I remember how frightened I was when my parents were teaching me how to tie my shoe-laces for the very first time. After much of their beloved patience was tested, I finally figured it out. At the time, I figured there wouldn't be anything in life more difficult to master...
Accepting the challenge to solve a medical mystery reminds me of the feelings I had as a child, when I wanted to (or had to) learn the "secret" of tying my own shoes. I remember my parents swiftly turning two strings into an attractive knot. It looked so complicated to me. They made it look so simple. I was intrigued by the "magic," but as Martin Luther King once said, "Seeing is not always believing." After learning how it's done, one realizes there's no magic to it at all. In fact, we even learn how to do it with our eyes closed.
Learning to tie one's shoes is probably the first of the many mysteries we solve in a life time. The mysteries of life are often as simple as shoe-tying. We draw from tools (wisdom and knowledge) to harness them. Most of us don't realize we have such abilities, so when we express such knowledge without understanding we call it "intuition." Intuition is not a gift which is mystical or magical. It's a conglomeration of universal metaphorical translations, derived mostly from the "magic moments" we experience in our lives. Our minds sort through and organize the data while we dream. Understanding intuition is similar to realizing mathematics and music are one and the same, except in translation. Intuition guides me in a specific direction to solve a medical mystery. It's an important part of my "Occam's razor," and "Einstein's retro-simplifier." My intense intuitive sense is built on a burning desire to quench the endless number of curiosities I've had about life itself. These are the "secrets" which fuel the fire of a "zebra hunter," sparked a long time ago by a pair of un-tied shoe-laces.
We sometimes find ourselves the recipients of good advice which we may have previously given to someone else. Why do we temporarily forget wisdom and knowledge we previously collected, and need to hear the same information from someone else, in order to appreciate it once again? The reason is linked to subjectivity vs. objectivity, and has to do with our emotions, which have tremendous influence over intuition. Emotions will either enhance or obscure one's intuitive sense, and re-set its relativity. The relativity of our perceptions will change the priorities of our wisdom and knowledge on a day-to-day basis. Thomas Jefferson once said the more he learned, the more "luck" he seemed to have. Hence, "intuition" and "gut-feelings" are built on wisdom and knowledge, and ruled by our emotions. I hope this dispels the myth that intuition has about as much to do with magic as does tying one's shoe-laces.
"The more you learn, the more you grow, and see there's so much more to know." - TJB
Desire is the first step in solving a mystery which might be a "zebra." Without desire, one will take the simplest path to a solution (e.g., leaving the shoes un-tied, wearing slip-ons, walking barefoot), and like Mark Twain said, "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." "Occam's razor" will simplify itself each time the same solution is repeated. The solution is often the easiest one, which may or may not be the best one. When an office visit is "de-humanized" the treatment of the symptom is often over-simplified. For example, anxiety state and depression can often be treated without introducing foreign substances into the body. I consider counseling and therapy to be safer treatment options. Both, however, are more time-consuming than prescribing a pharmaceutical such as prozac or xanax. If the healer doesn't have a clue what's going on, or doesn't have the time to investigate, then pharmaceutical intervention becomes the best choice. The reality is that the healer, metaphorically, never learned to tie his own shoes, and therefore unable to tie anyone elses. If the physician-patient encounter were more "humanized," and patients demanded a non-pharmaceutical solution, this would never occur. Time is all one needs to ask for.
"Miracles" occurring in a mainstream medical practice arise mostly from myths, as patients are often told by their conventional healer that the recovery experienced had noting to do with a nutritional deficiency or environmental insultant. There is nothing I could add about this which could outweigh the words of Doctor Martin Luther King:
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
When my mom was about 34 years-old she had severe gingivitis and pyorrhea and was advised by her dentist to have all her teeth extracted. She went home and cried. My father told her to read a particular chapter in Adele Davis's "Let's Get Well," which recommended high-dose Vitamin C to correct the problem. My mother's gums healed after following the recommendations. She was so excited, she gave the book as a gift to her dentist. He took it and threw it in his garbage pail, and told her the "miracle" had nothing to do with Vitamin C. Now that's "sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity" in a clinical setting. And it happens all the time.
I think this is the event which opened my mom's eyes to the "miracles" and "maladies" of medicine. And thus began my life with an enlightened human, a skeptic but open-minded teacher, a woman I deeply admired, loved and respected, who I faithfully followed around for the next 40+ years, who paused every step of the way to make sure I understood each message in life. A woman who never quoted the bible or the word "Jesus," yet constantly enlightened me with her wisdom, which held the same messages as "the word." She would make the sign of the cross every time we drove past a church, yet her explanation for doing so was always "because I do." She gave me spirituality without the stigma of religion. I believe this approach allows for better digestion of wisdom and the meaning of life. So religion and Church were something she left for me to find on my own. Religion and spirituality are not one and the same. Not all religious people are spiritual. When I pray at night in my room, everyone there is spiritual. And when I'm one-on-one with a patient, I focus on building a spiritual "human" relationship. I don't always get that same feeling at the church, as many are there because to have to be, and not because they want to be.
My mom kept her beautiful smile because she recognized "sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." She pulled the book from the empty pail and we headed back home. That was my mom's last visit to that particular dentist.
As Paul McCartney once said, it's all about getting "back to the egg," to not forget the place we came from. What I do in my practice has no magical or mystical qualities about it whatsoever. It's all about being "human" with my patients. It's the way medicine was practiced since the beginning of time, and discarded as scientific technology became the "gold standard." The reality of science is that I don't think it will ever explain the exact location of the "end of the universe." Nothing in this world is real if everything is built upon that particular defect of reason. Science is built upon itself without an anchor, as is spirituality. Science is trusted more only because it's easier to see with the eyes of a spirit in the material world. Spirituality gets a bad rap due to its association with the "unexplainable," its "mysticism," and religion. Joseph Campbell spoke about this subject and opened my eyes to its importance, not only in medicine, but also in dealing with life on a daily basis. We fear what we don't understand, even undeniable truth, and often accept information at face value, from "reputable sources," without question.
More Essays
The essays below include my formal (and informal) education, "magic moments," and opinions on healthcare and politics. Magic Moments are those episodes which enhance life with enlightenment and wisdom. They are the spiritual learning experiences which re-shape our souls, and change the way we perceive the world, ourselves, and others. Such moments are often associated with a smile both at the time of occurrence and each reflection thereafter, and hopefully, when they are shared with others.
Doctor Bolte's Formal Medical Training