“Oh...gross!”

I have always held a fascination for docs because they can unload someone’s insides and put them back together again with (hopefully) no spare parts left over. How cool is that? I can’t put a Tonka toy together without a couple pieces hanging around.

In all the research I’ve done with docs of all flavors, I never asked how they feel about getting slopped on by their patients. As a mom, I’ve had my kids gorp on me any number of times, and it was always a battle between keeping it together or yaking with them. And these are my kids. If a stranger let loose with their bodily fluids, I know I’d lose it.

MDOD tell a story of sitting in a puddle of pee because the drunk patient mistook the chair for the gotty-go. That would have been my first yak of the shift. I’ve read stories about docs being immersed in blood, vomit, feces, brain matter, and it all makes my stomach turn flip flops. So how do docs maintain a professional attitude? I’m sure they’re more caught up in the emergency, but isn’t there a place in their brain that registers, “Ohmygod, this guy just belched blood all over me. YUCK.”

I’m sure I’ll need to know this information at some point in my writing career. And unlike my normal wont of experiential writing, I’m good with simply getting feedback. No amount of Reiki would get me through the night. Of this, I am certain.

“We Need Scientific Proof!”

This is what a young resident told me the other day after I finished frying the synapses of my ER bud, Mark. Mark has been a happier camper since I started giving him a weekly Reiki treatment, and the resident was puzzled as to why. He simply couldn’t wrap his brain around the idea of energy treatments via my hands would send his formerly high octane boss into Nirvana.

He fell into the same trap that all good scientists do; he wanted to disseminate Reiki in order to understand its scientific properties, like one would do with a medicine. Problem is, there is little about Reiki that will satisfy our current definition of science. I tried equating Reiki to love – you can’t disseminate love either and, while there are some who question its existence, most of us accept it as part of our DNA. The resident was having none of it.

We were at a standstill until it hit me; he knows zip about the foundations of complementary alternative medicine principals, so it’s impossible for him to process the viability of Reiki. It’s like love. Until you’ve flipped both sides of the coin and have been in love, it’s impossible to make any judgments about it one way or another. Hampered by the lack of fundamental understanding, this resident is listening to a foreign language.

The way I see it, this resident is representative of the dichotomy currently taking place in medicine. Because many scientists don’t understand CAM principals, they want the ability to reduce holistic systems down to their most basic physical mechanisms like they do with medicine. Thing is, CAM can’t be measured following the traditional scientific rules, so the data becomes minimized, obscured, or distorted. I’m no longer puzzled over responses such as this young resident because I have friends like Mark who offer little in the way of scientific verification other than he “feels reeeal good.”