Humorous Accounts Of Alternative Crohn’s Treatments That Failed
When you have Crohn's disease, you're often willing to try almost anything to feel better. In my case, at various points, I’ve certainly felt this way. Why?
One important reason is that traditional healing modalities don't always work well, particularly when we’re talking about a pervasive condition like inflammatory bowel disease. Hence, after a while, you start to experiment.
Alternative treatments that did not work for my Crohn's
I’ve covered in other blog posts alternative treatments that have been of great assistance to me. Here though, I’d like to discuss treatments that didn’t work.
Certainly, it’s amusing, or maybe even humorous, to look back at these failed efforts. Perhaps, too, this can help others learn from my mistakes.
A jar of homeostatic soil organisms
A company pedaling homeostatic soil organisms insisted they would heal my gut. At a loss for anything better to try, I bought a jar for fifty bucks. Yes, the name had soil in it, but I’d thought that was a euphemism.
Imagine my surprise when the jar was filled with black dirt. It didn't taste much better than it looked. Picture making a banquet of the dried mud on the bottom of your shoe.
My brother kept making fun of me. 50$ for dirt? Was I insane? Clearly.
Needless to say, consuming the dirt didn't exactly help my sensitive stomach, and, at times, made me want to barf.
Chinese herbs from a dimly-lit basement
One day I was ambling down Mott Street in New York City's Chinatown when I came upon a dimly-lit basement featuring a Chinese Herbalist who barely spoke a word of English. Through pantomime, I was able to explain I was having belly pain, which prompted the herbalist to give me a bag of twigs, wood chips, seeds, and stems.
The cost: 25$. I was told to boil it into a tea. Needless to say, I followed her directions precisely.
What I got though was a filthy, smoldering concoction that would have worked well in the opening scene with the three witches in Macbeth. Needless to say it in no way helped my abdominal pain, and, ever since, if I want an herbal elixir, I stick to Lipton.
I also tried reiki for stomach pain
Someone told me I might feel better by hiring a reiki therapist. Reiki is a kind of energy healing that takes place without touch.
Hands are placed near the body but never actually contact it. 50$ for thirty minutes, so I figured it couldn’t hurt. Wrong.
The woman just made me want to have a panic attack. She's waving her hands back and forth like the earth’s plate tectonics are shifting and I’m sitting there feeling absolutely zilch. By the time it was over I actually considered the merits of returning to eating dirt.
Seeking out new treatments to help with symptoms
In the course of seeking out new treatments for Crohn’s disease, we often run into healing modalities that are less than ideal. Still, our experimentation is not a waste. For at the very least, they help us eliminate what doesn’t work for us.
Then, too, over time, we become better at spotting treatment modalities that are more appropriate. Thanks for reading, and, as always, feel free to comment below.
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