Friday, August 27, 2004

*poke* *poke*

Oh the goddam glorious unending *joy* of my life.

Years of unsuccessful treatment of my health issues have convinced me that western medicine is faith-healing at worst, statistics at best; I am without faith, and just about every facet of my life is way off to one end of the bell curve or the other, so NO MOJO FOR YOU. I've become so cynical about the whole thing that I am now doing the willing-suspension-of-disbelief thing and getting acupuncture once a week... I've been pretty cynical about acupuncture, and that combined with my abhorrence of needles have kept me from trying it, but now I have nothing to lose (except my gall-bladder if the acupuncture doesn't help).

My first impression of acupuncture is just a gut-level reaction to the fact that they put needles in my skin.

Needles. In my skin.

Needles poking out, channeling chi... or whatever. The guy is like "do you feel the chi moving?" and I'm like "I feel NEEDLES sticking out of my SKIN." I don't know what moving chi is supposed to feel like... so far the predominant sensation is physical and mental irritation from being poked and prodded.

If the acupuncture works, I'm going to have to re-evaluate everything. I mean, like *everything*. I don't have any beliefs that would be challenged by successful treatment, but I do have disbelief or non-belief in just about everything. (Questions of the form "do you believe in ___" have never made sense to me... there are things I know, and things I don't know, and "believing" seems a lot like "pretending you know something you don't". There are things I believe, but I don't believe that the things I believe are true.)

My life's been just fucking loaded with surprises these last few years, like discovering that my personality is sensitively dependent on the presence of a microscopically small amount of a chemical compound that my body doesn't produce enough of. And discovering that I can't trust the messages that my body sends me, since it's a liar. After those things, finding out that you can fix a gall-bladder by poking me in the feet will be just another thang.