Holistic Medicine and Me

A few years ago I didn't know much about Chinese medicine and I'd never even heard of Ayurvedic medicine. Today they are big parts of my life. While I'd dabbled in yoga for years, I never realized that I could actually use yoga to change the shape of my body. But after buying probably about 100 books on the subject, I've used yoga to correct my scoliosis and eliminate chronic neck pain that I'd had all of my life. Yoga even helped to cure my TMJ pain completely.

If like many people you have back pain, why not give yoga a try? It is easy, its cheap and it is generally considered good exercise. The only suggestion I would make is to avoid any teachers interested in extreme poses. For example, I'm not a fan of headstands. I don't think our heads and necks were ever designed to support our body weight. There is a reason legs are big and thick and have the strongest muscles in the body. While I can see the benefits of inverted poses, especially for tired swollen feet and ankles, there are many ways to get your feet higher than your head without placing your body weight on you head and neck. For example, at night I just like to put my feet up the wall to let the blood flow down into the rest of my body.

I'm also not a big fan of yoga diets. I used to eat mainly vegetarian foods, and I was always sick and suffered from fibromyalgia and many pain issues. A vegetarian diet really wasn't working for me. The light bulb came on when I was reading a book called Super Nutrition for Women by Ann Louise Gittleman. I was reading about the importance of zinc, especially for the immune system, and signs of zinc deficiency. What a revelation! Right after reading that I started eating red meat again and have rarely been sick since. I did stop eating red meat again at one time in an attempt to lose weight. I started getting colds and sore throats again and then remembered why I started eating red meat again in the first place. So my weight loss will just have to come from exercising more and cutting back on sugar, fat and refined carbs.

Holistic Health Tips

If you can afford it, buy organic food, especially organic meat. We used to drive by a major brand beef ranch on the way to a relative's house, and you could smell the stench in the air miles before you even passed the ranch. Something that smells that terrible can't be healthy for the cows or the people who consume their meat. Sure, I look at the prices of the regular meat at Costco or Sam's Club and think about how much money I'd save by buying meat there, but then I think of the ranch and the smell and I buy what organic meat I can find at Safeway or Nob Hill.

Luckily the Costco by our house is starting to offer organic meats now. There isn't a huge selection, but I can get organic chicken breasts, organic ground beef and natural (though not organic) pork chops. Sometimes I go to Whole Foods, but even there the meat is often more "natural" rather than certified organic. A wide selection of organic meat cuts is tough to find and I end up driving to a few stores over the course of a week just to buy healthy meat where I can find it. It takes more time, but personally I think it is worth it.

Favorite Quotes

In all the controversies over what the causes of diversities might be, no one seem to have paid much attention to the factor in the environment that has the most obvious effect on any organism: food. - Michael Crawford & David Marsh, authors of The Driving Force: Food in Evolution and the Future

It is so hard to get anything out of the dead hand of medical tradition. - Oliver Wendall Holmes

Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots. - Edward Bulwer Lytton. (Yes, he's the same guy who is now infamously known for the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, formed to celebrate really bad writing riddled with run-on sentences.)

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