Paradox Blog

Many of our elders seek out alternative medicines for their deteriorating health after long period of ineffective treatment or after doctors had declared there is no cure. The choices of alternatives they turn to range from Chinese medicinal herbs, Chi healing, acupuncture, health food remedy, to simply not relying so much on medicine. In fact western medicine as we know it does not always work on every disease or ailment we may have. The harsh but effective western medicine suppresses the symptoms of our common ailments such as a cold or an allergy with magical speed but often cannot prevent the reoccurrence of them. There is no doubt western medicine does miracle in prosthesis surgery, in viral disease prevention and in organ transplant but are we relying on it too much that we let our body's own healing ability lay a waste?

There are those that swear by the effectiveness of Chinese medicinal herbs. Indeed a cup of ginger soup is as good as those over-the-counter drugs for attacking the common cold and without the side effects of drowsiness and over-drying your sinuses. Ginger soup however takes much more time and effort to make than popping the bottle cap off those over-the-counter pain relievers. Chinese medicinal herbs appeal to those that prefer taking natural substances than chemically-synthesized substances but I was appalled to find that the herbal medicines my mom bought me allegedly to help me conceive better are in pill forms. It is perhaps a sign that Chinese herbal medicine has gone modern and adopted a form more suited for mass production but I simply cannot trust the content of the medicine anymore. What exactly are in those pills? There is no requirement to label the ingredients nor regulation to verify the contents and to test the effect of them. In this regard, western pharmaceutical practice is far more careful in making their claims and potential side effects known, though we may not always read the information in tiny prints that comes with the package of the drugs. I've heard stories of some conscienceless merchants mixing cortisone in their herbal medicine. Cortisone may be suited to treat inflammation. The abuse of it does a lot more harm than good for it eventually weakens your immune system. I prefer my Chinese herbs in their natural forms. I prefer taking the time to slowly brew those herbal ingredients to extract the necessary substances. I prefer to trust that the herbal medicine I take will not impede on my body's own healing ability but rather supplement it and allow for slow but gradual and natural healing without the intrusion of chemicals. If I want fast relieve, I would have gone to a doctor and pop those prescription pills in a bottle and trust that the side effect had been carefully studied and monitored. Chinese herbs in pill form? No, thanks.

Chi healing manipulates the energy flow we have through out our body. I am foreign to Chi healing but a close friend of mine stands by the power of Chi exercise and Chi healing. She follows a Chi Exercise Master who teaches Chi exercises as well as heals with Chi. According to her, her master has healed her long time menstruation irregularity and has improved her father's hearing problem. She practices Chi daily. Among our friends and acquaintances, quite a few are Chi practice followers. They usually follow a Chi Exercise Master and adopt a set of exercise routines to help the circulation of their Chi. The Masters usually can manipulate the Chi such that a concentrated amount of Chi will emit from their palms. When the Masters heal, they pass their palm above your skin and you can feel the heat it generates. The heat you feel is the Chi penetrating your skin to reach the organs inside. Your ailments, according to Chi masters, are usually caused by cluttered Chi circulation around a certain organ. Chi masters heals by generating heat to smooth out your Chi circulation. We all emit a certain amount of energy thus the claim that Chi masters can manipulate the energy is not entirely unbelievable. Chi practice hasn't invoked much objections since there is no medicine involved. Without the claim to heal, Chi practice, like Taichi, can be a healthy addition to ones life style. A lot more information is needed however before the skeptics among us can be converted to believe in Chi healing.

Many years ago, when my brother first showed sign of near-sightedness, my parents took him to an acupuncture therapist hoping to spare him the fate of wearing glasses. It did not work. It would have worked, according to the therapist, if we have gone to him sooner before my brother's eye muscles had strained too much when he could still relax them with the stimulation of those fine needles on the muscles. I don't know whether his claim was true or not. Many people do seek out acupuncture therapy exactly to relax their muscles and to release the tensions caused by stress. Clinics of acupuncture therapy are popping up in this area. A sign that there are substantial clients to sustain the business. Some health insurance policies even cover the cost of acupuncture therapy. Another sign of its popularity. You can probably categorize the practice of acupuncture as a type of physical therapy. If the aerobics, the jogging, the treadmill, the stepper, the cycling are forms of exercises to "macro"-tune our muscles, acupuncture can be seemed as a way of "micro"-tuning our muscles. Like Chi practice, some acupuncture therapists claim to be much more than therapists. They claim they can heal diseases where surgery may be necessary. Compare to surgery, poking needles into one's body may seem like child play to some. In cases where delaying a prompt treatment means life or death, it is simply not prudent to pursue an unproved and unconventional treatment like acupuncture in lieu of surgery.

Health-conscious minds are surely on the rise. Health food stores are raking in big money and popping up in malls big and small all over. Once their patrons were limited to body builders looking for natural substances to pump up their muscles. Nowadays, all walks of life turn to health food store for natural substances that claim to have done wonder from boosting energy to preventing cancers. Aside from the vitamins and minerals that are essential to our growth and maintenance, new substances are introduced as fast as the rumors on their effects barely begun to spread. Are we to trust that a substance is "natural" it is good for you? Nature is not kind. If we were left to survive in nature away from civilization, we would have been killed, if not by predators more powerful than us in strength, than by plants we mistake for food that contain substances poisonous to our bodies. One principle we can rely on is that anything going through our month should be taken in with moderation. Substances from health food store, natural or not, should be treated with the same discretion that we give to alcohol consumption, to smoking, to sugar, to fat and to medicine.

"The best medicine is no medicine at all". Growing number of people are cautious about going to the doctor too often and taking a pill for every abnormality the may feel about their body. The author of Spontaneous Healing and many other books, Dr. Weil is a Harvard trained medical doctor who thinks we are indeed relying too much on medicine to allow our body's own healing power to take effect. In his recent best seller Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, he laid out steps for people to follow in order to live a healthier, medicine-free life. With his knowledge in medicine, he sure sounded convincing enough to start a new trend. His teaching has also been taped into programs broadcast on public television. There is also a web site(www.dr.weil.com) where he answers questions you may have regarding healthy living. His popularity signals that people are ready to believe that medicine is not the ultimate solution to our health problem that prevention is more important than treatment. Prevention, however, is hard work. It takes discipline to follow through on a healthy life style especially amidst the abundance of temptation for quick fixes. Dr. Weil had made a bundle off his messages. Hopefully, people are not only spending the money buying his book but also the energy to start living healthy. Compare to the alternative, life long dependency on medicine, the effort that was put into the shaping of a healthy life style sure is worth while.