Alt Health Rabbit Hole

Damn you, Alternative Health. I love you, but why are you so difficult to navigate and so overwhelming? Should cleanse my bowels first or just drink more green tea? Is raw veganism the path to enlightenment? Give me a sign!

Yesterday was the unofficial beginning of what I am thinking of as the Six-Month Health Experiment.

My gradually unfolding plan includes diet renovation, regular exercise, soul-filling affirmations, visualization and meditation, and anything else that resonates with me. My idea is to create a workable, relatively inexpensive, low-on-the-Weird-Scale lifestyle shift that not only works to reverse my cervical dysplasia, but also makes me feel vibrantly, joyously healthy and balanced. And one that might help others.

My inital goal was to find clinically supported evidence for some supplements I plan on taking. (To make the hard sci folks happy.) I sipped my green tea and tried to ignore the humming of discomfort in my nether regions. Which I am praying is psychosomatic Type-A obsessive compulsive manifestation and not my cells morphing into cancer. This uncomfortable feeling has persisted for a few days now. Anyone who has a cervix knows you can't usually feel it. Mine is aching. Buzzing. It's weird and I wish it would stop.

I found some nice stuff about folic acid, green tea, vitamins A and C. And then things got abruptly weird. As they do when you type "alternative therapies" into Google. I found a site convinced that cleanses were the key. Tell me, why do cleanse sites insist on showing you photographs of what will be purged from your toxin-filled body? Like I need to see gross bowel crud and liver stones and freaking tapeworms. This just makes me not want to cleanse. In fact, I begin to think that the cleanse has put those horrific tapeworm mob scenes in my body in the first place. And the best way to avoid tapeworm is to continue to be blissfully, toxically unaware.

Then I found something called Beta Mannan that a whole crew of women are swearing by. This sounds like an ancient Mayan religious sect, not an aloe vera-based miracle cure. Apparently it's expensive, but also apparently you can talk them down. If you're the type to barter on magic beans, that is.

I found a woman who reversed her mild dysplasia using a hardcore raw vegan, alkaline diet, green tea suppository process. Easy as one, two, nine hundred different supplements and products with weird names. Wait, did she say suppositories?

Which is another thing I've heard. Don't just take the green tea capsules orally...stick 'em where the sun don't shine too! And all I can think when I read this is: what's green going up has gotta be green coming down. Yikes.