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Random Thoughts on Travel, Education, Health, and the World in General
I first traveled to Burma in 1996, co-leading an educational tour with a group of eighteen students from New College of California. Burma had just opened to the west after thirty years and Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratically elected president, who had been under house arrest by the military regime since her election in 1988, had just been released.Read the rest of this entry »
You go for your yearly medical check up. The doctor listens to your heart and feels your pulse. Your blood is drawn and your blood pressure is taken. Looking at the sphygmomanometer (blood pressure cuff), she reports a number: 120/80. “Perfect”, she says and when your lab results come in showing all of your serum levels falling within the normal range, you are declared healthy and told to return in a year for another evaluation.Read the rest of this entry »
I relaxed at Philz, my local cafe, sinking into a soft leather couch, taking in a fine selection of indie rock, and enjoying some very strong coffee. As I sipped on a tall Tesora, I daydreamed about the trip I’d soon be taking to Peru. I was excited, but at the same time troubled by a pain I was feeling. I knew its source. A deep wound inflicted by someone whom I thought was a friend. He had stolen something from me, something real and material, but also something more…vital. It felt as if this “friend” had made off with a piece of my heart. But knowing this did nothing to relieve the ache. I wrote furiously in my journal about the injury of betrayal and about my need for some kind of healing and that maybe I’d find it in Peru. I didn’t really understand why I thought this might be so.Read the rest of this entry »
Flying out of San Francisco, I imagined that all of my worries would simply disappear when I took off for the “mystical” land of Peru. I had recently been through a few travails, including an emotional business divorce and looked forward to some relief. But instead, I became aware that they traveled with me, like close friends who would not say goodbye. With this distressing realization, coupled with the frustration of having my plane ticket canceled for the flight out of Lima, I finally arrived in Cusco, irritated and exhausted.Read the rest of this entry »
I remember my first bass rig. 1975. A sunburst Fender Precision copy and a small no-name transistor combo amp. Light weight, compact. I just threw it all into my Delta 88 Royale and drove. Easy. No muss, no fuss. But as the years went by, and the bands got better, and I started to make a little money, my speaker cabinets got bigger and the amplifiers heavier, until I was finally hauling around an Aguilar DB750 head and a couple of “4 by 10” Eden cabinets.* (Did I forget to mention the compressor and rack?) The sound was awesome! I could turn the master and gain knobs to 2 or 3 and push my band with clean tone and endless volume. Yes, I was the “King of Bottom”. But my lower back started talking to me, and it was not with kindness. Rolling the cabinets to my car with a hand truck, I felt the pain as I anticipated the angled, awkward lift into the back seat. And then there was the head—750 watts and 43 pounds of compact tube power. I felt like one of those Olympic athletes doing the hammer throw just to get that thing into the car. As part of a middle age rock band, something had to give. It was a stark, clear choice–my back or my equipment.
Thirty Five Thousand years ago, the ice age caves of Southern France were covered in beautiful images of wild animals and abstract symbols. Since that time, the ancestors of these painters have produced the Mona Lisa, Sufi poetry, and Rock and Roll. The story of Homo Sapien has been, in large measure, a story of art—of the language needed to express it and the technology necessary to make it move.Read the rest of this entry »
I have been in chiropractic practice for almost twenty five years. From the beginning, I have taken an integrative approach, working with a team of complementary practitioners—medical doctors, acupuncturists, physical, movement, and massage therapists, nurses, and osteopaths—all under one roof in my clinic, Chiromedica. There were not many practices like this back in the 1980’s. But in recent years there has been a proliferation of integrative health centers, many of them run by medical doctors. Major medical centers like California Pacific, UCSF, and Kaiser Permanente have set up “complementary and alternative medicine” clinics, yet chiropractic care is excluded in house, relegated (at best) to off site referral. Given chiropractic’s central role in the history and development of alternative and integrative healing, it is worth exploring why this might be the case.Read the rest of this entry »