Me and Richard Dawkins

Not sure how I missed this by Barbara Ehrenreich, but so many people have sent it on to me I guess it's clear I agree with every word, and certainly that we really need to find the cause of this plague - and there is a cause.

Meanwhile, reiki turns out to have nothing to do with hot stones, and is just a waste of an hour and £30, a la Richard Dawkins here. All I wanted was some kind of massage to ease the pain in my back - brought on, apparently, but the tumour leaning on a nerve - which is now racking up 120 mg of morphine a day, plus two paracetamol every four hours, plus another painkiller I'd never even heard of before called diclofenac. According to the doctors, mixing the painkillers is the key, because the different ones work in different ways, but - like everybody I guess - I'm uneasy about taking all these drugs, particularly as the doses keep getting higher, and so I think there must be something else that will help...Hence my search for a massage.

But Reiki is the kind of witch doctor alternative treatment Dawkins makes fun of, and I'm with him. I had to lie on my bed, while a very short-of-breath woman sat on some kind of tripod next to the bed, handed me a three-dimensional silver magen david on a stick, and said, "it's like a wand, no? do whatever you want with it - it has a crystal, hold it, or wave it or whatever" and then for a never-ending forty five minutes, this woman moved her hands incredibly slowly over my body. Over my body, not on my body - she hovered, like the scariest kind of wasp.

Actually, I did feel something; towards the end I was hot all over, like having a temperature. I don't know what caused that, and I'm sure the reiki practitioner would say it was a "healing effect" or "an effect" anyway, but I also experienced intence annoyance and irritation at the waste of time and money. Although, and maybe I don't say this enough, it's always worth lying very still in bed for an hour in the middle of the day. I just prefer doing it without hoverers.

Comments

[Kim]

Was interested to read the Barbara Ehrenreich article. I've had a bee in my bonnet about this for a long time - look at the history of medicine and you'll find any number of diseases that were once believed to be "psychological" in origin that turned out to have physical causes.

I particularly dislike the idea that a positive attitude can cure cancer - it puts the onus for getting better on the patient, and ends up blaming the patient for their failure to get better. In the end, I really do believe that physical illnesses have physical causes and are cured by physical interventions.

One thing - I was surprised by Ehrenreich's assertion that breast cancer rates plummeted when women came off HRT. Is there evidence for that?

Finally, Derren Brown's recent book has a very good passage on reiki. As you say, it's all nonsense.

[Isobel Mags Buchan]

At the risk of suggesting the obvious, have to you tried a TENS machine, as some do when in labour? When I suffered with back pain I found foot reflexology did help ease things for a while and it is certainly a nice way of relaxing for 30 minutes.

[Dina rabinovitch]

thanks Isobel, I've just gotten a tens machine so will hook it up and try it out...

[carol]

My brother found acupuncture very effective in minimising back/neck pain due to arthritis and the after effects of a motor bike accidnet. He is a builder so puts a lot of strain on his back. might be wroth a try...

[Marilyn]

Even more obvious, but is it possible for you to have a blast of radiotherapy on the tumour pressing against your nerve? Often works for bone tumours (like mine), if that's what's giving you the pain.

The first time I had Reiki at our local hospice, I was very bad-tempered and impatient, and thought it was rubbish. But I tried again, and found some relaxation -- of course, it could have just been the lying still for half an hour in a calm scented room with twinkly music playing . . .

[Dina rabinovitch]

thanks Carol, thanks Marilyn - too freaked out by needles to try acupuncture! I've had the radiotherapy already on the tumour, and it did shrink, but this is just what's left...