Re: The "What if my doctor thinks I'm crazy?" question
I think there is a real truth to the idea that practicing medicine is playing God -- whether or not the doctor knows that, knows that the patient has transferred his or her connection to a higher power to the doctor, the doctor has this great responsibility and a lot of ego can get out of whack in that situation.
I see this a lot with people who are seeking antidepressant therapy -- they believe that the next med, the next combination of meds, and/or the magic "correct dose" can cure them. Not even more often than not, but always, this doesn't happen, so back to the doctor they go. Never once stopping to say, "Here I go again...maybe this is just not working!"
I am a big believer in many of the protocols at Curezone -- right now in particular
Iodine and oil pulling. I think there are real and quantifiable effects from both therapies, and I trust the collective wisdom here far more than I do the mind of the doctor at the doc-in-a-box who excuses herself to walk around the corner and type symptoms into a database to generate a treatment recommendation! But I also think that for many people, part of the cure can be unrelated to therapies but connected to a) taking charge of their health and learning about illness and healing, and b) showing up here and participating in the dialogue and offering strength and experience to the newcomer on the forum. No longer do we overwait in the doctor's office for the next ineffective medicine, but we can take part in a discernment process about what is wrong, and get support in amending it. And then pass the information to the next guy who comes along in a similar bind -- that's huge, in my book. There's something innately sickifying about the doctor visit and its tacit implication of absolute helplessness, and it's a feeling I don't ever feel when I show up here....
I do take some pleasure in my friend Emma's accomplishments. She has wanted to be a doctor since we were 8 and our basement has the burns on the ceiling from our chemistry experiments to back that up! Although for her, as I think is true for many, she went into a field where she could professionalize her need for connection to others, because that has always been tough for her (another professional group where I see this a lot is massage therapists, who can be, as a generalization, a pretty weird lot). I think being a doctor, especially as she is, to the poor and chronically ill, puts her in a position of service she wants/craves, yet puts some necessary distance between her and those she serves.
And to be fair, I can't imagine that if she ever said to her patients, "Listen, we can turn this diabetes around -- you'll just need to eat predominantly raw food, stay away from sugar, exercise, lose the cigarettes..." -- well, that's just not going to happen in Central Virginia. For some of these folks, going to the doctor is a semi-social event, and provides a sense of being cared for that is otherwise lacking in their lives, and Emma can be very cheerful and sweet (when she is not being grim and anal with her old friends...).
Although! That being said, I think now about my somewhat "progressive" doctor, who had really never heard of any of the Curezone therapies....
It is a mess worth steering clear of, the illness business...