I've
always trusted my instincts, but I had no idea how much grief they have
saved me, quietly guiding me behind the scenes in all my
decision-making, until this disease hit me. It is quite possible that
instincts that have caused me to do, and not to do, some things, even though consciously I was motivated to do otherwise, could actually have saved my life.
To
explain this, here's a bit of background on some of the things I've
done, and not done, more or less instinctively without really
understanding why, in the last few months and years:
- Early
in 2003 I started this blog, just for a lark. Quickly it became a
lifeline, a sounding board for my ideas about the world and about life,
and a connection to hundreds of disgruntled, underutilized and
extraordinary people, who made me realize I had been living in a
self-constructed intellectual ghetto.
- At the end of 2003,
unhappy, overwrought, and in constant conflict with corporate
management, I decided to walk away from my employer of 27 years. At the
time I was very well paid, and was admired and getting along well with
everyone except senior management, which was making some absolutely execrable decisions.
- In
2004 through early this year, I have toyed with at least a dozen
potential ways of making a living, and, to the great consternation of
those people who gave me wonderful leads, encouragement and references,
backed away from all of them.
- In 2005 I cut myself some slack,
thanks to insight from readers and readings and new online friends, but
most especially after reading Straw Dogs. In two years my blog title had gone from ironic to deadly serious to self-parody.
- In
2005 I began to pursue the 'sweet spot' at the intersection of my Gift
(what I am uniquely good at), my Passion (what I love doing) and my
Purpose (what is needed that I am here to provide). I have often come
close to accepting two out of three, only to dig in and refuse to
compromise, and start the search again. What's more remarkable is that
my Passion has been shifting dramatically and inexplicably over the
last year -- to passions that are much less ambitious and stressful,
more peaceful, more local and more personal. My instincts are driving
this, and my brain has, as always, been slow to catch on.
- This
year, after some stressful bad news in March, I changed my diet for the
better, and then began an exercise program. I also got new office
furniture to encourage better posture -- the chronic back problems I've
suffered the last three years have all originated in the neck and
shoulders (I also started looking into yoga, and seriously tried to
take up meditation). Six weeks after starting the exercise program I
felt and looked better than I have in thirty years. Then, nearly a
month ago, I got leveled by the symptoms that have now been confirmed
as ulcerative colitis.
Looking back at all these 'instinctive' changes1,
all of which had people doubting my sanity, I realize that my body was
telling me I had to start taking much better care of it, and of myself,
and that that was what drove all six changes. When I started the blog I
knew something was very wrong, but wasn't sure what it was -- just that
I needed to figure it out and take action, soon. Leaving my conflicted
job was a necessary and liberating step, but I knew myself well -- I
needed to work quickly to find something else that was more meaningful
and less stressful, since I could not afford to retire early. All the
leads I have balked at since were exciting, potentially life-changing, important
opportunities -- all of which carried with them enormous stress, which
I have always handled badly. At the time I thought I lacked courage,
but now I realize I wasn't equipped for the journey, my constitution
wasn't up to it, and my body was telling me so every way it could. What
appeared to be procrastination, or opportunity squandered, was in fact
the instinct of self-survival doing my 'thinking' for me.
Giving
myself a break, in 2005, becoming much more humble and focused about
what I hoped and planned to do to make the world a better place, may
have kept me from nervous collapse. At the same time I realized I could
not allow myself to get back into jobs that were too taxing (area 4 on
the chart above), unfulfilling (area 5 on the chart above), or
unappreciated (area 2 on the chart above). After two years of area 2
consulting work, however, it was my instincts, not my supposedly smart
mind, that told me that this wasn't working out -- that it wasn't my
lack of drive and perseverance, but simply the fact that what I had to
offer was way too far ahead of the market to be recognized and valued
properly, and that consulting, for me, would inevitably be 10 parts
anxiety and frustration for each part satisfaction.
The bad
news earlier this year caused me a lot of stress at a time I was
already coping with all the stress I could handle (yes, even some
things I haven't told you about, dear readers!) But I didn't consciously
give up soft drinks, caffeine and (most) alcohol. My instincts were at
work, preparing to enable me to mitigate the debilitation that this
stress was already starting to wreak on my system, by recruiting my
diet in the healing process before the disease had even hit. Likewise
the exercise, which I just suddenly 'felt like' doing, and which, by
strengthening my body in the two months before the colitis hit full
force, also allowed me to cope much better with the last agonizing
month.
So my instincts were right all along, and they have saved
me big time. Now it's time for 'me' (my brain, anyway) to start doing
its share of the healing work. This starts with the realization that
the body (especially the digestive system) is a massively complex
system -- far beyond the ability of the conscious mind to 'manage' or
even fully understand. While most doctors at least have the integrity
to admit they haven't the foggiest notion what causes ulcerative
colitis (or any of the other thousands
of auto-immune deficiency and hyperactivity diseases that are one of
the top health scourges of our time), coming up with some hypotheses
about possible contributing and catalyzing causes (causes plural -- there are no 'single' causes in complex2 systems) is a necessary first step to identifying preventative and therapeutic treatments (treatments plural
-- same reason). Who knows, while the doctors are busy doing what they
must, contending with patients' symptoms by using simplistic
trial-and-error treatments, we could ultimately put them out of
business by making their remedial work unnecessary -- finding
preventions for everything from digestive illnesses to respiratory
illnesses to allergies to AIDS to the rash of inadequately diagnosed
immune-system disorders to, perhaps, even the 'psychological' disorders
that are plaguing us all in this time of endless coping and forced
adaptation and struggle.
My hypotheses, which are initially instinctive to me, will disappoint a lot of people. I don't think it's likely that the causes
of these diseases are principally genetic (though a predisposition to
contracting them may be -- that's not the same thing). I also don't
think it's likely that the causes of these diseases are bacterial,
viral, parasitic, or prionic in origin (though exposure to such agents
could catalyze onset of the diseases). I believe the causes are likely
to be environmental, the
chemical cocktail of artificial toxins we eat, drink, wash, breathe,
brush up against and otherwise take into our bodies every second of
every day. Those who are skeptical that the same poisons that are
destroying the soil, the water, the atmosphere and global ecosystems
everywhere are also destroying our bodies' microspheres, should review
the case against tobacco.
It is quite likely that even when
these hypotheses of environmental cause of most remaining illness and
disease have been compellingly argued, we will not be able to do much
to prevent or 'cure' our bodies of what we have been doing to them.
We're too late to save our planet from the scourges of global warming.
And we'll likely be too late to save our bodies from the painful,
wasting deaths that the same man-made toxins are quietly wreaking on
them.
But at least we'll have tried, and at least we will know.
We will know that the executives of ExxonMobil and Monsanto and Koch
Industries and Phillip Morris and the rest of the world's megapolluters
will ultimately be remembered in history as the most monstrous, willful
and indifferent mass murderers of this civilization they have so
effectively and greedily exploited. Just as Big Tobacco, with the
armies of expensive lawyers and the politicians in its back pockets,
will never pay for its crimes against humanity, and just as ExxonMobil
will for the same reason never pay for the Exxon Valdez or any of its
other environmental holocausts, we are going to have to settle for knowing, not retribution, compensation or even remediation from the corporate monsters killing us all.
So,
back to what I know, what I don't know and what I imaginatively or
instinctively hypothesize about ulcerative colitis, starting with three
hypotheses:
- Hypothesis 1: Immune Disease is Caused in Part by 'Modern' Malnutrition:
By 'malnutrition' I don't of course mean a shortage of consumed
calories. And (thanks in my case at least to my wife's cooking), I
don't mean lack of variety or balance in cuisine either, though
unbalanced eating may be part of the problem for some, and it was a
major problem for me in my 'single' years. No, what I'm referring to in
this hypothesis is something much subtler and more ubiquitous: the lack
of variety of natural micronutrients and non-nutritional microorganisms
in what we eat, drink, breathe and otherwise continuously take into our
bodies.
This is the internal analogue of the way we use and treat the land, the external
space under our 'civilized' care. In gatherer-hunter societies we
allowed biodiversity to proliferate, we ate a staggering variety of
different foods, and we at them with everything that came with them --
all the bacteria, micro-organisms, parasites and 'dirt' attached to
them. As a result, our bodies evolved to cope with this astonishing
array of nutritional choices and 'unfriendly' substances, in minute
amounts, learning to use exactly what it needed, urge the body to crave
more of those needed things, and to neutralize what hurt it. Before we
messed with the program, our bodies became exceedingly good, over a few
million years of practice, at doing this, without the need for
antibiotics or medical 'experts'. And while few early humans lived to
old age, this is because they were eaten young, in the interest of the
greater Earth organism, not because they were sickly -- anthropologists
increasingly agree that prehistoric humans lived a much healthier, more disease-free, and usually longer, life than most civilized humans ever have.
The
digestive system is the very definition of complexity: It contains more
nerve cells than the nervous system, so many different enzymes and
sub-processes that most of them have not been (and may never be) mapped
(the genome is a snap by comparison), the enteric nervous system,
chemically very similar in makeup and function to the one managed by
our brain, and billions of
highly specialized organisms, each evolved for some essential purpose
needed to sustain human health. But today, food processing, the
elimination of over 90% of varieties of food we have eaten for
millennia (in the interest of agricultural efficiency) and the soaking
of our foods and drinking water in chemicals deliberately designed to
impoverish the richness and diversity of organisms we consume, means
that this incredibly intricate and finely-honed system is largely
unused, standing around 'unemployed' looking for something appropriate
and useful to do. If you're unemployed long enough you lose your craft,
and when essential micronutrients or undesirable microorganisms finally
come along now they can surprise our bodies, which may no longer be
able to know, from practice, how to handle them properly. Mistakes
occur and are compounded and crises are created as a result. The system
staggers and breaks down from disuse caused by the malnutrition -- the
lack of practice -- we give it. Exactly in the same way the land we
plow into monoculture and soak with artificial fertilizers breaks down,
unable to restore itself, starved of natural nutrients, impoverished,
blows away in the wind and runs off in the rain, unable to support life
at all. - Hypothesis 2: Immune Disease is Caused in Part by Antibiotic Toxins:
With the natural systems impoverished, malnourished, and bereft of the
practice and learning needed to do their job, civilized humans decided
they needed a backup system. Just as they did to the land with
agriculture, the chemicals of choice for doctors to treat our internal
ecosystem were the most potent poisons we could find: the word
antibiotic means 'life-killing'. But we thought we understood complex
systems, so the same twisted thinking that came up with the oxymoron
'antibiotic therapy' soon added 'chemotherapy' and 'radiation therapy'
to the lexicon. The same simplistic, militaristic thinking that
prevailed in agriculture and in war is now employed in the war on all
life in the human body, as if the body were some simple mechanical
system whose billions of essential living parts were superfluous and
dangerous. What malnutrition didn't mess up, the man-made poisons in
our water, food, soil, air, pills, and deliberately sprayed on our
gardens, our lawns, and on every surface of our homes have.
When
I was in my teens, before the discovery of retinoin, the drug of choice
for runaway acne (which I suffered from) was tetracycline, a potent
antibiotic that I consumed, on doctor's orders, several times daily for
a decade. The drug slowly cleared my acne but wreaked havoc on my
digestive system, causing chronic diarrhea and frequent digestive
system upsets. I was warned not to take it with milk products or
antacids which would lessen its effect. There is absolutely no doubt in
my mind that that ten years of self-poisoning has contributed to my
current condition.
- Hypothesis 3: Immune Disease is Caused in Part by Musculo-Skeletal Distress: From
my early teen years, my posture has been poor. Lousy school furniture,
gradual reduction of exercise as coaches focused their attention on
'star' athletes, loss of social self-confidence leading to a
semi-permanent slouch, staring away from a world I found bewildering,
cruel and unbearable. One girl friend, when I was in my twenties, said
I stood as if I were 'hollowed out'. For decades my body adapted to
this strange stance, complaining by means of frequent neck and shoulder
aches, and an inability to stand for more than a half hour without
developing a sore back and having to crouch on my haunches to relieve
it. Then recently, as described above, this awkwardness started to
create debilitating spinal distress, to the point that at times I
couldn't lie down, couldn't sit, couldn't stand. Three times I went for
physiotherapy. Once I was hospitalized, convinced it was a heart
attack. My physio applied a technique analogous to traction treatment,
extending my spine. It was briefly exhilarating, but caused bizarre
immediate after-effects -- abdominal aches, indigestion, and terrible
skin breakouts. I stopped going. And then, when I started exercising, I
read about the importance of running posture -- an erect, hips and
chest forward posture rather than a hollowed-out, curved running
posture. I tried it, and it worked, but it was excruciating -- the same
symptoms as the traction, but worse. I relapsed into a curved running
posture and my performance plummeted. That was just before the
ulcerative colitis showed its full fury. My final note before
abandoning the exercise program reads "focus more on running posture
and monitor reactions carefully -- something wrong here".
Those
are my first three hypotheses. There will probably be more. Since this
is a complex system problem, I will never be able to prove or disprove
them, but, through careful self-experimentation, I can develop persuasive evidence that, at least in my case, they appear to be valid (or invalid). I will end up with a credible theory of the causes of my disease, and, from there, I can develop an appropriate treatment program that will deal with the causes, not the symptoms.
This
will be a lifelong program. We can never hope to understand let alone
undo all the damage we (civilized humans) have done and are still doing
to our bodies, but we can learn and remediate and improve, one tiny bit
at a time. My dear readers have provided me with over 100 possible
elements to a treatment program, and I will work through them
painstakingly. The ones at the top of the list are holistic and modest
in their claims, embracing complexity. Those at the bottom of the list
are the 'miracle' cures, drugs, herbs, magical 'expert' spiritual
healing and other techniques that promise, all by themselves, to solve
the problem, and criticize all 'competing' therapies. The pushers of
such miracles don't get complexity any more than doctors, and I am
highly suspicious of them (especially when the pages are full of price
lists, or the information is 'secret' and only available by buying the
book or the magic ingredients).
Ultimately I believe this is
the only way out of the trial-and-error one-size-fits-all anti-life
warfare of modern medicine, the learned helplessness that has
incapacitated us from taking charge of and responsibility for our own
health and well-being, and the relentless poisoning of our ecosystems,
macro and micro, by greedy, indifferent corporations hiding behind the
inherent complexity of ecosystems that will never, to the satisfaction
of our carefully-rigged laws, be able to bring them legally to account.
The shock and awe drug (prednisone) I have been persuaded3
to take is just beginning to work, I think. The pain has, for most of
the day, subsided from 5-7 levels to 3-5 levels and the insomnia
relents for a precious 3-5 hours per day, so I feel at least sane again.
Forward, ho, small steps at first.
Notes:
1.
My instincts have also had me immersed daily in my hot tub, at a
temperature higher than doctors advise, for quite a few years now. It
seems to alleviate extreme itching (which seems to be weather-related),
neck and shoulder stress, anxiety, and also provokes my imagination.
And more recently I've developed a craving for varied fresh fruit and
ice whipped up in a blender, no additional ingredients. I need to fold
these into the theory and hypotheses I'm developing, but I'm not yet
entirely sure how these strange instincts 'fit'.
2. Doctors, lawyers, politicians, corporations all hate complexity. As I explained in an earlier article,
this hatred is an occupational hazard for most adults -- the political,
social, educational, technological, communication and economic systems
in which we are forced to work, and which use simplistic, bizarre and
absurd mechanisms to assess our 'performance' within them, cannot
accommodate or even appreciate complexity, which must by necessity be
(over-)simplified, both to render most of what we are forced to do in
the workforce un-ridiculous and bearable, and to enable us to persuade
a dumbed-down public that it is actually valuable and helpful and hence
deserves to be 'paid' for.
3. During the delirium of pain and
sleeplessness just before I started taking the drug, it suddenly came
to me that Bush and the war-mongers of the world, those who believe
violence is an answer to anything, behave very much the way an
out-of-whack immune system behaves -- attack everyone, good and bad,
take no prisoners, brook no dissent, assume we're all inherently bad
and need to be bullied into obedience to the 'one true way' by sheer
force. Wouldn't it be wonderful, I thought, if there was a prednisone
the world could 'take' to suppress and rid itself of Bush and the
simplistic 'over-active antibiotic' thinkers like him? At that point I
realized that if my damaged immune system is running amok like the
world's violence-lovers are, maybe I do
need some terrible drug to shut it down, just for awhile, until some
sanity in my tiny internal world prevails again. How's that for twisted
thinking? |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
