Hey, everyone! I learned a new word today; Holistic Medicine. It apparently means climbing into a hole, (hence the name hole-istic), then filling the hole with hot water and herbs in the hopes of curing what ails you. Obviously, if you lived near a hot-spring, things were a bit easier. When ancient, practically prehistoric, people did this, one of three things happened: they either got better and got out, drown and didn’t, or were eaten by their cannibal neighbors as soup.
I could discuss all three of these options at length, but for the sake of time let’s focus on the first. Besides, the other two didn’t result in any notable health benefits. Unless, of course, we’re researching cannibals. Yes, the good meal did improve their health, but the process didn’t actually further medical science. Consequently, I think it best to narrow the scope.
Eventually, medicine-men realized you didn’t need to sit in a hole for a week, if you just ate the herbs, and he put on a funky mask and danced around you for half an hour. Tribal businessmen loved this because it seriously decreased lost productivity hours and medical payments. Even when you considered how expensive medicine-men were. However, the name stayed the same because, frankly, Dance-istic-Masked-Medicine is just bulky and difficult to pronounce.
Then came the Chinese. They learned how to make tea. Tea got so popular, that early on they tried making tea out of everything. There were some false starts. Water-buffalo-dung tea just didn’t go over very well. Rice tea was considered boring, until an enterprising man named Mus Make Do, fermented and rebranded it as Saki. Eventually though, they settled on just a few plants for making recreational tea, which was legalized sometime during the Oh Eim Hi dynasty.
The thing is, in that time dancing was not very fashionable. Physicians, as medicine-men were now called, had to come up with new techniques. Those ingenious pioneers looked to the tea fad for their solution. They put the healing herbs back into the hot water from the holes, but in keeping with the timesaving advances, they made their patients drink the horrible stuff instead of bathing in it. The cannibal soup problem had finally been solved after two-thousand years. Everyone was happy.
About that time Acupuncture was also developed. In case you don’t know, acupuncture is the process of sticking needles in a person’s feet to cure their headache. Don’t ask me, I don’t know how this practice came into fashion. Maybe someone with a headache was blindly stumbling around when they accidentally knocked a dagger off the table into their foot. This caused them to quickly forget about their head and when the dagger was removed they noticed the headache was gone. More research is being done, and since I’m not the one doing it, I don’t know. Whatever it was, the rest is history.
Right about now, you’re asking yourself, just how I know all this stuff. C’mon admit it. You know you’re curious. Okay, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. Recently, I have been suffering with chronic pain. My doctor, (what both medicine-men and physicians are now called), recommended I try herbal therapy, and acupuncture. Now, I’m fairly lazy and the thought of digging a hole, filling it with water and herbs with strange names, then drinking the stuff just didn’t appeal to me. If that’s your thing, go for it. I don’t judge. Of course, I’m not very excited about paying someone to stick pins in me either, but it seemed the lesser of the two evils, so I made the appointment.
I have to take a moment here to talk about getting the appointment. Remember, I am in pain. In point of fact, I have been in pain for quite a while, that’s the reason this stuff was recommended to me in the first place. The thing is, those folks at the Holistic clinic are so sensitive to my welfare, they’re afraid to talk to me. So, let me tell you about the call. I dialed (actually, I pushed buttons, but that’s beside the point), and a chipper female-voiced computer took ten minutes to tell me how concerned they were about my pain. Next, they wanted to be sure I got to the right person, so they put me through a series of prompts: Press 1 for Blah… Press 2 for Blah Blah… Press 3 for Blah Blah Blah… that sort of thing. What was different from most of the annoying computers I have been subjected to, was the sensitivity of the voice. In fact, after pushing the second number, one of the third menu choices was, “If you are starting to be annoyed with this computer system, please press 9.”
I foolishly thought this might get me to a person quicker; so I pressed 9. I kid you not, the voice sounded sad on the next menu. It explained what it was trying to accomplish. It then asked me if I was now calm enough to go back to the regular menu, or if I was still upset. Well, I was a little miffed, so I pressed the appropriate number. Now the voice sounded as if it were crying and thoroughly apologized. It asked for forgiveness again, and queried if I was still troubled. In truth I was pretty angry, so I pressed the number to indicate it. The voice was very distraught now, and asked me to please not be so mean, because it was only doing its job. By this time, I really didn’t want to hear it, and pressed 9 again. The voice changed from unhappy to hysterical. Screaming that it just could not deal with my ugly personality any longer, it threatened to call its analyst, and hung up on me.
For a moment I felt shock. Then I went through the preceding events trying to figure out what I had done to upset her. That emotional outburst couldn’t have been my fault. Could it? I decided to send the clinic’s electronic phone system a dozen roses with a card stating I was sorry.
I also decided that the system and I needed a cooling off period, and consequently didn’t call back right away. What I didn’t realize at the time was, the chemicals which made me empathetic to the phone system’s needs, also created a rush of healing in me. My pain had left me. I thought about writing the clinic to tell them of this miracle cure I had discovered. I didn’t need to, though. They knew what they were doing. A week later I got a bill for pain management services. It included a note saying I could call anytime. Holistic treatment is not addictive. The thing is, after a few more calls, I’m considering dating Sheila. That’s what I call their phone computer. Don’t judge, she makes me feel good.