Albert Provocateur: November 2009

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Turkey Trot - Home Alone for the Holidays

You’ve lost your last friend, you’re down in the dumps, the planets are not aligned correctly, the holidays are fast approaching, and you’re home alone. There is nothing more depressing than the sense of utter helplessness one feels at the hands of a perceived abandonment forcibly endured during the festivities of Thanksgiving and Christmas. This is especially true when financial figures dip into the red, when family members are far away, when loved ones are no longer with us, and when television, magazines, the Internet, and other forms of mass communication show us those cozy fireplaces, warm and loving households, and smiling faces that we’d just love to punch in. While it can be normal to feel somewhat subdued and sad during the holidays, when those feelings become tantamount to downright depression, then we have problems. It is usually the elderly that bear the brunt of those “Thanksgiving turnarounds” or “Christmas crises,” due to a plethora of real or imagined factors ranging from financial limitations and being home alone to a loss of independence, eyesight, or mobility. No one is immune, however, and even the young can feel blue, as chestnuts roast on an open fire and mistletoe catalyzes self-embrace, for lack of a suitable partner to share a touching of lips. We know the problem, or do we? We have all felt it at one time or another, what with parties, shopping, baking, cleaning, and entertaining during the holidays taking their toll on sleep, exercise, and self-love. So, I guess my gift to you this holiday season is to come up with a primer or set of instructions for halting, or at least making bearable, that annual mad dash or stampede that leaves us feeling drained and devoid of healthy cheer between that last Thursday of November and the first of the New Year.

Our so-called quest to tame the turkey trot could not begin if we were unable to state categorically that before a cure can be prescribed, an accurate diagnosis must be made. What is it that actually causes us to wallow in self-pity during the most joyous time of the year? Are doldrums a normal sign of aging or are the social obligations, mad hatter shopping, financial difficulties, work-related angst, and sleeplessness of the holidays something greater than the sum of their parts but much less than incurable? Three things are certain at this crossroads of the year, that family can be a burden as well as a blessing, that overspending can mean financial worries for months to come, and that exhaustion, lack of sleep, and exercise deprivation increase stress in a vicious cycle from which it is difficult to extricate oneself. And let’s not forget those vodka spiked eggnogs, peppermint hot chocolates, or Christmas martinis that do little to raise low spirits, rather they have an opposite effect. Adding alcohol to imposed social obligations is a recipe for self-flagellation, when saying “no” to liquid amenities or social outings without pangs of guilt or a need to explain becomes an exercise in willpower that many of us are ill-equipped to muster.

While we have accurately presented this annual rite of remorse, which is new to no one and further complicated by “selection psychosis,” with incapacity to choose the right gifts for family and friends, and “tradition tampering,” with failure to duplicate the conscious and unconscious holiday ceremonies of a happier past, we have done nothing to solve the problem. The good doctor will now make amends, and give you his take on the remedies, which, by the way, are free of charge. The premise here is that we have all gone through this, and, rather than reinventing the wheel, we must adopt what is tried and true. While we cannot force ourselves to be happy during the holiday season, we can certainly reach out to the individuals and community organizations around us. The holidays don’t have to be perfect to be enjoyed, and new friends and traditions can provide an excitement lacking from the usual seasonal rigamarrow. Now, the name of the game is to also set aside family grievances for peace of mind, stick to a realistic shopping budget for obvious reasons, and plan ahead. Running around like chickens without heads was not something envisioned by the inhabitants of Bethlehem many moons ago, and, what was good for the founders, is most certainly good for the rest of us. Learning to say “no” to social activities that can leave us resentful and overwhelmed follows suit, or perhaps attending them only briefly to make an appearance or a surgical “hit-and-run.” Sound realizable? Then let’s put the finishing touches on this work in progress. Don’t forget to get plenty of sleep and physical activity during this holiest time of the year, as well as direct greater attention to stuffing the turkey instead of oneself. Alcohol, sweets, and cheese are fine, but everything in moderation, and, remember, “breathers,” in the form of moonlit walks, stargazing, or soothing music are good. Finally, when all else fails, irritability, hopelessness, and insomnia may warrant a trip to your doctor or mental health professional. There is no shame in asking for help. A perceived loss of face in no way compares with a loss of mind.

Cheers! Things could be worse. I could have mentioned that turkey not only contains more cholesterol than ham, but that it has also been known on occasion to give one the “trots.”

Funeral Fandango

While my medical pieces have heretofore addressed a slew of maladies ranging from acne to zoster, as well as the collective human spirit to preserve life and fight any incursion into our bodies’ inner sanctum, sometimes a final number is called in destiny’s 50-90-year-old bingo game. When taxes no longer disturb the slumber of a hapless victim, the deceased’s family and friends are often left with a reminder of the high cost of dying, in the form of an average funeral bill of $7,323. Then, as the band engages in a badly timed “funeral fandango,” especially in these times of high unemployment, rising medical costs, dashed retirement savings, and freefalling home values, we are left to wrestle with the dilemma of where to find the money to bury loved ones. The Grim Reaper knows no black ink, and the 700 bodies lying unclaimed in the Los Angeles County morgue last July attest to the unsettling reality of sticker shock of the numerous families who can ill-afford to pay runaway funeral costs.

With the price of an average funeral outstripping the cost of living and with funeral directors nonetheless claiming their services a bargain, some good old-fashioned truth is warranted when false prophets, vacillating editorial points of view, and general disbelief in the printed page envisioned by Gutenberg to honestly inform reign. So, let’s call a spade a spade. Here are the facts. In 1984, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued the so-called “funeral rule,” requiring all funeral homes to provide a general price list of all goods and services and permitting consumers to choose individual items instead of a complete package. Notwithstanding this mandate, in 2004 funeral directors continued to argue that the intensive services they provide accounted for their misunderstood prices, and that most people pay far more for weddings, cars, or one year’s college tuition than the average funeral. Obviously, they were steadfast in their convictions when, in 2008, FTC undercover investigators found that a fourth of the funeral homes they visited significantly violated the funeral rule. Hello! We can’t even rest in peace. We feel the pinch even in death!

Aside from a basic services fee, charged by all funeral homes and which there is no getting around, price negotiations can be conducted on a vast assortment of related items ranging from the funeral service and public viewing to embalming and the casket itself. The name of the game is to neither be pressured nor “guilt tripped” by funeral directors who prey on frayed emotions by referring, for example, to less expensive coffins as “welfare caskets” or “morgue boxes.” A little homework goes a long way, and the Funeral Consumers Alliance, which many of us would be hesitant to join as regular card-carrying members (due to the unpleasantness of its connotation), advises family discussion of funeral plans in advance, in much the same way that weddings, vacations, home purchases, and college tuition are hashed and rehashed in the living room or around the dinner table. Who knows, perhaps participants can arrive at alternatives to the traditional funeral home experience.

Unpleasant, you say, and how dare that man broach such melancholia at this joyous time of Thanksgiving and Christmas merriment! Perhaps you’re right, but death is a constant companion that gets no vacation time or annual leave for the holidays. Death of a loved one, while never acceptable, can at least be defused financially if cremation and services at $1,350, do-it-yourself home funerals at $250, or “green” funerals are opted for, instead of the simplest of funeral rites at $5,000 and a grave marker of $3,000, not to mention the cost of a funeral plot. The facts bear this out. While fifty years ago, cremation accounted for only about 4 percent of funerals, that figure rose to 35 percent in 2007 and is projected to increase to 59 percent in 2025, if we live that long to see it.

No one is implying that family members of the deceased, with the help of a death midwife, should bathe, dress, lay out the body, and preserve it with dry ice in the home for three days, in order to save a few bucks and defray the costs of chemical embalming and a traditional funeral service. That possibility does exist, however. Nor is anyone advocating “green” funerals, with burials in open fields, grave markers made from local rock, and even employment of GPS coordinates instead of the markers themselves. Nevertheless, a failure to reel in funeral costs can turn a funeral fandango into a dance with the devil.

Al Capone was a Capricorn

For some time now, animated and often hostile debate has raged over a proposed connection between astrology and medicine, or what is called astro-medicine. Even Al Capone weighed in on the subject, and there were those, critics and curiosity seekers alike, who linked his fateful demise in prison from neurosyphilis to a not-so-casual alignment of his stars in Capricorn. Going back still further, it has come to light that the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians, who were far from ignorant and who gave the world horticultural marvels, a magnificent library, monuments in stone that still stand and awe today, recorded history in the form of hieroglyphics, and willow bark, or aspirin, for rheumatism and pain, were students of medicinal astrology and a perceived influence of stars and planets on health. Their “captive audience” of Jews also kept a knowledge of astrology among their confidential doctrines. It didn’t end there, either. The Middle Ages was a particularly florid period for “star power,” with faculties of astrology springing up in such diverse Spanish cities as Cordoba and Toledo, and with kings, Popes, aristocrats like Catherine de’ Medici, and even a famous doctor-astrologer and bubonic plague authority or two such as Michel Nostredame, better known today as Nostradamus, plying their wares in the heavenly-body arena of the early and middle 1500s. It was thought that a star disharmony between physician and patient would lead inevitably to incomplete recovery from physical malady or no recovery at all. Physician promulgators of astral alignment familiarized themselves with the horoscopes of their patients, and, when that was not the case, patients took it upon themselves to investigate those of their healers. Furthermore, a common conception, or misconception, whichever you prefer, arose that the way the planets were arranged at the moment of a child’s birth dictated a later predisposition to disease.

So, that is all well and dandy, but where does the field of astro-medicine stand today, if it can be considered a field at all? Before that question is answered, some startling revelations bear denouement to incredulous minds. One of them is the fact that two-thirds of the world’s population seek health care from sources other than conventional biomedicine, otherwise known as allopathy. Closer to home, 42% of American households have tried complementary and alternative medicine in recent years, and the staid and somber National Institutes of Health (NIH) has supported no less than 50 investigations into the usefulness of various alternative therapies, of which astro-medicine is no stranger. Demand for attractive, affordable, alternative medicine approaches to chronic disease has grown exponentially, especially on the preventive and public health care stage. In mysterious India, where truths are often hidden and minds open, allopathy rides shotgun to yoga, massage, prayers, spiritual healing, tantra/mantra, gem therapy, hypnosis, acupuncture, magnet therapy, and that old acquaintance, astro-medicine. Can we dismiss the swelling legions of astro-medical warriors and a hungering public so lightly?

Perhaps there is more to the story than mere superstitious invention of a medical system that renders various parts of the body, diseases, and drugs subservient to the influence of the sun, moon, and planets. Perhaps the celestial-corporeal association is real, and the instrumentation and investigative methods currently available are too primitive to prove validity beyond allopathic doubt. Can so many people be wrong? Are the purveyors of allopathy so presumptuous as to think that their medical dominion and carte blanche of the last 400 years trumps the collective wisdom of the prior 60 centuries?

Medical astrologers study the anatomical-astrological birth charts of their clients or patients, in order to give advice about the areas of the body most likely to experience trouble. Farfetched and outlandish, you say? Perhaps, but condemning astro-medicine does not mitigate the fact that scores of patients with chronic diseases such as cancer, AIDS, arthritis, asthma, diabetes, and epilepsy, to name a few, have derived solace, comfort, and a measure of symptom control, if not out-and-out cure, from other alternative medical methods. Those remarkable gains, with survival of up to five years in some cancer patients, warrant a closer look at the “attractive nuisance” posed by complementary therapies so easily discarded by undiscerning allopathic eyes. As Shakespeare put it, in Julius Caesar, “The fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” He might have said, instead, to paraphrase, “Open minds breed sound bodies.”

In astrology, there is a dictum that states, “Stars assume, but do not force,” meaning that the influence of the stars and planets on the health of a person can always be weakened by self-discipline, a healthy diet, and benevolent thoughts. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Al Capone. The stars reveal that as a Capricorn his knees, joints, and skeletal system should have done him in. As it was, another “bone” brought about his demise, for he lived, loved, and died by the sword.

Sorcerer's Soup

As ghouls and goblins descend upon us in this Halloween season, the annual question of whether one can be scared to death, or “scared stiff,” whichever you prefer, must once again be posed. The sorcerer’s cauldron froths and boils over, rendering its soup no more toxic than the so-called brain-heart connection. In fact, there is a physiologic basis for strong emotions causing death, when the nervous system becomes so jump-started by serious threat that it can cause heart attack and consequent exitus. Animal studies bear this out. There are also historical precedents to the lethal brain-heart connection, with a Roman emperor, a 13^th century pontiff, and American patriots all succumbing to the mortal blows of anger, grief, and elation, respectively.

Both disruptive life events and the chills of Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, or Freddie Kruger movie house madness can lead to an inevitable downward spiral in life’s course. The palpitations, heartache, and anxiety wrought by Hollywood make believe can easily parallel similar repercussions of real-life calamities such as the death of someone dear, the threat of death to someone close, the anticipation of a difficult examination, the embarrassing loss of self-respect or self-esteem, the unpleasant memories exhumed during an anniversary memorial service, or the threat of imminent harm or injury in battle. Even the jolt of a happy ending can end miserably, with the strength of the emotions elicited weighing heavily on an “animus et corpus” worn down by neuronal, hormonal, and psychic bombardment.

We have all experienced anxiety at some point in our lives. The adolescent on a first date with an unsightly pimple that just sprang up, the college student about to take a first set of final examinations after pulling an “all-nighter,” the hapless groom about to say “I do,” the postmenopausal woman awaiting biopsy results after a suspicious mammogram, the second-string athlete about to get his chance in the big game, the employee suddenly called in to the boss’s office after rampant rumors of pink slips and company lay-offs, and the list goes on and on, indicating that being human entails a certain amount of heart palpitations, taut nerves, queasy stomachs, cold hands, and downright urges to roll up into the fetal position until the all-clear has been sounded. Until now, however, the latter had been considered nonlethal, par for the course, and attributed to simply living life. Now we know that they can kill you! A study of 3,015 70-79-year-olds, in fact, has demonstrated that not only “the good die young,” as the saying goes, but the anxious also. The more anxious one is, the more he or she is likely to die, with the added twist that anxiety is a greater predictor of death in blacks than in whites.

And what of the million-dollar shrink’s term, “catatonia,” theme of horror movies and idle cocktail chatter? Catatonia is a paralysis that has no apparent physical cause and little physiologically concrete to refer to, except that it may be provoked by fear. On any given day, any one of us can become its victim with no advanced notice, and a study conducted in 2004 suggests that it was originally rooted in our collective DNA to protect our species from being eaten by other animals. Unfortunately, we now know that other kinds of fear, anxiety, or feelings of imminent doom, real or imagined, can lead to catatonia.

Passing from a sorcerer’s soufflé of Ouija boards, tarot cards, horoscopes, pinned effigies, amulets, potions, elixirs, bloodied chicken corpses, and Santeria, we subsequently navigate the singularly turbid waters of Cupid’s domain, where we pose the question of whether one can, indeed, die of a broken heart. Been there, done that, and lived to tell the tale, you say. Perhaps. But consider yourselves fortunate, as failed romance may be just stressful and acute enough to cause heart failure. While people under stress may already have heart disease, who’s to say that the stress of unrequited love is insufficient to cause fatal heart failure? After all, acute stress cardiomyopathy, which resembles a heart attack without actually being one, occurs in non-cardiac patients hospitalized after acute physical or emotional trauma, such as grief for the loss of a loved one or fear resulting from an act of criminal violence or involvement in an automobile accident.

Our account of mind over matter would be found deficient, if we were not to contrapose the concrete to the sublime. Why worry about what we don’t know killing us, when even the innocuousness of castor oil, rhubarb pie, sunflower seeds, and cherry, plum, and peach stones, to mention a few, can put our short time on earth to an even shorter test? Perhaps we should devote our energies and turn our sights toward what can actually kill us, instead of a witch hunt for sensationalism and magic bullets to fell the monsters inhabiting our psyches since the beginning of our time. Wouldn’t resources be better directed at automobile accidents, murder, other accidents, suicide, and cancer in the 15-24-year-old group, cancer, heart disease, and accidents in the 25-45-year-old group, and heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, chronic lung disease, Alzheimer’s, pneumonia, diabetes, and accidents in individuals 65 and older than at shadows, figments, and sounds that go “bump” in the night?

Sorcerer’s, shamans, medicine men, charlatans, and traveling snake-oil vendors are everywhere, now, at Halloween, and whenever. Calling their bluffs, however, in these times of increased evidence of the brain-heart connection, leaves this writer scared stiff!

Albert Provocateur

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Turkey Trot - Home Alone for the Holidays

Funeral Fandango

Al Capone was a Capricorn

Sorcerer's Soup

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