A point about health care
Ten years ago I was working out at the Burbank YMCA when I got to talking to one of my wife’s friends, who was using the machine next to mine. When she asked how my wife was, I said she wasn’t feeling well, that lately she’d had persistent stomach upset.
“She should come see me,” the friend, Donna, said.
“Why?”
“I can make it go away.”
“Really? How?”
She said, “I’m an acupuncturist.”
Now, I knew Donna only slightly, and I knew her as the blonde bombshell mother of one of my son’s grade school classmates (and therefore someone who knew my wife). I didn’t know her as someone who stuck pins in people for medical reasons. But I was about to.
“Can you really make it go away?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then… can I come see you?”
I had had persistent acid reflux for about 15 years. Lately it had been worse. I had been to every doctor in my group and tried all sorts of remedies prescribed, including one that killed all the flora and fauna in my system and made me so ill that I wanted to die, and one that put all sorts of new flora and fauna in my system and made me so ill that I wanted to die. I tried not eating many different types of food, and then eating only those types of food, and then eating no types of food at all for a week at a time. Nothing worked. I figured I had nothing to lose by trying out Donna, the attractive housewife formerly from New Jersey, who now wanted to stick pins in me. The pins couldn’t be any more uncomfortable than the acid reflux.
The next week I found myself in her office. She asked me questions quite different than any of the doctors I had been to. For one thing, she asked me what it tasted like. No one had cared to ask that before. “It tastes like there’s a dead mouse stuck in my throat.” She thought that was pretty descriptive. Then she had me take off my shirt and my pants and my socks and lie down, and then she started to stick pins in me. And almost instantly the dead mouse was gone. I had spent countless hours circulating among doctors with theories, and five minutes of acupuncture cured me.
I make this point because the current Senate version of the health-care legislation now crawling its way through Congress seeks to allow treatment plans to include “alternative therapies.” This story from the LA Times shares the medical establishment’s take on this, as summed up by someone at Yale School of Medicine: “These provisions are anti-science and anti-consumer.” A spokeswoman for the California Medical Association is quoted as saying, “They raise red flags because they could potentially open the door to practitioners with less training and expertise, which could endanger patient safety.”
But, y’know what? Acupuncture never endangered my life. Meanwhile, many years ago when I couldn’t keep any fluids down, a Western doctor prescribed compazine — a muscle tightener — that came within 20 minutes of killing me. (I was very lucky that the right ER doctor, one who had once before seen someone’s head twisting all the way around behind his back, happened to be on duty.) I haven’t known any acupuncturist to mistakenly take out someone’s gall bladder (as a surgeon did with my wife), or to recommend that my father-in-law have his voicebox removed (when later it turned out he just had a sore throat).
The people advocating for “alternative therapies” in this story are derided as “lobbyists.” And I guess they are. But so are the people agitating against these treatments getting covered by national health insurance. One way or another, they’re part of the American Medical Association. There are many fine doctors in the nation, and if I’m struck by a car, please don’t take me to see an acupuncturist. I don’t deny the value of skilled surgeons or orthopedists or optometrists. What I don’t like is the ongoing agitation against other therapies with long traditions of effective healing.