[DeuceKicker]

cliff notes at bottom

This sounds very much like the homeopathy hoodoo my ex-girlfriend is into. She would extend her arm out in front of her while holding a vial of the offending substance, and the witchdoctor would try to push her arm down (while applying a scientifically measured equal amount of pressure for each trial). If she could push it down she needed to be treated for it, which involved holding it in her hand while having a vibrating back massager run up and down her back a few times to direct the chi in some beneficial way. After that, she couldn't come in direct contact with it for 24 hours.

She got into it when a friend told her that she had all kinds of food allergies but was cured completely. My ex was allergic to citrus. Every time she drank orange juice it made her lips tingle and puff up slightly. After being 'treated', she claimed to no longer have any tingling. She certainly did start drinking a lot more orange juice after that, which left less for me and was probably a major contributing factor in our break-up.

I was initially skeptical, but was trying to be open-minded. What did it for me was when she took our daughter for a treatment. Our daughter was maybe one at the time, so having her hold a vial of something and stick her arm out straight wasn't going to happen. What they did was put the vial in her sock and have her sit on her mother's lap, then the mother did the arm thingie by proxy, on the theory that the chi from the baby would go through the mother (who was supposed to somehow be a blank chi-slate) and the doctor could tell the baby's reaction by the mother's reaction. After I gave my consend for one visit for baby, Mommy wanted me to come along, I think to try to convince me to try it for some things, but it had the opposite effect. Even my ex, who I guess didn't know exactly what they were going to do with baby, said it seemed pretty far-fetched.

The ex has a skin condition resulting from her pregnancy, and she's been going to this hoodoo doctor for three years now, with no improvement. The doctor has her convinced that it's because she has to be cured for a host of 'foundation' things, which almost everybody has some allergy to, before they can move on to the specific thing causing her skin condition. And of course, if she gets treated for something, when she goes back, the doctor is just as likely as not to tell her that she has to be re-treated because she didn't avoid contact with it for 24 hours or it didn't take for some other reason.

Another problem was that she didn't know beforehand what she was going to be treated for. The doctor had a big case full of vials of all kinds of minerals, compounds, etc... and would test half a dozen at a time and decide which to treat her for. So she would come home and I'd hand her the remote saying I was going to take the baby for a walk or whatever. The ex would take the remote from me then scream, "Oh no! I can't touch the remote, I'm being treated for plastics today! How could you be so stupid!" In hindsight, this kind of nonsense was probably more of a contributing factor to the break-up than the orange juice.

Here's probably my favorite story. She got mad at me for some minor thing I did very early in our relationship, and has always held it against me. So one day she announces to me that she's over it once and for all. It turned out that she went to a different hoodoo doc who treated her for the "mental pain" of her memory. She lay on the table and had to concentrate hard on what she was pissed about while he did a Captain Tom with the vibrating back massager (which is supposedly a very scientific, finely tuned chi mover-arounder, but just looks like something you'd pick up at Sharper Image). A number of months later, she brought it up during an argument. I said, "I thought you said you were over that." She threw some orange juice at me. This was a good thing, because I found out that my eyeballs are allergic to citrus, so I went in that weekend for a treatment. The next time someone throws citrus juice in my face I'll be immune.

Conclusion: I think a lot of it is really hoaky, and some of it just doesn't even begin to pass a common-sense test. I can't say for certain that there isn't an energy flowing through our bodies that modern scientific equipment can't detect (but that some Chinese dude 3000 years ago, who didn't know enough to wash his hands after handling pig feces, somehow detected and was able to map as it coursed through the body). But my suspicion is that many of the cures we hear about are the Placebo Effect.

On the other hand, if your mind gets tricked into thinking you've been cured, and it stops the symptoms, does it really matter?

Cliff Notes: Grow up. If you need cliff notes on a message board you're not the kind of person I'm interested in conversing with, anyway.