck some needles in his ear for "general health". Now at first I thought this voodoo but he did not catch this flu bug I am just now getting over. I am becoming a convert.

My point is that Acupuncture and Herbology are two areas that will thrive in the coming years and if one could master these skills they would become indispensable to any society.

By the way that potato thing really works. Just get a raw baked potato, wash it and start eating. Something in the vegetable puts you in a much better state of mind.

1 comment:

Grant Wagner said...

Howdy, I only recently found this blog, and so far I've been enjoying it.

I have some mixed thoughts about this thought. I guess I'm not just as skeptical as you yet, but I'm heading that way. I know that when ever there is money involved, those who are most ambitious are often the most greedy, and surplus of any kind only comes by leaving others in want.

About 5 years ago, I got out of bed one day, had the worse shock of pain I ever experienced course through my body as soon as my foot touched the floor and fell back into bed with tears. I couldn't walk on it at all, but what shocked because there was no icendent of trauma that I could remember. I looked up the closest doctor which was part of my new HMO, and went in during walk in hours. When I got there, I found that it was a homeopathic office, and decided to be open minded and give it a try. In short, the "doctor" I saw was as confused as I was, gave me some little beads to melt on my toungue with a natural pain reliever, and told to go to the emergency room if it didn't get better. It didn't, and her drugs didn't even take the edge off the pain.

The next day I went to a conventional doctor, who suspected that I had gout, and proved it with a blood test. His real solution? Eat less pork and organ meat. Turns out eating a really good spicy Italian sub every day for a year added up.

It seems to me that modern, western doctors are interested in treating root causes, but often with extended treatments, such as your anti-depressant statement. Often the symptoms themselves are ignored to the point that the cause, at least in the mind of the patient, is unimportant. I wonder if the homeopathic solutions take the extreme polar opposite solution?