Mind and Body

Here is a surprise bonus! This essay is the length of an entire column!

Normally I would put it on a separate page and point at it, but I didn’t feel a pointer was sufficient. Maybe you wouldn’t click on it. If you’re reading this, you’re the kind of person that stays after a movie to see the post-credit scenes. You’ve read down past the “end of column” notice. This is your reward.

Any lingering doubts I had about the mind/body connection were obliterated this week. I have seen a miracle, if a miracle is an amazing event coming out of nowhere. Not divine intervention, just a miracle.

For weeks, I have been having severe leg pain that was idiopathic: no known cause. The pain was not debilitating, but it ticked the first box on a Kaiser doctor’s checklist: “Does this interfere with daily activities?” Yes it did; it was a pain in the neck, except it was in my leg.

The situation was bad enough that my family was suggesting expensive in-home physical therapy (because of my well-known laxity in doing PT). I was using a walking stick. I avoided long walks and curbs.

I have been seeing my trainer Barry weekly for 30 years. Because he knows what he is doing, we start each session with a chat about how things are going. I call this my talk therapy time. The length varies, usually five or 10 minutes. Last week it was 30 minutes, and we talked mostly about my leg.

I cannot tell you for the life of me exactly what we discussed. All I can say is that I made a few quite small changes in my daily routine at his suggestion. Nothing onerous. His talk had apparently seeped into my subconscious, and convinced me that my problem was solvable.

This is the miracle part. Not PT, just changing my mind and adding a few simple new routines. The pain diminished every day. Four days later, it was essentially gone. No more walking stick.

I am sure I took Barry’s advice physically, but I think his most important advice was mental. He convinced me the problem was easily solvable. That turned out to be correct. Because we changed my mind as well as my body.

I know this is trite. It will seem trite to you until it happens to you. If you can’t accomplish the mental feat, find a trusted professional who can.

One trusted professional who can is my chiropractor, Dr. Jason Wong. Good advice, good adjustments. He and his brother have helped me get over my lifetime suspicion of chiropractic. I’m a believer.

And I am also a believer in assisted stretching. There is a chain called StretchLab; I’ve been going to the Lafayette branch for a year. What they do works. I’ve enjoyed everyone who stretched me, but particularly Arissa who moved away, and Quincy was still there. Stretching reduces pain. Yes I could do most of these stretches by myself, but I don’t except I do when manipulated by someone else.

The miracle shouldn’t have surprised me. For years, I saw an MD whom I referred to as my alternative medical provider, to distinguish him from my Kaiser doctors. I spent more time talking to him than I had talking to any other doctor: 15 to 30 minutes per session. Usually, longer than the treatment itself.

He practiced something called Health Medicine: treating the whole person. Amazingly, he laid it all out to me in my first session, and I didn’t take it in until my last.

He said to me, directly, “If I had a bowl of pills on this table labeled ‘placebo’ and gave you one, you would get better.” As a gift for his retirement, I bought him a large bowl labeled “placebo.”

During the entire length of my treatment, he waved his hands and his technology and I felt better. During my last visit, he showed me the technology had all just been Dumbo’s feather, delivered elaborately because that was what I expected, as someone who is scientist-adjacent.

A room full of electronics and diagnostic equipment, whirring fans and blinking lights, convinced me I was receiving state-of-the-art medical care. Turns out I was—between my ears.

He was giving me seemingly technological treatment that was the more complicated (and expensive looking) equivalent of a placebo. And it worked. Because I desperately wanted it to. Because if it is costly looking, it must be better.

During our last session, he asked me, “Why do you think this works?” I didn’t have the answer then but I do now.

Too late for you; he retired. But I needed to close this discussion by describing my course of therapy with him. You should be so lucky. As I put it in my Yelp review, “The world needs fewer doctors with “A”s in biology and more with “A”s in empathy.