27 March 2007

I spent an hour or so recently talking to a friend, ‘X’, who is on the waiting list for a hip replacement, or maybe two, and is looking around for alternatives. It was X’s situation which prompted me to write up the story of my diet cure. I expected him to have read my story, and to have ‘got’ what I was saying there, about how a ‘cure’ doesn’t come from outside but involves a whole life change. My hope was that X would have got what he needed from my story, and we would talk about his story, and about what kind of a whole life change he needed. But he hadn’t read my piece, or only a part of it, and hadn’t ‘got’ it at all. So I found we were talking a different language, and I ended up being too emphatic, talking to much, too adamantly, interrupting him. Why the passion? Because it was not X whom I wanted to save from this drastic and horrible procedure, at least not only him, but everyone. X’s situation is shocking because he is still in his prime, too young for an operation usually performed on ‘the elderly’. X mentioned his mother being ‘in her seventies’, and hip replacement would be fine for her. No, it wouldn’t, in my view. No one needs to have that done to them, to be treated like a machine that’s gone wrong.

I say X is a friend, but he’s not at all a close friend, just a fellow activist in the peace movement. X has lots of friends, and lots of people besides me shocked and wanting to help. And there’s loads of ‘alternative’ help available, and varieties of hip surgery too. For me, as I told X, it was easy, because my options were limited: stay on the drugs and stay dependent on them to ease my symptoms, or go for whole life change helped by a focus on this diet. This is why X did not ‘get’ what I was on about. When I told him that my symptoms vanished in a couple of weeks, he said, ‘Ah! so I can try this diet and see if my arthritis is the kind that responds to diet.’ No! that’s not it. He then went on to tell me about a theory that one can start by eliminating all the potentially aggravating foodstuffs, see if the symptoms lessen, then re-introduce the foodstuffs one at a time. But, I said, this is not about arthritis being to do with food allergies.

And so it went on, with X describing the shopwindowful of alternatives, and he will sample them, investigate them, make a decision on what’s best for his condition – which could be genetic, he thinks. No, no! NO! I wanted to shout. And it’s not about the Dong diet being the best of the various diet cures available. X was keen to know if there is an explanation of how this diet ‘works’, which I could supply, although, significantly, the explanation puts the emphasis on what the diet tells you to avoid, rather than on those foods which are essential to the remedy, to helping your body be well, so ‘how it works’ gets back to the allergy idea. But again, that’s not the point. And it’s not about me being ‘right’, and wanting to get him to believe me. [Except that it is, in a way. X had made a polite enquiry about my scholarly pursuits, and I’d told him they are an escape. When I can’t get the world to change, to stop being crazy and destructive, I retreat to my ivory tower, and do research into obscure writers. This hip surgery thing is just one instance, one tiny instance, of people being treated like commodities and consumers of commodities, making us all parts of the capitalist machine.]

Anyway, I slept on it, not well, and in the morning I found I had homed in on what may be the key factor, or at least possibly a way of getting past the communication barrier. The key factor is ‘commitment’. It’s like commitment in a good friendship or marriage. You meet someone, find you like them and/or fall in love; that’s the first stage. Then you make a commitment, or commitment happens, and what that means is you stop evaluating that friend, that lover, because you and s/he belong to each other. The shopwindowful of other potential friends or lovers are not rivals for your friendship or love.

Commitment to a ‘cure’, of the kind I wrote about in my story, is not really to the cure, the diet or whatever, it’s to one’s body and oneself, to one’s self. ‘The body’ becomes ‘my body’, ‘me’, ‘myself’, no longer a malfunctioning machine. As with the friend or lover, you stop evaluating, you don’t say or even feel ‘is this diet working?’, ‘is this the best cure for my problem?’, you just go for it, and it is that commitment which is what helps and brings healing (not what ‘works’: that unhelpful, mechanistic word). Oh dear, that still sounds lame, communication being SO difficult. Anyway, I’ll tell him about this second go at explaining what I’m on about, and then go back to my ivory tower.

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