What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us

When I first consulted a gastroenterologist, she asked me what was wrong. When I said that I had bloating, she literally threw up her hands and exclaimed, “Everybody has it!” Half an hour later, she prescribed medicines that blocked stomach acid production and relieved the symptoms of reflux. I took them. They offered relief but did nothing to solve my problem, and made it more difficult to solve. It took me years to get off the pills.

When I consulted Dr. Cao, a doctor of oriental medicine who taught in Beijing for thirty years, he said, “I don’t know what you have. But we will try to help you.” The response was acupuncture and herbs, which moved my autonomic nervous system closer to normalcy. When I told my doctor about it at the time, she said, “People get better by themselves.” What she meant was that anything unsupported by standard evidence could be disregarded. She wasn’t wrong, and she wasn’t right. The juju of medical knowledge does not heal people; life heals people, especially life in the form of human beings capable of loving intuition and keen observation.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not advising ignorance, only that we recognize and accept the limits to our understanding, and so free ourselves to do what we can with what we do know. For example, we know that moderns broke ties with nature and opted for controlling it. We have made radical changes that are yielding massive unintended consequences, and we can’t find our way ahead. Our destructive reasoning processes obscure the big picture; our industrialized, chemical farming practices sterilize, poison, and deplete the soil; competitive, sedentary consumerism fattens us as if for the kill.

When we’ve had enough, and we see a way forward, we can change. In searching for cure, I will be eating hypoallergenic, organically produced foods. I will also be looking for additional advice and help from my current doctor. When I first consulted Dr. Vega several months ago, he said, “I think we can help you.” So far, experience has proven him right. When the current inflammation subsides, and my gut will tolerate a wider range of foods, I will turn my attention to the microbiome, and try to find ways to enhance it.