A Quantum Moment

I had a quantum moment in the back of an ambulance yesterday morning.

Three days ago, I had a tooth extracted. My first, and I have to say, I hope my last. This tooth was infected at the roots, and it had 3 roots, rather than the normal 2 (aren’t I special?). It was a bad, bad tooth. Funny thing is, it got bad because I let a reckless dentist put a cap on it years ago. I should have never done that.

The extraction was hard and no fun. The surgeon prescribed a powerful painkiller to help with the aftereffects. Yesterday morning, while driving to work, I suddenly developed violent tremors, a rapid heart rate, sweating, chest pain, and dizziness. 

Fast forward 10 minutes: I was in an ambulance, hooked up to an EKG, and on the way to an emergency room. I spent 6 hours in what I consider one of the worst places in the world – a hospital. I hate hospitals.

The diagnosis was not too alarming – ADR, or acute drug reaction. The narcotic painkiller had forced a sudden, violent adrenaline dump in my system. There was no heart damage, but it was painful and scary. I had had a mild seizure. Imagine that.

For many, many years, I’ve avoided almost all medications, and visited with doctors very, very infrequently. Anyone who knows me knows that I have no respect for or trust in mainstream medicine. My own primary care physician is a naturopath, and even she doesn’t see me very much at all. Any allopathic (non-naturopathic) physician is, as far as I’m concerned, to be avoided.

Medicine is a business. The objective is profit. A hospital is a corporation, like IBM or Google. When you enter a doctor’s office or emergency room, you are a customer – not a patient. Your money is a top concern. Your health doesn’t even come in a distant second. Your welfare is inconsequential.

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, approximately 110,000 people die each year from the effects of FDA-approved prescription drugs. And that is a conservative number, provided by research conducted by the John Hopkins School of Medicine. Wow. And that study is more than 12 years old now. That number today is even higher.

The most chronically ill people I know are frequenters of doctors. They walk in to the doctor’s office with one problem, and walk out with 5. They are always sick, and they are always suffering. The highest goal of a physician should be to heal and discharge a patient. And yet, the only evidence I’ve ever seen is that doctors and medicines make people very sick, and very broke. And sometimes, they make them dead.

Pharmaceuticals are a tremendous money-maker, and they injure and kill far, far more often than they heal. They rob your wallet – and your peace of mind. It’s all a bad, bad business.

If more people came to terms with these truths, and worked on their own healing through nutrition, herbs, meditation, and attitude, there would be so much more healing, and so much less suffering, in the world. We all deserve that. And Creation gave us all these wonderful herbs and methods and choices to heal ourselves. 

Why do we submit our bodies to synthetic opioids and other hugely dangerous chemicals? Why do we agree to have surgery when it isn’t lifesaving? An obese man has crippling knee pain, and has both his knees replaced at great pain and expense. If he practiced clean nutrition and lost weight, his knee pain would disappear. The surgeon won’t tell him that truth in earnest. And we all know why. How cruel is that?

My quantum moment had to do with one particular thing: for about 12 years now, I’ve been to taking one very low-dose prescription drug daily, to treat what a physician once told me is a chronic condition that merits a lifetime of this drug. The painkiller interacted with this drug yesterday morning, and the ER nurse told me that although my episode was far from fatal, it could have ended almost as badly.

Today is the first day in 12 years that I haven’t taken that low-dose drug. I have a call into the physician I see every 3 months for the monitoring of this drug; I left her a message telling her that we need to meet next week to discuss my permanent withdrawal from its use.

This drug was the one hold-out in my life. I’m holding no longer. Yesterday showed me that although I was assured that the drug I took daily is relatively benign, and completely safe, it’s most certainly not. No chemical is. No chemical has a place in a body. I sit here and wonder today why I looked away from this truth for 12 years. I was lying to myself. I hate that I was doing that.

I’m just getting over yesterday’s drama, both physically and emotionally. It was really scary. But I’ve been blessed because something amazing has come of it. I’m utterly and completely done with chemicals and doctors – come what may. 

It’s time to embrace fully the alternative end of healing. Time to break the spell. Time to trust my healthy body to balance and heal itself. And it will.

Blessings come to us in the strangest ways sometimes. I’m a very lucky and grateful girl.

ཞི་བདེ

Peace on Earth