The Illusionist(s)

I have seen this type of patient only 3 times in the entire length of my practice–a certain expectant, determined-to-be-closed patient who’s unwilling to work with me either by “opening up” to the process of treatment, or by being honest about their intentions and their ability to commit to whatever is involved. When I first started I wanted the experience of working with anyone I could get–it didn’t matter, I wanted to be able to figure the case out, try every angle I could, and see if I could make something happen. But when patients don’t want to work with you, and actively work against you, the result is often painful, physically. Painful for me, as well. We’re trained to watch out for that, to keep the kind of unbiased professional distance we need to operate: there is no place for “the personal” to interfere in the process. But it always, always hurts, even though now it seems to be that much less of a shock. I now recognize the signs, get a referral list out, and tell the patient I’m no longer available, even if their actions are nasty (or in one case, just plain illegal).

I’m grateful there have only been three such patients in nine years–but each time I’ve encountered the phenomenon, I’ve focused on the feeling involved, and I’ve missed the remedy I needed to give.

I’ve been told that as practitioners, we get the patients we need to see. People we need to learn from, people who choose us to help them because they find something “in kind” with us, even if it can’t be named. The person who told me this also told me that when he started his clinic work, almost every patient he saw had schizophrenia.

I noticed that in my own list of patients, the majority of them were the type who will develop cancer, if it isn’t interrupted. They can be excessively controlling, fastidious, ordered. They are fascinated by music, and beauty (the beauty of nature in particular), and harmony. They put themselves last on the list when everyone else’s needs call to be met. They grieve (but don’t know why) and smoke (and don’t know why) and hide themselves as well as they can muster, at first by working really hard to “be nice”; then with firm resistance, and finally by lying outright. Underneath everything, though, they just don’t trust. That feeling is the engine that runs the whole show–they don’t trust the physical world around them (so it has to be cleaned up, organized, changed, beautified); they don’t trust others (and feel like others try to pull the wool over their eyes, or will abuse them in some way–often because they do); and they hide as much as they can about themselves, weaknesses they feel make them vulnerable. They don’t trust their own bodies and feel that on a very deep level, they and their health are incredibly fragile.

They’re right, of course: their health is fragile, and they are fragile. They can’t trust others because they really don’t feel they can place any trust in themselves (and they are blind to the fact that others find it difficult to trust them in return). And so they will often tell me that they will simply not tell me anything. They will refuse to answer direct questions because they don’t believe I need to know the answers (but I do!) and they’ll be set in their ideas despite whatever I can do to demonstrate that their beliefs simply don’t apply to what’s actually taking place in terms of the work we’re doing. In short, they face me with the same kind of doubt, the same kind of questioning stubbornness and tendency to fixed ideas I can have about them, and we can languish in this back and forth dynamic forcing us into its dance. It’s taken me a lot of time to figure out that “getting stuck in that dynamic” is the problem–and that if I step back and look, everything the patient does is a demonstration of all that I need to know to prescribe well.

When the third patient of this type presented herself, I thought, “What the hell am I doing wrong?” and felt completely insulted. I’d put in a lot of time, unpaid; I’d gone out of my way to see the patient via house call, since she couldn’t come to see me in my office–and because she complained of not having enough money, I never charged her mileage. I listened to her protests of an inability to afford the cost, despite knowing she came from a well off family and completed a post-graduate degree which placed her in a well-paying full-time position with the university even before she was done with her studies. I knew she’d managed to travel most of Europe, study full time, and buy her own home in Toronto long before most people her age could scrape up enough to pay rent on their own apartment–and yet I listened to what she was telling me instead of seeing what she was showing me. I spent hours trying to cajole her into answering my questions, when really I could have saved myself all that effort if I’d just let what I was seeing register.

"makes an excellent living fence"

Instead I locked everything I knew to be true about her away in the insult.

But I never stopped thinking about her case. And finally it dawned on me that if I just considered what I’d observed–the stubborn refusal and insistence on hiding herself; the persistent physical pain and its location, which hinted at grave problems with sexual relationships; the unguarded criticism she would launch at a particular man and his behaviour (again, sexual) and the unhappiness she hid regarding her current relationship; her responses to all the medications she’d been given, which actually brought her state even more clearly into focus–it was an easy case, I don’t know how I missed it. But I do know that when we take things personally and react to them that way instead of looking at what we’re being shown and what it tells us, we can become lost.

It’s taken me a while to figure out what to do next, with this case, how to initiate the way we continue on with each other after cutting off communications several months ago. After putting together my own research and taking another look at the case with a very critical, inductive eye, I repertorized only what I knew to be facts about her behaviour and symptoms. That was the easy part: the difficult part was figuring out what to do with that information.

So I took a dispensing envelope and the vial of medicine, wrote out a label, and twisted out a number of pillules to enclose in the envelope. On a plain piece of stationery, I wrote out very simple instructions for use. I wrote more, of course–a brief note on what I was sending, and why. In the end, the patient is still suffering, still dealing with pain on a daily level. I have something which might alleviate that pain once and for all–and I decided that I couldn’t withhold it, and that everything else that came to pass should be seen as the means to which this possibility could be explored. So I packed it all up in an envelope with instructions, and sent it off to my patient’s address in the city.

The choice to take or ignore the remedy is not mine, but in my note I tried to cover every angle of the decision. If she takes it and decides to go ahead with it, I’ll manage the case. If she doesn’t, and discards it, that’s good too. I don’t know if sending the remedy is selfish on my part–I want to think of it as payment for a good lesson, long past due. And hopefully well learned.

Divided, Part II

It’s just about to become Homeopathy Awareness week, internationally, so I thought I’d post this list of quick facts about Homeopathic medicine. I thought I’d post it because I know the facts are largely unknown among Homeopaths–in particular, the homeopaths who practice here in Canada. They’re basic, they’re well documented, they should be something we know our way around, but we don’t (most Canadian homeopaths aren’t aware of the political realities of our practice in the context of conventional medical hegemony anyway–and here in Canada that power structure’s in place with far more pull than it is in the UK, where these facts have been collected).

So here goes. With full credit and many thanks to Louise Mclean, LCCH MHMA, who compiled the data below (and I’ve added to it with elaborations relevant to Canadian and American practitioners).

45 QUICK FACTS ABOUT HOMEOPATHY

How Homeopathy Works

FACT 1: Hippocrates ‘The Father of Medicine’ of Ancient Greece, wrote that there were two Laws of Healing: The Law of Opposites and the Law of Similars. Homeopathy treats the patient with medicines using the Law of Similars; orthodox Medicine uses the Law of Opposites, e.g. antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, anti-convulsants, anti-hypertensives, anti-depressants, anti-psychotics.

FACT 2: Homeopathic theories are based on fixed principles of the Laws of Nature which do not change – unlike medical theories which are constantly outdated or disproved, and are therefore always changing.

FACT 3: Homeopathy is an evidence-based, empirical medicine.

FACT 4: Homeopathy is both an art and a science.

FACT 5: The Homeopathic “Provings” of medicines are a more scientific method of testing the effects of medicines on the human body than the orthodox model.

FACT 6: Homeopathic medicine awakens and stimulates the body’s own curative powers. The potentised remedy acts as a catalyst to set healing into motion.

FACT 7: Homeopathy treats the whole person. Homeopathic medicines work by communicating a current/pattern/frequency of energy via the whole human body to jump start the body’s own inherent healing mechanisms.

FACT 8: Homeopathy assists the body to heal itself, to overcome an illness which brings the patient to a higher level of health. Orthodox medicine suppresses the illness, bringing the patient to a lower level of health.

FACT 9: The homeopathic practitioner endeavours to search for and treat the cause of the dis-ease in order to heal the effect.

Homeopathic Medicines

FACT 10: Homeopathic remedies are cheap. Cheap to produce, environmentally economical (one plant can make enough medicine for billions of people, for a long time, with no destroyed rainforests or plundered cultural materia medica for the sake of patents in Homeopathy’s wake)

FACT 11: Pharmaceutical medicines are expensive. And their production can and does include all the expense and devastation cited above.

FACT 12: There are more than 4,000 homeopathic medicines.

FACT 13. Homeopathic medicines have no toxic side effects and cause no dependencies.

FACT 14: Every true homeopathic medicine is made using one substance – whether plant, mineral, animal, etc. We know the exact substance it was made from, unlike most modern drugs where we are rarely informed of the ingredients.

FACT 15: Any remedy up to 12c or 24x potency still contains molecules of the original substance in a measurable quantity; and this is known as Avogadro’s number (or, the estimated number of particles in a mole, in chemistry; approximately 6.02214×10²³).

FACT 16: Every patient is unique, therefore homeopathic medical treatment must be individualised.

FACT 17: Homeopaths treat congenital illness, tracing its origins to 6 main genetic causes: Tuberculosis, Syphilis, Gonorrhoea, Psora (scabies), Cancer, Leprosy.

FACT 18: There are hundreds of thousands of homeopathic books, available at specialist outlets, not sold in the high street.

Homeopathy on the NHS

FACT 19: There are 5 homeopathic hospitals in the UK – in London, Tunbridge Wells, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow. They cost the NHS under £10 million a year compared to the £100 billion for the total annual NHS budget for 2008.

FACT 20: At one of the earliest debates on the NHS Act of 1948 the Government pledged that Homeopathy would continue to be available on the NHS, as long as there were “patients wishing to receive it and doctors willing to provide it”.

FACT 21: There is a campaign by certain UK professors to oust homeopathy completely from the NHS after they wrote an NHS headed paper to all Primary Care Trusts in 2006 telling managers not to refer patients to the Homeopathic hospitals.

FACT 22: The Homeopathic hospitals are clean, with friendly, well informed staff. The patients are generally pleased with their treatment, unlike many orthodox National Health Service hospitals.

FACT 23: The chances of contracting MRSA or C. Difficile at a Homeopathic Hospital are extremely rare.

FACT 24: Unlike orthodox medicine where two thirds of all conventional hospital admissions are due to the side effects of pharmaceutical medicines, the bill for negligence claims soaring into billions, one UK leading insurance company reported only ‘a couple’ of claims against homeopaths in a ten year period.

Orthodox Medicine Opposing Homeopathy

FACT 25: In the United States in the early 1900s there were 22 homeopathic medical schools and over 100 homeopathic hospitals, 60 orphanages and old people’s homes, and 1,000+ homeopathic pharmacies. You can read all about them in Julian Winston’s book, Faces of Homeopathy

FACT 26: Members of the American Medical Association had great animosity towards homeopathy after its formation in 1847 and it was decided to purge all local medical societies of physicians who were homeopaths. To read more about this, read Harris L. Coulter’s books, Divided Legacy Volumes I to IV.

FACT 27: Big Pharma does not want the public to find out how well homeopathy works!

Scientific Studies

FACT 28: In 2005 the World Health Organisation brought out a draft report which showed Homeopathy was beneficial, causing Big Pharma to panic and the Lancet to bring out an editorial entitled ‘The End of Homeopathy’.

FACT 29: In 2005 the Lancet tried to destroy Homeopathy with a meta-analysis which only looked at 8 inconclusive trials out of 110, of which 102 were positive. This was a fraudulent analysis.

“The meta-analysis at the centre of the controversy is based on 110 placebo-controlled clinical trials of homeopathy and 110 clinical trials of allopathy (conventional medicine), which are said to be matched. These were reduced to 21 trials of homeopathy and 9 of conventional medicine of ‘higher quality’ and further reduced to 8 and 6 trials, respectively, which were ‘larger, higher quality’. The final analysis which concluded that ‘the clinical effects of
Homoeopathy are placebo effects’ was based on just the eight ‘larger, higher quality’ clinical
trials of homeopathy. The Lancet’s press release did not mention this, instead giving the
impression that the conclusions were based on all 110 trials.”

Find Peter Fisher’s rebuttal article here.
Find links to the Lancet’s original 27 August 2005 issue, with its cluster of articles condemning both homeopathy and the suppressed WHO report promoting homeopathy, here (you need a subscription and a credit card).

FACT 30: There have been many clinical trials that prove homeopathy works. In the past 24 years there have been more than 180 controlled, and 118 randomized, trials into homeopathy, which were analysed by four separate meta-analyses. In each case, the researchers concluded that the benefits of homeopathy went far beyond that which could be explained purely by the placebo effect.

That’s lovely. But I’m sick of maligning the effect of Placebo. I think we ought to study the damned placebo effect already, since it cures far more ailments than the vast amount of conventional medical treatments. There’s something to it, evidently. We should find out what it is.

FACT 31: The Bristol Homeopathic Hospital carried out a study published in November 2005 of 6500 patients receiving homeopathic treatment. There was an overall improvement in health of 70% of them.

FACT 32: Homeopathy can never be properly tested through “double blind” randomised trials because
each prescription is individualised as every patient is unique. Therefore 10 people with arthritis, for example, may all need a different homeopathic medicine.

FACT 33: Homeopathic medicines are not tested on animals.

FACT 34: Homeopathic medicines work even better on animals and babies than on adults, proving this cannot be placebo.

FACT 35: Scientists agree that if and when homeopathy is accepted by the scientific community it will turn established science on its head.

Homeopathic Practitioners

FACT 36: In the UK, Homeopathic Practitioners train for 4 years in Anatomy and Physiology, as well as Pathology and Disease, Materia Medica, Homeopathic Philosophy and study of the Homeopathic Repertory. (In Canada, the minimum training is 3 years of basic medical sciences (A & P, Pathophysiology, physical examination; training will often include things like counseling skills and holistic nutrition; the core focus is on Homeopathic medical philosophy, Materia Medica, the Homeopathic Repertory and supervised clinical training. A further two years of clinical training is typical; continuous study and training is expected of each practitioner).

FACT 37: Most homeopaths treat patients who have been referred to them by word of mouth. Most patients seek out homeopathy because conventional treatment has not benefited them or because it poses too great a risk of side effects.

FACT 38: The homeopathic community has thousands, even millions, of written case notes that demonstrate the positive benefits of their treatment. Some homeopaths have video proof of their patients before and after treatment.

FACT 39: Homeopaths charge patients an average of £50 an hour. Specialist Doctors can charge up to £200 or more. (We charge more here in Canada–on average about $120/hour; Americans tend to charge even more than Canadians. Public health insurance varies by province in Canada but in Ontario–the most populated province–conventional medical doctors charge an average of $200 per patient seen. The average visit with an MD takes 8 minutes; you do the math. Physical examinations, health statement letters, and diagnostic tests are all billed as “extra”, which increase the per-visit rate of pay if applied).

Popularity of Homeopathy

FACT 40: The popularity of homeopathy has grown in the past 30 years, its revival entirely through word of mouth and estimated to be growing at more than 20% a year the world over.

FACT 41: Hundreds of famous people throughout the past 200 years have enjoyed the benefits of Homeopathic medicine.

FACT 42: The aristocratic patronage of homeopathy in the UK extended well into the 1940s and beyond can be easily demonstrated. In the Homeopathic Medical Directories there are lists of patrons of the dispensaries and hospitals. They read like an extract from Burke’s or Debrett’s.

FACT 43: Homeopathy is practised nowadays in countries all over the world. In India (where it’s been practised without interruption for 200 years) there are 100 Homeopathic medical schools and around 250,000 homeopathic doctors.

FACT 44: In a recent Global TGI survey where people were asked whether they trust homeopathy the following percentages of people living in urban areas said yes: 62% in India, 58% Brazil, 53% Saudi Arabia, Chile 49%, United Arab Emirates 49%, France 40%, South Africa 35%, Russia 28%, Germany 27%, Argentina 25%, Hungary 25%, USA 18%, UK 15%.

FACT 45: The media as a whole has been unwilling to air a defense of the efficacy of homeopathy
and the validity of this 250-year-old profession.

Aren’t we at all curious why, especially since the media’s never reticent when given the opportunity to publish attacks against it? In writing this up, I had no trouble finding media articles in major “news” publications which parrotted the conclusions in the Lancet–all without publishing links to the original source, and all without any journalistic history of concern for complementary or alternative medicine in general. Time.com published a brief article encouraging “literate” doctors to slam homeopathy just like the Lancet did, without so much as a link or quote from the original meta-analysis, something a “literate” doctor might like to examine for him or herself. There’s something else a “literate” doctor might wonder about, given the Lancet’s very long history of publishing numerous successful studies proving homeopathy’s efficacy over the course of it’s own history (The Lancet even published the WHO’s own supportive report on Homeopathic medicine in the same issue as the cluster of anti-homeopathy articles and the damning Meta-Analysis). Why all the “buy-in” from powerful media all over the world? Why is such poor journalism suddenly the norm, along with contempt for reader intelligence and curiosity? And why were so many mainstream media “sources” (such as MSN.com, for example–which specializes on celebrity gossip and on-line advertisements) suddenly interested in summarizing anything The Lancet has to say?

It should give us some idea about the way media can work to affect what we do, no matter how successful we are as practitioners.

Divided, Part I

For over ten years now I’ve made my living in alternative medicine. It doesn’t really matter what kind of experience you collect, what kind of working relationship you build with your patients, what kind of hit-or-miss scenario you encounter along your particular journey, nor does it matter who “teaches” you anything, no one wants to tell you about or discuss one constant in our work: every couple of years, like clockwork, we alt-med practitioners find ourselves scrambling to mobilize against some well organized, well funded threat to our livelihood–a threat that can be local or national, and is now often international in scope. And every time it happens, people in our professional communities think that somehow “things will work out for the best” if we just go along with what’s happening, consider the attack to be some kind of “constructive criticism” we could use to our advantage (and then try to change what we’re doing because we think we can become “more acceptable”). Sometimes, we take the government and conventional medicine at their word for what they’re trying to do with us, if the “attack” ends up leading (coincidentally!) to some time consuming, money sucking “process” initiative.

That’s the best case scenario, one that, in my experience, has yet to end well. The worst case, the most evident reaction, includes an automatic factioning process. Various alternative medical system “regulating bodies” (societies, associations, colleges, and boards) all claim to be working “right alongside the government in a “process”–the only valid process–that will make us all “legal” (or acceptable, or legitimate…whatever it is we’re told we’re not, by everyone except our patients). “Everyone else” not in the “chosen” and involved body is just “doing the wrong thing”. Somehow, we always fail to see how it is we’re all lured off to take part in these ongoing projects that lead nowhere but effectively tear us apart. I wonder how we keep missing this, every time it happens.

It’s difficult to think we’re ever going to be united on anything any time soon when so much paper and ink are wasted in international and local one-upmanship endeavors, which quite literally show us up to be politically retarded. Easy to manipulate, we still think it’s all about what we’re supposedly doing wrong, and who we have to blame and ostracize in our communities for creating the “bad name” with which we’re all labeled. It’s like we assume the position of the powerless, every time. We are quite literally the unwitting instigators of our ongoing demise. This is never more evident than when we’re confronted with the kind of challenges we never seem prepared to face, whether they come at us from a local source, or from some huge force far outside of the confines of our own state laws.

This year’s big challenge in Canada is Bill C51–it’s full of massive restrictions regarding access to all natural substances–herbs, vitamins, medicines, and just good old real food–to which we’ve idiotically allowed Big Pharma, Big Food, and Big Medicine to control access. It will also dictate choice and behaviour, with severe repercussions to individual citizens who opt to use alternative medicines, and to practitioners alike. It opens us all up not just to these transgressive laws, but also laws made in other countries which previously did not affect our own behaviour–such as the Codex Alimentarius, which many natural health physicians believed would never apply here in Canada. Under C51, they’ll become law in Canada and we’ll be subject to those laws, without their having to undergo the parliamentary process in to become law in this country. There won’t be any recourse then, in terms of protest–elected officials will have no say in the matter, and they’re our one tiny link to power in this country.

It will mean the end of alternative medicine as we know it here–that is, it won’t be available to the public through well trained, educated, and skilled practitioners, only through conventional medical doctors (who are not required to undergo this education process in order to prescribe). To add insult, the bill is intended to be the “thin edge of the wedge”. It will be one of the first which will override any legislative sovereignty we have as a country. And that will open the door to plenty of other such bills, not necessarily ones which affect alternative medicine alone. It’s meant to be a real Trojan horse of a law, the potential for abuse is staggering.

And yes, the repercussions include seizure of property–homes, practices, files, medicines. They include incarceration, asset seizure (so it will be impossible to defend yourself, should the law be used against you), and the imposition of very heavy fines (these will be applied to manufacturers of natural products primarily–the idea is to shut them down, eliminate their access to plants, seeds, genetic materials for the manufacture of natural products; but the fines will also be levied against individual practitioners, consumers, people like parents who choose to treat their children with real food or herbs, too).

Two years ago, when Homeopaths were being suckered into yet another “self-regulation” scheme that we were never allowed to devise ourselves, I remember having one hell of an ongoing argument about the process with my own doctor, a Naturopath who trained me quite well in my own studies in classical Hahnemannian Homeopathy. But he’s an exception as a Naturopath–for his accreditation, the DHANP, he was required to study Homeopathy in school to the same basic extent that I was: five years of conventional medical sciences following a completed university degree, combined with a full three year Homeopathic medical science training course, and two years of supervised clinic work in classical homeopathic medicine. This is an American accreditation, one we don’t have in Canada at the moment–mostly because NDs here have succumbed to demands made by conventional medicine that they prove themselves to be “science based” practitioners. As a result, the “ND” designation here allows you to claim that you are a Homeopath even though you’ve never studied homeopathic medicine. When the NDs got that little plum, they were also given quite a political pedestal, which raised them far above the Homeopaths and other alternative medical practitioners below. Suddenly NDs were the authority, their patients could seek out help and receive repayment for their expenses from private insurers…while the NDs ensured that Homeopaths, Traditional Chinese Medical doctors, and others would no longer be covered under those policies. Divide and conquer, effectively implemented, part one.

Divide and conquer part two came along when the “self-regulation” process became an opportunity to destroy both NDs and HDs (homeopathic doctors) by attempting to create a regulatory “college” board which included them both. The first clue that this was to be a destructive idea was the fact that the NDs were under fewer practice restrictions, would not fulfill education and ethical standards set by Homeopathic medical societies, and finally, held a great deal more political clout in the conventional medical community than their Homeopathic counterparts, and nothing was being done to fix that inequality on this proposed college. That should have been a glaring clue we could not overlook: and yet, I remember my own doctor thought this college would be a great idea. When I protested that he wasn’t thinking about the poor training most NDs have in Homeopathy, and how so much of our future as homeopaths will be compromised because of the lack of priority that has been placed on the need for full training of homeopathic medicine as opposed to it’s opposite paradigm, conventional medicine…he pooh pooh’d my concerns as if I couldn’t understand what was going on. I insisted: I pointed out to him that the very school in which he used to teach student Naturopaths classical homeopathy, the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine, no longer employed a classical homeopath on its teaching staff. He no longer taught there himself, and the full extent of the school’s courses on homeopathy were now being written and taught by a pharmaceutical company selling polypharmacy patent medicines mislabeled as “homeopathic” to untrained physicians, all looking to practice lucrative homeopathy as if it were the same as conventional medicine. He agreed there was a problem there, but couldn’t seem to understand that this would put us all at a disadvantage. He couldn’t see that this pharmaceutical company, now the sole Canadian-based lab making the Homeopathic remedies Hahnemannian homeopaths use, was poised to reach into a promising new market of untrained MDs, who’d be far more inclined to use their rote prescription patent medicines under the guise of treating patients with Homeopathic medicine. After all, alternative medicine is a huge growth market right now, our patients have all tried conventional methods and those methods have failed. Over 70% of the population now uses some form of alternative medical care–that’s a big chunk of the marketplace that’s up for grabs to Pharmaceutical companies looking for even bigger profits. And that fact puts all the bona fide alternative medical physicians in a disadvantaged position.

He meant well, he was idealistic and completely bamboozled by the lure of “scientific legitimacy”, the kind conventional medicine approves of, the kind that keeps pharmaceutical companies humming. He protested that not enough Homeopaths were familiar with the basic medical sciences, even though he knows full well that those courses are handy in terms of reference, and of knowing about the conventional medical paradigm and how it differs significantly to Homeopathic medical science, which requires a completely different perspective in which to practice effectively. I argued then, and still argue, that a Homeopath had better understand Homeopathic medical perspective and method thoroughly–or stay away from the medicines and the practice of homeopathy all together–choose a modality that’s a lot easier, closer to conventional methods, instead. It would be more useful for us to know what diagnostic tests are available here, so that when our patients bring their results to us we can interpret them effectively, and act accordingly (send them out for even more tests, or use the information in our own differential diagnoses for finding the similimum). But that information’s only taught to MDs–and they’re not willing to share that knowledge. Another fact that should alert everyone concerned that the last priority in this “protective measure” is our patients’ care, that public health and consumer protection are definitely not on the agenda for these regulations.

This conflict was the greatest disappointment I’ve ever felt in my teacher, and in my doctor: to me it was mystifying that he would be willing to argue a point even if it meant we would both be compromised in the end. When I told him this, he told me not to worry, and said, “The government can never take away your right to make a living.”

I couldn’t believe such a capable and learned person could be so politically naive, so gullible. And so thoroughly unaware of our shared history as physicians in North America. They damn well can take away our right to make a living as practitioners away. They could, and they have in the past. Using very similar tactics. Successfully.

Earth Day is the new Christmas

I’m on the verge of heartbreak when it’s clear that companies like WalMart have discovered a way to make themselves look virtuous and green for Earth Day. Driving home from the GO Station this morning (Ontario’s own version of Lip Service on the issue of the Stewardship of Nature), I managed to catch almost the entire radio spot (they’re running one on TV, too), featuring WalMart’s “healthy” snack options. There aren’t many of them, just your usual Sun Chip corn/wheat chips, flavoured with an MSG chemical manufacturers can legally call “cheese” because of the political and economic clout companies like WalMart command, selling for “the famous WalMart low price”. The big selling point of the commercial is its message: for every package of such “healthy” foods you buy, WalMart will donate a portion of the proceeds to purchase “green points”, which then go to support and promote the use of “alternative” (and yet unspecified) forms of energy. No word yet on exactly what “green points” we’re talking about–Kyoto Accord green points? The kind of Green “credits” discussed in Brazil’s last biodiversity conference, way back in the last century? What? It’s mystifying in that familiar sloganeering way: you know the phrase would have a little disclaimer star right above it if it appeared in a print ad. In a TV or radio spot, however, it sounds right only until you ask, “what do they mean by that?”

And that’s all WalMart has to do to be absolved of its myriad transgressions against life, people, food, labour, and the planet: feature a pretty, smiling hippie girl on television holding a bag of junk food, telling the world what a good corporate citizen it’s become. That, and perhaps hire Renzo Piano to design them an Optic Green head office somewhere in the South, full of light, and air, with a token nod to solar energy in a glistening panel installation on site. Something more like a sculpture than an actual working fuel source. Just to, you know, say that they did it. So they have a place where they can consult with other “green” experts, who’ve found a way to cross that line between activism and corporate resistance.

In a way the rash of suddenly green corporate citizens is part of a timely lapse in “holidays” — and I have heard an advertising executive interview that Easter and St. Patrick’s day came so close together this year, which left a kind of gap that Earth Day filled perfectly–just in time for “green” marketing, exceedingly lucrative and new. It’s not really that new, however, and definitely not new where food is concerned. What’s interesting is its coincidental presence in a world where so much is happening around food and its distribution right now, so much is affecting its price and accessibility. So much is happening around the kind of food that’s being produced, what’s being wasted, what’s being hijacked for use in non-food product, and what’s being misrepresented to us as “real” and “healthy”.

WalMart’s just another big box store in Canada, most recently a big box food store to rival the 5 other massive big box food corporations currently running the show here–Loblaws, Sobey’s, A&P/Dominion, to name a few. Ever since Loblaws came into the “green” food business, however, nothing in the typical supermarket has actually lived up to the European standard of “organic” food; and the resulting legal definition of “organic” in Canada has become as believable as the legal definition of a “trans fat”. Plenty of the food being sold in these major chains are billed as organic, despite the fact that the only difference between these foods and the store’s regular brand items seem to be packaging. In these grocery stores, “organic” foods contain as much genetically modified grain and soy, as many refined and “enriched” foods, as many soy-derived glutamates and hydrolyzed proteins, and as many artificial colorants, hydrogenated rancid fats, and perfumes as their non-organic counterparts. It’s all about labelling now, as opposed to content–labelling and definition: WalMart is perfectly suited to walk in to a market that’s already been hoodwinked to buy less-than-what’s-stated foods made by other large corporations, usually from food sources far, far away from home. China, mostly; or in countries recently forced to allow grain materials formulated by companies such as Monsanto and Cargil to be grown in large quantities, despite their farmers’ and consumers’ resistance (places like Brazil).

That sounds like the antithesis of “green”, doesn’t it? No matter: sell the consumer a plastic weave bag they’ll think is made out of cloth for a dollar extra, and you can make him or her believe even more strongly in their virtue as protectors of this planet for the coming seven generations. It all looks good and real, just like Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth–but everyone remembers the end of that brilliantly produced film, with its well articulated but terrifying argument: the one suggestion made to “make the effort” to stop Global Warming came in the form of asking people to buy fluorescent light bulbs, instead of incandescent ones.

So the problem of sustainability, which is perfectly attainable, just gets worse. WalMart is moving in very quickly, even where the company faces a great deal of resistance from citizens who are targeted as its market (WalMart inevitably just overrides public concern, decision making power, and law to open up anyway, putting competitors out of business easily). It’s well known for its questionable business practices, its legal transgressions in terms of pay and working conditions and labour practices. It’s known, in Canada, for union busting (since so many WalMart stores have been unionized by their workers–WalMart simply appeals to the local or provincial governments and the unions are dismissed outright and dissolved in those stores, or WalMart just closes up shop until such time as it can reopen as a non-union store). There’s no doubt WalMart needs to account for a great deal of what it does to generate profit, and people need to rethink shopping at WalMart all together: it’s unfortunate a bunch of Earth Day ads demonstrating a commitment that’s as small as possible is the best the corporation is willing to do.

It’s dispiriting, I know. So is the fact that the last canning factory east of the Rocky Mountains, CanGro, is closing, here in St. Davids Ontario. The countless farmers who continue to grow fruit like peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, apples, pears, and berries of all kinds will no longer be able to sell their produce to companies who would put the stuff on the market. We’re talking about arable land in Ontario that’s been used to grow fruit for the last 400 years: no longer marketable because the large food distribution corporations like Loblaws and WalMart prefer to buy food products and produce from China or South America or Chile or California instead. It’s a lot of good Niagara land producing a harvest that is simply ignored here, no longer valued; and, it’s another massive aspect of the Ontario economy (it’s largest sector, actually) that is just shutting down. A lot of people will be forced to pull out fruit trees for a subsidy, and replace them with…what? Corn for ethanol? Or, worse, corn for…the refined processed food industry? More grapes for more agribusiness wineries, fruit which costs tens of thousands of dollars per acre to plant and won’t yield for at least 5 years? And if there is no subsidy, or the subsidy for these changes aren’t enough? What then? More newly constructed Niagara bedroom communities?

The more I learn about this, the more I realize something really sinister seems to be at work here in Niagara. In the CanGro case in particular, the 100 plus staff members were ready and willing to negotiate purchasing the plant themselves, and creating a fruit farmers’ cooperative: but the local Member of Provincial Parliament, Tim Hudak, was once again ineffective at bringing the parties involved together (he also let Cadbury Schweppes close last year–another very important canning/fruit processing plant Niagara farmers depended on, another large employer in the Niagara region). The first and only grape farmers’ cooperative in Canada, 20Bees, was also allowed to fall into receivership despite the fact that so many farmers and wineries in the area need a co-op and the ensured supply of the best quality fruit in order to sustain the Niagara wine industry–but again, no “bail out” could be arranged. Seems very clear that ever since Hudak’s been around, Niagara’s industries have been shutting down quickly and without obstacle, no matter what attempts people have made to save them, and themselves, in the process. Like dominoes, we’ve lost a huge chunk of Ontario’s (and Canada’s, let’s not be simple about this) agricultural industry–this was the biggest industry in the province not 20 years ago. Following that, we’re watching the auto industry close, massive layoff after massive layoff, while Hudak and his party’s federal counterpart, Harper, throw billions of dollars to GM, Chrysler, and Ford just to watch them keep the money and fire everyone anyway, because it’s always given with no strings attached. The Auto industry was the province’s second largest industry–in particular, the second largest industry in Niagara after food–so Niagara is really in trouble. With so much money and effort invested already in an industry as vital as food, I can’t help but wonder why it is we let such astounding opportunities for real “green” business to flourish go, while people we elect continue to prop up businesses which simply aren’t “green” in any way, and simply aren’t interested in giving anything back to the communities which provide them with tax free business operation, a market, and lots of underpaid labour so their profits can soar.

We aren’t manufacturing anything much in Canada anymore as the largest employers started to leave Canada in droves way back when Free Trade was forced on us. That was Niagara’s first blow: produce grown here would no longer make it into Canadian food stores as Loblaws et al contracted to do business with American agribusinesses first. The wine industry grew as a response to that death: people were paid about $4000 per acre to pull out their trees and replace them with vineyards. Now that that industry’s been taken over by multinationals trying to look like small boutique wineries (while putting all the small wineries out of business as quickly as possible), those vineyards are also being pulled up (the 20Bees Co-op represented at least 20 individual vineyard owners, independent farmers–now all out of business as well as out of their vineyards, as some lost everything when that co-op failed). What we have now is more Escarpment land that can serve no purpose for the production of food. We could turn this into a real opportunity to put food from this area on the map, so to speak, as one of the world’s best high quality food sources, particularly to consumers who want to buy from local producers, and want to buy food raised sustainably: but the sad reality is that developers end up buying the land from exhausted farmers. When the Niagara on the Lake farmers who’ve been farming peaches and pears bulldoze their trees this week (that’s Niagara farmer Bill Duffin’s doomed peach orchard being pushed over in the photo above, one healthy tree at a time), they won’t be given enough subsidy to plant anything new–and even if they were, what could they plant that they could actually sell? Agriculturally, the land is worth nothing–unless alternative means of farming can be explored, and implemented–and lets face it, these could just as easily be subsidized as any “replanting” project, and they’d continue to keep producers here, and people working. As a site for a new subdivision development, because of that other bastion of Lip Service in Niagara known as “The Greenbelt Law”, a lot of farmers will be selling their land to builders in exchange for anything they can get to move somewhere where they can actually make a living doing something. Or, the other option: sell the land to developers who put in “Power Centres”: strip malls featuring big box stores in predictable combinations. Invariably, WalMart and Loblaws’ defense strategy to WalMart, the Loblaw’s SuperCentre, come in with these Power Centres to take over where the farmers used to be.

So, finally, even small business owners like farmers are being lost by the thousands in Niagara, all so that big box stores can stomp on in. The foundation of the Canadian economy is still individually owned, small businesses–entrepreneurs, even on a small scale, have always been the most resilient, the biggest form of financial stability and employment possible to the country’s economy. What does it say about us if that’s dying here, so rapidly? It says we have a strange idea about exactly what “Green” entails, for one thing. My secret wish is to see some backbone and fury here: I’d love it if every farmer could take every penny of those subsidies to plant whatever nonsense they’ll be told to plant–genetically modified soy, or Round-Up Ready corn (whatever version of that seed they’re in now), or even the deadly genetically modified rapeseed they use to make Canola oil–and leave their peach trees exactly where they stand. They could use the money to buy the CanGro operation outright and run it themselves anyway, just like the co-op they wanted to create. Grow the fruit sustainably, without deadly chemicals and crazy biotech seeds or caustic fertilizers and market it directly to Canadian consumers who want to buy local, fresh, native, “organic” produce, as that market is growing. Happy Earth Day, yeah.

I have to look for any kind of hope I can find, any sign that people have the means to figure out a way of taking back some of this lost access, the loss of control over something as basic and as fundamentally required as real, nourishing food. And it does exist.

There are still farmers out there who are actually growing produce organically–careful about using heirloom seeds, careful about saving and storing those seeds particularly for foods that have become so heavily modified by the biotech industries. Some people are doing this on a small scale, others are stepping out of that small model and setting up community supported agricultural schemes where local people subscribe to the harvest in advance. All of these farmers have carved out their own markets–educated consumers who will buy from farmers’ market stalls in city centres, or restaurateurs and chefs who insist on sourcing the best and freshest foods available in what is becoming quite a culinary hot spot. Many of these farmers are proudly “uncertified” organic, since “certified organic” has come to be an empty marketing strategy in these parts–and all encourage you to get to know what they do on their farms, get to know what all local producers do with integrity. The vegetables pictured here come from local organic producer whose work in the area has made her something of a leader among foodies and people in the know Linda Crago’s Tree and Twig Gardens Heirloom Vegetable Farm, a CSA she started in my area about 5 years ago that’s grown so large she’s supplying restaurants all over Ontario, as well as customers who can now order as needed every week instead of “buying in” every season.

The produce is not about shipping possibilities or storage ease or even marketability: it’s all about taste, fragrance, variety, the sensuous reality of food we all miss when we consume processed foods or junk foods we’re told are “healthy-er” than plain old Doritos or potato chips. We’re always jumping off from that point of comparison because we’re led to do so: we assume nothing like the assortment of texture and hue and flavour exists for us to choose from, and that our frame of reference begins and ends at what we can buy in a big crinkly package, in a supermarket. But that diversity does exist. The minute I look at those purple and green tomatoes I think of panzanella salads, or simple tomato sandwiches, or even rich homemade sauces or soups that burst with their sweet, intense flavour, and how each variety I choose to work with will create something far less predictable in its quality than the hothouse varieties we can get anywhere. Heirloom plant varieties always surprise with their appearance, texture, and flavour, and they can’t be had in local supermarkets doomed by contractual obligations to buy from large agribusiness producers thousands of miles away. They mature in the garden, their flavours develop from sunlight — not from food additives which coax our bodies to respond so that the lack of real flavour in our food doesn’t seem so apparent.

In my area alone there is a massive potential for a grass-roots-up food regeneration movement: many farm owners are growing older and large farms are too pricey to operate; fruit farmers can opt to find a new market for their produce by targeting consumers directly, or creating “value added” small scale industry to go along with selling the produce directly. If fruit farms are now becoming useless, and so many once-active acres become fallow land, there’s a perfect opportunity for new farmers who wish to court and nurture a more informed consumer base for real organic produce. Since so many fruit farmers will no doubt be asked to rip out their orchards for a subsidy to plant grapes or corn, why couldn’t they be subsidized to farm organically anyway–or even to designate their land for organic farming use, so that agricultural schools could set them up to create community initiatives? The fact is there are thousands of the really “green” agricultural scientists who are emerging from graduate schools already well trained and well versed in the many ways we could produce foods more sustainably in this country–we could actually employ them here, instead of watch them move away to places like Norway or Italy or Sweden, where people see real value in what they know and corporations have far less power over the way food is produced. If we want to think about killing a few birds with one stone, we can even think in terms of economic problem solving–supplying a learning environment/food source/nutritious lunch program for kids in schools, as Alice Waters does in the US with the Edible Schoolyard (or as Jamie Oliver and his friends tried to do in the UK–but we can plan against the outcome he got there); or, we can supplement already overrun food bank programs all over North America with community garden schemes, community canning efforts (especially for those forgotten fruit farmers whose orchard’s produce won’t be canned any other way), and opportunities to help those “in need” produce their own food, even if they haven’t got the land to do so. The possibilities for community and cooperation with each other seem to explode whenever gardening comes up, don’t they?

There’s a real need for foods that are rich in nutrient content, whether those foods be grains or fruit or meats and dairy–and there’s a growing awareness that real foods, in particular the traditional foods, are vital to creating and maintaining human health. What we think of as cultural food traditions are actually stores of nutritional knowledge gleaned over long periods of time by trial and error, and long term observation. Many of the foods we’ve now been led to believe are “deadly” or “unhealthy” simply are not so, nor have they ever been–and ironically, many of the foods we’re now told to believe are healthy (particularly the ones sold to diabetics or those who suffer from cardiac diseases of all kinds) are simply marketing opportunities for various processed food producers. Even mainstream media have begun to expose some of these marketing scams–a recent CBC Marketplace feature focused on the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation’s mandate to sell “Health Check” labels to producers of foods like Becel margarine (100% pure, rancid, hexane-laced hydrogenated soy oil, which we know exacerbates heart disease as well as diabetes). Many Canadians have become outraged to learn that these “labels” are still allowed by the Canada Food guide nutritionists, despite scientific research which warns against ingesting these foods. On the plus side, however, many of the newly outraged Canadians who used to believe the marketing (and in the Canada Food Guide, which has been exposed as yet another big corporate marketing tool) have become even more determined to learn how to make better food choices. And that’s a start, if not a focal point, in creating a demand for real food.

Real food will certainly continue to be a focal point for alternative medical practitioners who specialize in treating and reversing chronic disease, and in averting the long term effects of chronic disease on populations in general. After all, we know that chronic diseases don’t just affect us individually, they have an impact on a generational level, and on a community level as well. Human health in the developed world has actually become significantly compromised over the last 2 generations, despite what modern medicine would like us to believe. People now become chronically ill sooner in their lives, chronic disease is much more commonplace among the population, and overall quality of life declines much sooner for people in our generation and the one preceding ours. What I’m seeing in the latest generation doesn’t bode well for the future, either: we’re at a stage now where prosperous societies produce children with chronic illness that begins very early: from autism and other neurological disorders, to severe allergies to food which start in infancy (or before that), to severe allergies to the environment in general (“environmental” allergies are so prevalent now that various foods and all perfumes are now banned in places like schools as a policy, throughout North America). How did we get so sickly we can’t even live in the world, which is no more polluted now than it’s ever been?

I’m also seeing a universal weakness in an extremely important area, and that is skeletal development. Children with poor dentition are so commonplace now, where once (I’d say even thirty years ago, just over a generation ago) this was very rare. What we’re also seeing quite frequently now is the shocking occurrence of heart disease in even the more physically “fit” athletes, at very early ages. Heart attacks that kill at 13, for example; heart attacks that take place right on the basketball court, or at the track meet. In children who are supposedly supremely physically fit, at ages closer to childhood than adulthood. At some point, we have to begin to acknowledge how much of these deteriorations have taken place not as a result of genetics but of the supposed “better living through chemistry” diet we’ve all subsisted on for decades now. And we have to begin to seek out the real “green” alternatives our ancestors depended on for full, sustained health. In our own era, right now, that means the work that small scale local producers are trying to get done in the communities around them, with community support and cooperation.

So, yes, it does look bleak when it looks like all the Big Food Boys are muscling their way in to take over what it is we’d really like to see happen with our food, what it is we’d really like to (need to) buy and use: but the fact is that things can definitely be made to change in our favour. Organizations conducting privately funded, independent research on nutrition aren’t the standard yet, not by a long shot– but they do exist. The largest one and the most comprehensive in its scope is the Weston A. Price Foundation, which creates a wealth of information on nutritional science based not only on traditional cultural food knowledge but also on pure scientific inquiry, funded by nothing except individual participant donations (in other words, they aren’t working for Big Pharma, or government food marketing boards, or bio-tech firms and chemical farming companies in any way). This foundation also does advocacy work–with its foremost scientists often speaking out to demand access to real foods such as raw milk and dairy. As a resource for people who need access to these foods to treat health concerns such as autism and environmental sensitivities, WAP has brought many people together. From there, people seem to be naturally creative when they work cooperatively. They can work together to lower the cost of access to various foods or supplements or even medical care, just because they create solutions to their existing common problems. It’s quite a revolutionary thing, community. Right now, in the Niagara region, it’s our only hope if agriculture as its been done in this area of the country is to continue.

Even if all we have the strength or energy or inclination to do is plant our own garden, no matter what size it is, that’s a significant contribution to ourselves as well as to the world’s ecological health–quite an impressive point for “green” living against the efforts of big box retailers intent on making themselves look good despite their long and ongoing records for exploitation and abuse. As small as that seems, it would have a great deal more impact than switching out your incandescents for some twisty neon bulbs you’d probably only be able to find at WalMart.

Gli Abbruzzese

When I think of the foods my mother used to make, it occurs to me that almost no one takes that amount of time to prepare anything anymore. It was a long time before I realized that foods most people think of as “Italian” were foods my mother rarely made–hers was a cuisine that involved a great deal of preparation that started outside of the kitchen, a discriminating taste for the very best ingredients, no matter how rare. I took a lot of this for granted when I was a child, it often made me impatient when she would scour the city’s live markets, or forests in parkgrounds, looking for exactly the right herb, or mushroom, or animal or vegetable for a dish my mother had decided she would make. I wondered how it was my mother seemed fixated on these ingredients, when everyone else’s mothers around me seemed far less concerned, and never seemed to make the same foods as she did, even if they too were Italian women from Italy. To me she seemed like a witch: particularly in an age where everyone’s children were fixated on “astronaut” foods, stuff that was packed up and created in labs and sent off to the moon with the spacemen. She’d buy us the peanut butter in tubes and the Tang so we’d leave her alone when she gathered malva blossoms on the neighbour’s lawn to make tea only she would end up drinking. But she’d shake her head at us. Rightly so.

My mother’s village was quite small. There were a limited number of families there, and she grew up on a property in the hills outside of Teramo, a place settled by what I’m told were seven families, formerly named after their seven homes–Le Sette Case. Seven is a big number in Abbruzzi, I’ve learned: there are entire feasts prepared on the first of May based entirely on that number’s prominence in the mythos of these people. Up to 30 courses can be served on that day’s celebration meal, and every course’s primary ingredients are also arranged in terms of sevens. So I don’t know how much of my mother’s retelling is the truth, or a simple example of local mythology, passed down even to her from its ancient source. What I remember of her land is that it’s surrounded by mountains, green fields, rows of corn leading up into the sky and vineyards throughout the lands closest to the house. It was a large stone farmhouse, like nothing I’ve seen here. An elevated main floor built above what used to be the stables and barns, presumably for heat. What I remember of the place was its massive elements: a tall staircase leading up to the main great doors; polished stone floors throughout the first floor, and marble on what we’d call a veranda here, exposed to the elements (and therefore very surprising); a focolare, that thing we might call its hearth, so large it could be entered standing, surrounded by stone. It was oven, fireplace, central heat, the preferred seat, the focus of the household (and the origin of the very word itself). It was never left to go out; it was never left alone.

My mother had her own house on the property too: a little stucco farm house with a couple of rooms and some land. She’d bought it from her uncle when he decided to stay in the States. It was her intention to go back to that house at some point, it was never her intention to marry my father and live in a city like Toronto. From her family home’s entrance, you could see the Gran Sasso and the Miale mountains, the lights of the city below us, and the family’s own contributions to the little town they built: a small church, a school house, a very large retail store (what they called the “Sale e Tabacchi”, “salt and tobacco”; a place where they sold food, wine, supplies of all kinds, dry goods, milled grain and other produce they’d grown, and animal feed), and their relatives’ houses. Remote and seemingly isolated, as cold as hell at night and as hot as hell during the day.

My mother had a knowledge about plants that made her seem almost magical–the doctor, lovely as he was, was never called on at our house unless my mother couldn’t get the plant she needed to get us out of our illness. We were careful not to tell the doctor anything about my mother’s doings, but on the occasions she offered her information, he listened very carefully in a way you never see MDs do now, they seem so intimately defensive, even around chamomile tea. She was uncompromising about what she gave for our pains and we often seemed powerless to do anything about it unless our strength returned. By then we’d be feeling better and we’d let her off the hook, anyway: no big thing. It wasn’t until I ran into the character of the friar in Romeo and Juliet that I recognized what she’d actually been doing in nurturing and gathering the odd herb, the strange root, the full bloom at the precise hour. It wasn’t until I’d invested the time in the lure of this kind of medicine myself that I “got” my mother’s fixation, and understood why she was like no one else I knew. For the longest time I didn’t even realize where my own interest came from, even though it seemed limited to an interest in scent and its sources. But even there, it was my mother’s fixation before it was mine. One of my earliest memories with her is a streetcar trip to the Simpson’s department store for an engraved gold atomizer of Miss Balmain; another is her “finishing touch” of Le Galion’s Sortilège whenever she got “dressed”. I still remember her favourite perfumes and their presence in our home, I now know my own choices lead directly back to those mixtures, though the specific bottles and labels will never be sold here again. I wear their “offspring”; the same themes, reinterpreted.

I remember the day when I learned the meaning of her name: Palmarosa. Not its literal meaning, that was always obvious. It has a significance and a significative form that is unique to my mother, unique to us. I’ve always thought of it as a strange name, it still is, I’ve only met one or two other women with it and all of them seem to be related to me. It’s always been very pretty, in my opinion, but for some strange reason I missed (again!) it’s connection with the plant world. It is a grass, a palm, after all: one used in the creation of perfume because of its proximity to the scent of rose oil. It grows in South America, Argentina and Peru. My grandfather travelled there as a young man and very possibly came across the plant while he was there, as it doesn’t grow in Italy where he lived as a child, and returned to live as an adult. I’d never seen the plant mentioned before, and my interest with plants and medicine was there, but untapped. I’d found a bottle of the oil in Michigan, at a vendor’s stall in a market, and asked if a sample vial was available…then asked where it came from, what it was used for, how it was gathered, what it looked like…as if the curiosity flooded from me all of sudden. South America resonated with me and I remembered my grandfather; images of my mother in the garden, in the forests, in the markets all flashed back to me. I lost my grandparents early, one of them even before I was born: all I remembered about her father was his extreme height, his very gentle voice, and his brilliant blue eyes, his elegant face. I could imagine him sailing across the ocean, and wandering through the jungles as a young man. It was part of the story of him I’d been told–the part that was so much less my mother’s experience of him than her own myth about him, something less terrifying about him than the man he actually was to her, and to the rest of her siblings. Suddenly it was as if all those experiences linked us together, across time and space and even life and death. I remember the hair at the back of my neck standing, the gooseflesh. So out of nowhere, out of the ordinary, out of the extraordinary.

I knew where the wild thyme grew, where bolete mushrooms could be found (not the false ones, though, that grow under spruce trees–leave those ones there), when to pick dandelion leaves for salad (and where) and why basil has to be grown near tomatoes. Carnation petals have a thin end–pull them out of the cluster and that part of the carnation tastes sweet and peppery. Lilac flowers taste of honey; violets and pansies as well. Nettles and black malva and chamomile are everywhere around us–though the leaves of sunny chrome yellow coltsfoot blooms, everywhere around us too, contain enough cyanide to kill. Tiny artichokes small enough to fit into your fist are a staple in my mother’s cuisine, as are crêpes, made by the hundreds and combined or wrapped or filled in thousands of dishes; chestnuts as well, for the flour, paste, and roasted nutmeat they yield; peppers with an intensity to rival the hottest Indian cuisine. Before I was five she’d made me notice the difference between the saffron that came from Spain, and the saffron that came from Aquila, not that far away from where my mother was born. It was slight, but it was there in colour and fragrance, in the intensity of the finished flavour. She had a fixation for Bertolini essences, glass bottles with little metal covered stoppers, sold in tiny boxes bearing the turn-of-the-century typography and the depiction of an aquiline-nosed crone. She made liquers with these: Millefiori, Vermouth, Rhum, Caffe Sport, Triple Sec, Amaretto, Banane, and the essence that defied description, Alkermes. As deep blue-red as garnets and beets, it stained everything magenta and tasted of red currants, rose, pomegranates, heat, and spun sugar. Actually, nothing really tastes like it; nothing has its perfume. It’s unmistakable, and it went in every one of our birthday cakes, soaked through the Pan di Spagna until every golden inch was as pink as rubellite tourmaline. Colour, texture, aroma, and the ability to chemically alter your state: my mother’s birthday cakes took longer than a day to make, a labour of several steps, an assembly of various flavourings and extracts and techniques. Clouds of egg whites, their “reds” (my mother’s word for yolks) beaten to the ribbon stage; a baking powder drenched with the essence of vanilla; lemons juiced, peeled, zested. Then, as filling, a thick, cooked cream, flavoured with the tart lemon peel, its quantity halved, and that half flavoured again with cocoa as black as coffee. There was nothing juvenile about these sweets–each thin slice we were allowed on our special day was its own allure of layered sensations, until finally it wasn’t just the alcohol content that made our heads spin. It was as if she wanted us to use every part of our ability to sense as we grew older, not just the dessert but everything else; like her intention for us was that we be perceptive enough to know where we came from, know who made us. Know what was involved in the effort. And since there was a lot of effort involved, she seemed determined that we begin to figure this out early.

It didn’t register quite so easily, of course. What we loved about her traditions, our traditions, we often gave up in the name of being like the other children around us. It made it easier for us to be the “translators” we were, the facilitators between her and the outside, foreign world–because we had to fit into both in order for us all to thrive. My mother was frustrated with us, but patient. We would recognize it one day, we would be made to understand her point, she’d worked hard enough, she knew.

It was decades later, in a remote trattoria in Reggio Emilia, that I was offered a dessert that instantly brought me back to my third birthday, the first time I realized what she’d made especially for me, the memory of the flavour of the brilliant liqueur flooding back so quickly I could barely name it. I knew it right away as my mother’s birthday cake. When I asked the waiter for the name of what I was given, he answered, “Zuppa Inglese“–what translates literally into “English soup”–an Italian metaphor that teases the English for their supposed and lingering affection for cakes in general (Victorians and their “tea time”), and their savvy predilection for making use of dry cake in trifles. The Alkermes, the waiter told me, was really the most English thing about the dessert, since it could only be obtained, for the longest time, from the English herbalists who’d retained all the secrets of its creation.

Dr. John and Me

No one knows why events take place in the way they do, they seem random and unrelated and quite often irrelevant or forgettable, when in fact they hinge on some central force in our lives in a way which may never fully reveal itself in its complexity. I’m not sure I know why Dr. John and I are even communicating with each other, but he’s here and he’s been a presence now for a decade…and not always a pleasant one. But I decided to take him on as my personal doctor once I’d studied under him while I was learning, myself.

I have good reasons for this choice, despite the fact that he’s pricey, he’s way the hell out in Peterborough which just adds more expense to the effort, and politically we’re on opposite sides of the spectrum, a place from where we look at each other with a kind of red-eyed fury. Here they are:

1. He’s persistent. I need someone persistent, who could think a bit more creatively than others. He punched out various possibilities for remedies as suggested by Scholten, he pushed Dr. Sankaran around with other ideas for treatment, he weighed the writings of people like Jeremy Sherr and Lou Klein when the typical polycrests didn’t have the expected effects. He’s convinced I need some kind of mineral remedy: I’m not so sure, and so far I’ve had a sizable amount of insight into my own condition. But we’ve been able to throw around some possibilities in terms of what may actually be taking place with me. I’ve done my share of the appropriate animal remedies, and now I think the mineral might just be the right track, based on a mutual understanding of a physical and emotional reality I just can’t seem to shake: that I am deficient in something vital, and I have been, from the start. So now we shall see.

He was my supervisor while I did my clinic work in school, and he was a sonofabitch in that department, always doubting or second-guessing my choice of medicines for my patients, asking me to replace my own decisions with the choices he’d submit. It was not personal: there was another student he supervised who formally complained about this when he did it to her. For me it this became overbearing, and ultimately, I felt like I should have paid attention to my own decisions about my own patients. But that was the lesson: consider his suggestions as just suggestions, questionable and only potentially helpful. After all, I took the case: it was I who observed and interviewed the patient for two hours; I collected the factual information by observation and interview–his input and decision for remedy selection could only be based on speculation and not inductive reason, and therefore his remedies were bound to be ineffective or less than appropriate. Still, I let him convince me that I should give one patient who needed Aurum Argenticum Nitricum instead; and then another who needed Lac Caninum Lac Humanum (even there, I can see he was pushing me to stand my ground, as these substitution medicines are so close to the original prescriptions I’d made). After that, it hit me that my original choice may have been the best choice, so I fought more heartily for my own decisions in each case, and got them. I think I was so slow to pick up on what he was doing that he made me demand the right to manage my cases myself, after that. Just to be sure the lesson was learned.

2. He thinks in spirals and tangents and parallels and alternative perspectives.
So do I.
The minute he started to talk about Phosphorus as a spontaneously combustive, corrosive chemical, and tied it in with its effects on the liver, then brought it all home by examining so much of the substance’s cultural meaning with discussions of the myth of Prometheus, fire, and the human (physical and spiritual) condition in front of a classroom full of “just tell me what I need to memorize for the exam” doctors and nurses, I knew I found an equally frustrating, detail-inflexible, quasi-highbrow twin thinker. Who might “get” me, after all.

Plus, he presented a paper case he published in the Dutch journal, LINKS, and I was the only person in the class to “figure out” (rather, recall the various remedies discussed in the paper) the remedy which cured the case. It was Hydrogen–how could I forget it? It was a case of extreme nervousness, a sense of never feeling grounded and almost prone to being “abducted” from whatever gravity exists here. And the physical symptoms were so bizarre, I could never forget them. I think I’d know a hydrogen case on sight, even today. So, when I offered the answer, he shot me a stunned, silent “You read the article?” along with his confirmation of the remedy. It became our unspoken little secret: and in return he let me contribute to his lectures without getting too frustrated with me. Now that I teach, I know the generosity of that agreement.

3. Because of the first two reasons, I knew I would never have to worry about transference.

4. Despite differences of opinion in politics (especially about the politics in our work, where we are opposed most profoundly), despite obstinacy on my part, despite having real difficulty finding something that works brilliantly, he cares fiercely about me as his patient. Remedy wise, I’m a god damned shape shifter, and no one hates that more than me (maybe he does, I think I’d hate to have a patient like me, after all). But I know that one day he will knock it out of the park, and I’ll get better.

Right now I don’t know where I stand with Dr. John, in that I’ve finally received my remedy in the mail and it does seem to work to calm down some of the more horrific symptoms I’m suffering with right now. But it’s a very low potency, and I have no idea what the medicine actually is (except I do know it’s quite likely a fluorine compound of some kind, or some combination of aurum and salt). That means that I can give this some time to take effect, and maybe make an appointment some time in the fall, after it has had time to act.

We will just have to wait and see.

Honour

Today I forced myself to come out of my house for a few hours, and wandered around outdoors where it is becoming sunnier every day (but it’s still a bit chilly). My father’s been mucking around in the plumbing in the house, and as a result my kitchen sinks haven’t worked all day, and more and more water’s coming in from the drains as we speak. Naturally, he’s yelling about it to me, as if I were the one who took tools to the pipes on my own and made sure the disasters would result. This anger that comes out of us so easily–it’s been shattering me for a lifetime. Deep breath, everyone. I’m in turmoil about what follows.

I stumbled into a conversation the other day about the nature of rape and incest, and how its forms go unacknowledged in the world around us because they’re so often such a deeply embedded aspect of family life. Now, in my mind, I always knew this meant that patriarchal societies like our own turn on the idea of some man owning people as if they were property, and passing on that property to sons or selling their property (daughters and wives, whores in the “stable”, all the same thing in this economic set up) as chattel. And I always knew, on an intellectual level, that that means “ownership” of the women in the family as a means to produce more “property”–children. And I knew, as well, that “ownership” also means they can assign a value on a person’s worth–hence the big deal about virginity and “honour” and all the nonsense that so many men still believe in with all their hearts and minds, as individuals–and so many cultures still enforce as a tenet.

And then I remembered that this is true in our family, where my father’s preoccupation with me and my “value” often ended in violent battles between us. Where, many times, he intervened between me and a man and our own relationship in order to do damage to the relationship by opening up the noxious point again and again. How he made it clear to me, in words and fisticuffs and belt marks, that I didn’t even possess my own sexuality or body, that it was his to control. And that he would destroy any relationship I ever made with anyone else as long as he could, because of that fact.

Well, I guess it’s not as if he “raped” me, or anything–no, not technically. But there it is–a direct line between incest, seen as a father’s right; and the destruction of an individual person’s right to all that is their own by birth. It explains the outright disrespect he’s shown me for as long as I can remember–the contempt for anything related to me, as long as he could trace it back to me. It all stems from this idea of me as property, a real extension of himself, both as a symbol of him and as his marketable commodity.

I reacted to this thought as if I were reacting to a shock–because that’s what it was. I remember when I was 15 and interested in a boy who used to come around here–just interested in that way that kids are, wanting to spend time around me as much as I wanted to spend time around him, maybe to just experiment, with first kisses and a little bit of a crush on each other. I did a lot of writing back then and like most kids at that age who write a lot I kept a journal, which I wasn’t aware was being monitored for weeks by my father. Eventually I wrote about my little crush, how we’d talked about just being alone for the first time, instead of in a big group with other kids around, your typical teenaged stuff; and my father read up until that point before exploding in fury at what I’d written. Of course, I had no idea he’d been peeking in. In my mind, my privacy was my own; and what the hell was so wrong about having a crush on a kid your own age? Eventually the moment where the boy and I could just talk to each other without others joining in arrived. But I do remember we were not at all alone–other people we knew were all in attendance, just doing something else besides talking to us.

My father chose that moment as if he’d lain in wait for it to arrive. He stormed out among us, and made me feel like I was completely disgusting; he beat me in front of that boy and other people, and called me every single name he could think of, accusing me of acts I didn’t even know about at that point in my life. And that boy was not spared. My father insulted him and his family by accusing them of carrying out a plot to extort money from him (you know, they were all intent on making me pregnant, and therefore I would be forced into marrying their son, and my father would be forced into paying them lots of money until their son deigned to marry me). It’s so medieval and so unbelievably sick that my father would be so deluded (really, if I’d actually had sex with the boy and got pregnant, I’d have had an abortion without batting an eye, even then; and even then I would have been sure to have some form of birth control on hand for the event if that is what would have happened–but I had no intention of having sex with a kid I just wanted to talk to. I was 15, not 10).

My father chose to react to this child and his family as if he believed I were absolutely repulsive, that I was so awful and disgusting that someone would have to extort money from him just so that their son would accept the idea of being with me. Actually, my father chose to react to what I’d written. He secretly read what I’d written for weeks, waiting for something to act on, believing that I’d somehow reveal myself in my own misguided plans to devalue him with my actions. Everything I’d written, in his mind, was all about him and all about me as something that belongs to him, a threat to him because of my existence.

That violent event was devastating. I’d forgotten about it almost completely–the details like the boy’s name, the night it happened, but not in other ways. I’ve always “remembered” it because it’s at the heart of a depression that still lingers, maybe at the heart of my illness as well. And I was 15 at the time, the time something similar happens to most girls, and changes their lives irreparably afterwards.

Something similar happened again 12 years later, I was seeing a man I wanted to be with sexually more than anything–someone good natured, from a good family, someone who seemed to want to be with me as much as I wanted to be with him. But then things changed between us after a night when my father decided to become inflamed over our (very discreet, and also completely acceptable and to be expected) sexual interaction with each other. It’s not surprising, as I was 27 at the time and my sexual activity was my own concern. But once again he pulled the “I own your ass” business and intervened–and this time, with the man. Again things came to blows between me and my father, and once again the relationship was ruined. I never connected the two incidents, because I’d almost forgotten the first one that took place and all the pain it caused. Even now I feel like I’m the self-centered one, who doesn’t see how wrong I am in all of this, and how much damage I’ve done with my actions. That’s quite a twisted logic, to be blaming myself in that situation and not seeing exactly what the conflict was and why it was staged at all. My father believes I am his property, especially sexually. And he believes that to this day and comments on that to my husband. He doesn’t understand that that’s not only wrong, it’s transgressive, a kind of rape that bypasses the physical violation and plows straight into the emotional and psychological violence directly. Then again, I “get” the idea intellectually and yet I still feel like he’s right to think that way, as incorrect and transgressive as the idea is. It’s like I’ve internalized his hatred for me, even though I know he must be wrong, and always has been. All this time all I’ve been struggling with is that imposed hatred and that violation. How do I make myself right again? How can it be possible? Every relationship after that first one that was destroyed…because of me and the way I felt in them, the way I felt about myself. I always felt like there was something atrociously wrong with me, I wasn’t deserving of anyone’s love or attention or care–I was never sure of their intentions, and always questioned them. I was convinced I’d be dumped sooner or later, and in almost every relationship, I was: even when I would choose to leave the man.

It’s there under the entire relationship with RS–even in the fact that he was so much older than me, and quite willing to be like a “father” to me–and maybe there is something to that in my selecting him as I did. It’s behind the lack of connection between me and M.–the lack of sexual life we actually have together, since my father insists on intervening there even if only in word. I don’t feel worthy, I don’t feel like I deserve that vital part of the relationship, or even of my life. I feel like my sexuality is a destroyed thing.

It’s like that film, Prizzi’s Honour–I get it now, in a way I never could before (ironically, as almost the same thing that happened to the Angelica Huston character at the hands of her father happened to me). Fittingly, Angelica Huston as the wounded Prizzi exacts the only kind of revenge that counts: she kills her father via torture, and then re-establishes the relationship her father’s incestuous beliefs destroyed. It’s as if she wins “the argument” with her father over her worth, in a way I never could: she forces him to see he was wrong by using his tactics, a kind of war of surveillance, calculation, and violent action, and she reverses every other development that took place since her violation happened, taking a bit of the revenge out on her lover, who “bought in” to the concept of her “dishonour” by moving on to another lover altogether.

And this brings us down to the crux: the point at which all things come together, the point at which all things started to fall apart, for me: that 15 year old girl who’s still out there, wondering why the hell she’s been so beat up about nothing, and so hurt that everything else in life suffered after that. Dr. John got close to it, but didn’t name it: my accidental conversation with some other girls who’ve survived rape and incest made me see this point. They told me very clearly: in all cases of rape, the woman will always be told she’s the one who was in the wrong, the one who brought it on herself, often the one who chose to be raped in order to inflict shame on everyone else she is related to.

Huh.

Contact

I’m working on translating even more Italian/French to English.  This time, it’s all from research work done about various popes and medicine, and the role of the Vatican in medical history. I tell myself it won’t be as interesting, but the fact is, it most likely will be.

I think of the Vatican as a specifically appointed arm of the Mafia anyway. They have more expensive clothing, and the homosexual preoccupation, though just as violently denied in the Vatican, at least gets more of a sublimation in the materials, colours, and clothing shapes their denizens get to wear than it does in the Mafia.  And exactly who do we kid about this stuff anymore?  Sublimated my eye. 

I’m doing this for a book that will come out in November, 2007, exploring the historical popularity and acceptance of homeopathic medicine, plus the history of its effectiveness and its choice as the preferred treatment of many famous patients–everyone from Darwin (who would never have become well enough to write his Origin of the Species without it) to the Impressionists to successful and well known athletes of every stripe.

My New Year

Yesterday wasn’t as frustrating as I thought it would be, what with the long drive after the first real winter day of the season. I drove east and then north in relative peace, listening to a recorded reading from a novel, something I’ve wanted to do on long drives for ever, but could just never accomplish. The day was almost perfect–sunny, chilly, snowy; I was going to meet my brother for some coffee before driving up but he said he was going the same way; he actually changed his mind when he thought I’d be buying coffee for him, but the fact that my father was there made me rethink the whole proposition. I haven’t got a lot of reasons for wanting to be around my dad these days, especially when he’s got an audience and a reason to be defensive. The guy dislikes me: I get it. No need to belabour the point. I have more enjoyable things to do.

Dr. J was in pretty good spirits yesterday but starting to get a little annoyed and peeved over the results of the last remedy, which brought on a deep depression, tooth sensitivity, extremely long migraines, and even more weight gain despite attempts at restriction. So we hashed out a new approach and he ended up “seeing” what I’d suggested, about 3 consults ago. And so here I am with my new medical friend, above. Let’s see how things go.

It’s been an interesting ride with this doctor, since I started, and I think I may be looking for a solution that doesn’t exist sometimes. If cure is on its way, it’s going to take a while, again; and now I’m feeling like we’ve got to go really deep and it’s possible I’m a little bit frightened, because the pathology is so deeply set. But I finally got him to see the case as I have–right from the start there is evidence of bone deformity in my crazy dentition–small dental arches, large teeth, and slow, faulty, disruptive dentition. Now I know this just illustrates the severity of deficiency my ancestors suffered–I’d have to say on my father’s side, since his family has these bone deformities much more than my mother’s does. Where Dr. J. saw sycotic, I kept seeing syphilitic–in the mineral deficiency, hormonal disturbances, deep depression, and violence which is everywhere in my life. If there is bone deformity in the organism right off the bat, even if it is only initially visible just in the teeth, then the pathology is severe enough to compromise the very foundation (the skeleton) of the organism. Nothing goes deeper than that.

I’m not looking at cysts, or PCOS, or endometriosis, or even just severe anemia or hypothyroidism; I’m actually looking at something far more insidious, far more hidden, and far more progressive. I’m looking at cancer; neurological deterioration, and emotional and mental deterioration instead.

I write this to remind myself: this is the pathological process I’m interrupting.

The Gift

RS’s parcel of books arrived for me yesterday–17 pounds of heavy, hard bound tomes purchased in India, delivered directly to me from Maine. The selection was completely “safe”: everything I wanted, everything I needed for my practice, including some skin/tongue atlases, a few books on constitutions, a journal, and a book on how to effectively market your practice. When I found the box, I was astonished. He’d made a number of promises about sending them to me, but he just never did. He made a year’s worth of promises to meet with me, and that never came to pass either. When we last talked about the books and his sending them, I remembered rolling my eyes because his reticence to do as he originally intended just reinforced my understanding that he just didn’t think about me as he used to anymore. It wasn’t a priority, he’d get to it one day, what was the rush? In my own mind I crossed off the arrival of the books. I thought, “he won’t bring them to me, and he won’t send them to me either.” That left me in a kind of despair. But the postmark on the parcel was dated August 1st. He had put them in the mail long before we had our discussion, and I’d “crossed off” the promise in error.

The books are a huge gift. I could tell he selected them carefully, too–planning to make my practice work, wondering what he could choose out of all those books that he knew I would use and love. On one of those calls from India, he told me he promised he would make my practice busier when he got home, and I could tell from his voice and his plans that he wanted to be part of a life with me, a serious part of my life. So it’s heartbreaking to know that he changed all of that thinking shortly after his return, or maybe during one of our conversations while he was still overseas.

When I opened up each hard cover I wondered. He had tucked some bills inside a number of the books–the cash memos from the store in India, a journal note book from the Homeopathic hospital in Vila Pare in Mumbai. A cash register receipt from the Blue Hill Co-op. A sales slip from New Mexico. He’d read through a number of these books as he drove east from Denver, possibly at night before he fell asleep in his car; for company while he sat and ate his meals on the way. They arrived at the right time: just as I was picking up my interest again, making some plans to try and re-open my life in practice after letting it languish for so long. I never really “let go”, but I let the momentum drop significantly. I feel like I’ve been buried for so long now, and wanting to learn again was the only thing that was giving me hope about “resurfacing”. I’m more hopeful now, but with a lot of doubts about what I’m actually feeling.

Maybe what I’m feeling now is that old feeling of being well within his sights–a little bit of surprise, outright adoration for someone who so carefully chose for me. I called to thank him as soon as I could, and realized after I hung up that I won’t stop feeling the way I do about him. It’s addictive, this feeling: here is a man who knows “more about me than I’ll ever guess”, as he said once. He used to have this uncanny ability to know what I was thinking about things–know what I was about to say, know precisely what I wanted but could never ask from him, even sexually, even as far as things like writing. It was astonishing, and also seductive. When it stopped happening between us I think I felt that loss more than any of the other exchanges we shared. So, (after weeks of thinking otherwise) I realise I’m still in love with him; and he is still no longer in love with me.