This is the out-take from Wednesday's post, during the writing of which I thought that people wouldn't want to read a long family story about just one of ten books that had influenced my life...
Doctors no longer call the disabling kind of arthritis "arthritis of the spine." They now know that several different disease conditions can produce pain in the bones and joints, and most of them can affect the spine. Arthritis is a general term for inflammation in the joints. Of over a hundred known diseases that can have arthritis as a symptom, only a few, like gout, a food intolerance condition usually involving pain in one toe, or ankylosing spondylitis, which is believed to be an autoimmune disorder usually producing pain in a young man's lower back, seem especially linked to a specific part of the body. Most can cause pain almost anywhere.
The kind of arthritis that often leaves people in wheelchairs is rheumatoid arthritis. While the pain of rheumatoid arthritis has triggers patients can avoid, it is a genetic disease. Most people never need to worry about getting the disease.
In the late 1960s, however, a lot of people suddenly developed intense, painful arthritis, usually affecting one joint at a time, but affecting several joints in quick succession.
One of them was my mother, a full-time professional Beauty in her early thirties. The fashion for a short, top-heavy body shape had passed, but on Mother it still looked very effective. She was often compared to Elizabeth Taylor, sometimes favorably, and to Indira Gandhi. Women, young and old, paid her to style their hair, nails, wardrobe...makeup, if any. Mother usually encouraged them to let their skin breathe and keep their natural hair color, but if an actress really wanted to play a blonde character Mother could make her look credible as a blonde. She spent a lot of time washing the hair of old women who'd been led to believe that they needed to have someone else wash and dry their hair, which she didn't mind doing. She was not popular in Hollywood; before she even went to California, in Miami she'd rather dramatically failed to hit it off with Tallulah Bankhead, and apparently other actors didn't want to be seen with people who didn't hit it off with Bankhead. (Exactly what Bankhead had said, Mother never would repeat. "Stinking drunk and foul-mouthed," she always said.) Mother did, however, "style" starlets for auditions, and beauty contestants for pageants.
("Did you know any movie stars?" people used to ask. We weren't part of those social circles. Mother knew enough about the movie industry to warn aspiring actresses that they might be better off staying out of it. She had grown up around enough rich people that she didn't drop names or carry on like a fangirl. There were actors she liked, a minority, and actors she didn't like. She didn't talk about exactly how well she knew the Rogers or the Reagans, although she liked them. When we lived in California I remember being taken out to a parade and told, "There's Roy Rogers, and there's Michael Landon! Wave high!" After we'd left I remember Mother bringing home books from the library, "Do you remember Dale Evans Rogers? Well, she wrote a book!" But waving high to actors whom Mother knew and liked, or whose wives she knew and liked, was as far as her admiration for anyone in Hollywood went...until it came to voting for Ronald Reagan. She liked Governor Reagan in California and liked President Reagan later. I don't know that she ever actually did so much as a haircut for Dale Evans or Jane Wyman. If movie stars were among Mother's friends, they weren't close friends.)
Mother's being a Beauty had kept the family in style even after I was born; but she was starting to want to do more for her patients than feeding their vanity about their looks...even before the acute pain of what was probably viral arthritis, a complication from flu, drove her to consult a doctor. Even before the doctor checked this and that and solemnly pronounced that Mother had "arthritis of the spine" and would be wheelchair-bound in another five years.
"There must be something I can do," Mother fretted.
"There is," Dad said. They had bought a farmhouse outside the town of Floyd, Virginia. They hadn't made much money on that year's apple crop and no bank was willing to lend them any. "We can sell this place, move back to California, and find a better doctor."
Mother didn't want to sell the place.
She was White, with no family tradition of doing vision quests; some human instincts are universal. She went up through the woods to pray at the top of a mountain. She left me playing with moss and pebbles and prayed until, she said, she seemed to see a light and hear a voice; but not the kind of light I could have seen, too, or the kind of voice I could have heard. The voice told her to go to Folsom, California, where she and Dad knew some people who had fled the toxic pollution in Los Angeles when they did. Rent a house from A, lease a shop from B, and there she would meet a man who would give her a book that would tell her what she needed to know about curing her arthritis.
So they went to Folsom. All systems go. The house was for rent. The shop was for lease. Also leasing space in the same building was an old dentist they had visited in LA and his junior partner. The junior partner and his wife became family friends for life. Among the literature in their waiting room was that book, Victory over Arthritis.
Although Dr. Alsaker's book, written in 1966, discussed arthritis in terms that seem outdated now, and although his advice has disappointed some people, it's also worked for many. Most kinds of arthritis are still understood to be basically autoimmune disorders. Most are relieved, though not all are cured, by basic immune system support practices: Eat a diet rich in Vitamin C, fibre, and water--as much of it raw fruit and vegetables as possible. Grains should be "whole," preferably cooked whole or just crushed, like oatmeal, rather than refined into flour. Avoid commercial meat and milk, which are likely to be full of antibiotics, which may be triggering the autoimmune disorder. Avoid refined carbohydrates. Avoid stimulants like coffee and tea, much more drugs like alcohol and tobacco. Get plenty of exercise in the morning. Go to bed early at night. Make time for prayer and meditation. Test for allergies to plants in the nightshade family; many people with arthritis are sensitive to biochemicals found in potatoes, tomatoes, rhubarb, etc.
This treatment plan won't get rid of rheumatoid arthritis though it is likely to extend remissions and reduce flares of the disease. It will speed the passing of viral arthritis, which usually subsides in a year or two, anyway, but an immunity-boosting diet may flush viral arthritis out of the body in a month or two. It will help "rheumatism," or osteo-arthritis, the most common of the arthritis conditions--to some extent. It will help most arthritis conditions, to some extent, but not all. Gout, for instance, is an allergy to specific foods, many of which are "natural" and don't have to be avoided by those seeking victory over other kinds of arthritis.
Ankylosing spondylitis, which has the best claim to be called "arthritis of the spine," is a whole different topic. Mother didn't have it. Nobody we knew ever had it. Norman Cousins famously did have it, and his experiments with treating his pain by laughing out loud led to the discovery of the role of the diaphragm muscle in stimulating the body to produce and release pain-fighting endorphins. Actually the Lamaze approach to childbirth had discovered this biochemical phenomenon first, and Mother had only been a Lamaze practitioner and La Leche Leader for twenty-five years...but the male doctors in the AMA weren't very good at listening to women back then.
There has been a lot of insensitivity and in-fighting among arthritis patients and their doctors, over the years, based on misunderstandings of what an immune-boosting diet can be expected to do. "It's cruel to tell people that a diet will cure arthritis when it won't cure the kind they have." "It's cruel to sell people painkillers when a three-month diet might cure their arthritis." And so on. Stupidity is a choice and I say it's stupid to bicker about this. For many people, even today, Victory over Arthritis is still "a real good book," the only treatment they need. For some, unfortunately, it's not. We know a great deal more about how the Alsaker treatment cures some patients and disappoints others than we knew in 1970.
My mother was one of the people for whom Victory over Arthritis was the only treatment she needed to make her arthritis go away. For some years she lived in fear of its coming back, dreaded cold or wet days and warned her children not to pull or squeeze her hands...but it really was gone for good. She never had arthritis again. She lost height and developed a stooped posture in her sixties, but in her eighties she was still walking a few brisk miles before breakfast every day. And playing the piano, well enough to accompany Sunday School groups. Her handwriting changed after her arm was broken in an accident, but she hand-wrote the addresses on letters she wrote in her eighties, too--and hand-typed the letters.
Well, she had chosen good healthy long-lived ancestors. Then again, so had most of the patients for whom she performed "miracles." From 1970 on Mother was always in demand as a home nurse and life coach for people who'd been told they had to live with chronic diseases. She never was shy about sharing the science that told her how many of those people could recover their health. Mother had studied massage, briefly, in her cosmetology course in trade school in 1950; she never practiced massage, though she taught me the rudiments. She studied hydrotherapy, too, with the Seventh-Day Adventists in the 1990s. Mostly her "miracles" were performed by Boring Old Diet And Exercise.
For Mother Victory over Arthritis was not only a "good book" but a religious experience...and a career.
For me it was just one of a multitude of books Mother studied in her career. She read everything Rodale Press had on the market in the early 1970s and became one of their "first readers," to whom they lent books for previews, by 1980. Most of their books were on the dry side, but accessible, to a bright primary school child and I was encouraged to peruse books like Diet for a Small Planet, Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit, Back to Eden, The Wit & Wisdom of J.I. Rodale, Confessions of a Sneaky Organic Cook, and each new issue of Prevention, Organic Gardening & Farming, and The Mother Earth News, after school. So were the siblings, as they learned to read.
Mother's career didn't really take off in the 1970s because she was having so much thyroid trouble, but even then her children became accustomed to Mother spending a day or a weekend with a patient, with a patient spending a few weeks or months in our home, with people calling for help. As kids we estimated the levels of various nutrients in our own diets. We were encouraged to blame any Christmas candy we'd eaten if we had flu in December or January. Back home, people had their opinions of our being total California Granola "health food nuts," but if they needed a home nurse, you know...who' you gonna call?
She was still a celiac, a wounded healer, and when I went to that Seventh-Day Adventist college it was certainly noticeable that I was more "health-conscious" and less healthy than a typical Adventist. But I did have advantages in fighting my way through "chronic" mononucleosis, throwing off viral arthritis in a few weeks when I developed it in 1989, and going gluten-free in the early 1990s. I had learned a lot about home nursing, and cooking, and the relevance of cooking to health care, from Mother.
To Mother and me the differences in the way we did health care, for ourselves first and others second, were always overwhelmingly obvious. Health care was Mother's vocation; for me it's an odd job. I got only half of my genes from Mother, so she and I had somewhat different tendencies and sensitivities, and were quicker to notice different things in patients. I'm more comfortable simply stretching and massaging a muscle, to treat pain, rather than moving into someone's home and taking over person's kitchen the way Mother did. I recognized that meat-based diets were seeming to do more good than vegan diets, by the turn of the century; Mother clung to her faith in vegan diets. Both of us came to understand that the main reason why temporary vegan diets weren't having the fantastic effect they used to have, in this century, was glyphosate; Mother was one of those who wanted to believe that vegetables contained enough nutrients to offset the damage glyphosate did, right up until she developed liver cancer. I love vegetables, from spinach to strawberries, but my body's not built to let me cling to vegetables if they've been sprayed with toxic chemicals. Will my going carnivore to avoid celiac sprue save me from liver cancer? Remains to be seen.
To some I've been told I seem like a clone, or at least an heir, to Mother. I do think of health and disease along the same lines she did. I read the same books. And those books did give me insight into doing peer counselling, in college, that steered me toward a psychology major; they did help me diagnose and cure myself.
They gave me the peculiar pleasure, something a few people like Rand Paul and Robert Rodale have understood, of being able to visit my mother not just to gossip about The Nephews but to have collegial discussions about health care news, views, and strategies. Young people don't always want to inherit their parents' jobs, one reason why people came to America used to be to have a chance to choose their own professions, but becoming your parent's colleague does add a special dimension to family love. I found facts Mother was able to use to help her patients, and she found facts I was able to use to help mine.
Like Mother, I've had to find my own answers to health questions our doctors couldn't answer, and it's made me a bit of a wounded healer. I've been credited with curing disabilities, saving lives, and saving marriages. If those people hadn't called me they would probably have found the same science-based answers to their concerns somewhere else, but I did help them. I claim no mystical powers but some of it has been a spiritual experience.
Was a controversial medical bestseller of 1966 really where it starts? Mother's life experience before her healing vision had led up to her vision too, of course, but she always did cite the pivotal idea having been spoken, by her inner "voice," as "You will meet a man who will give you a book..."
The dentists didn't write to my parents after we left Folsom, but the junior partner, his wife, and their children met us again in the 1980s. The older dentist had already died. The younger one had been organizing a Seventh-Day Adventist community in Mississippi and was starting to look for another place that had no Adventist church in which to organize another community. This time they did write, and remained pen friends for years.
We never know how much good a casual, coincidental gesture of good will may do. "Arthritis?" the dentist said. "There's been a lot of talk about this book...you can keep it if you need it..."
He was a Christian. Mother was a Christian. The gift of that secondhand book, which Mother soon passed on to another arthritis patient, was a religious experience.
