I had intended to call this post “Death is Now My Friend”, misremembering the title of an Inspector Morse novel “Death Is Now My Neighbour”. The inspiration arose from daily awareness of old age. Sometimes it seems like a steep slope, whereas midlife can seem like a vast plateau, in which we imagine its indefinite continuance beyond the horizon. The signs and symptoms of old age provide us with a memento mori. Easy to hate or fear the idea of death or blot it out; but now I begin to see it offers a privileged seat in the theatre of life, with a clear line of sight. Yes, you can sometimes feel a prisoner in your own body, the way it fails you. But the mind gives the body a hard time too. Perhaps this has been—still is—my main problem. This is holistic territory, this is acknowledging that we can’t expect pharmaceuticals to fix us up. Sometimes I wonder if the meds i’ve been prescribed do me more harm than good. If I think that, it messes up the placebo effect that thing which doesn’t come from the drug but the doctor’s reassurance.
And then I say, ok the drugs are harmful, but my body has great strength and powerful defences able to fight all the poisons thrown at it. I suggested this to my haematologist and added, “you know, like Rasputin”. I think he was baffled.
I have a book by “Cheiro”, who also called himself Count Louis Hamon, an astrologist and palmist
Holistic is not a word I’ve heard my doctor utter. I think body & mind work snugly together and maladies don’t just come arbitrarily out of the blue. They’re scars of our fights with heredity and circumstance. I’ve observed many times, and expressed on this blog, that the most powerful medicine is the Placebo Effect. I feel better when the Doctor tells me it’s ok, all under control, just keep taking the pills.
Yet it seems that today’s drugs mess with one’s cosy marriage of body and mind, with all its ups and downs already. These powerful concoctions may make you better, worse or simply unaffected. And so it is with poisons like nicotine and long-term high-dose alcohol. And then I consider the case of Rasputin, who’d systematically raised his tolerance to poisons knowing he was surrounded by murderous enemies. He felt ill, but carried on … I got the clips from this book:
For the whole story, see this pdf document.
For myself, I’m never sure about the cocktail of medications I take daily. Do I need them at all? I suspect their main purpose is to cancel each other’s side-effects, but I dare not mess with them, ’cos it makes the doctor and pharmacist cross with me. I need their approval and support for the Placebo effect. As the Reader’s Digest assured us, Laughter is the Best Medicine. The clip on the right is from https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/emotions/self.html, a page headed Emotions and Diseases: Self-Healing, Patents, and Placebos In my view, it’s well worth a look, though it consigns the ideas to the History of Medicine, adding that such ideas were still going strong in the Fifties and Sixties. Today’s Reader’s Digest wants to bring them back!
