Chocolate Trading is dangerous for my mental health!

Haven’t seen me for a while? That’s because for the last three days I’ve been drying my hands. I’m standing in a public toilet, holding my hands under a machine called something like Storm-Eco-Hygi-Dry, which is emitting onto my wet palms a tepid breeze more minuscule than a butterfly’s fart.
 
I try to keep my hands clean, but it’s no easy task. Having pumped a portion of liquid resembling a minor marsupial’s ejaculate onto my hands from the soap dispenser, I pressed the hot tap in vain, eventually washing the soap off in cold water. Finally, knowing my hands are far from germ-free, I give up and act the boy, drying my hands on my jeans.
 
As I walk out, I wonder if we haven’t all gone bananas over health and hygiene. I’m no Howard Hughes, but must confess that with the norovirus raging rampant, when visiting hospital loos I wash with hot water and soap, then antiseptic gel, and then, as I leave, wrap my coat sleeve around the door handle that everyone else has used, with all their varying levels of cleanliness.
 
In UK airports they have hands-free loos. Entry doors have been replaced by twisting hallways. Soap, hot water and strong blasts of warm drying air all turn themselves off and on with impressive efficiency.
 
Mind you, we are innovative types in the West of Ireland. Before watching a three hour long film at the Galway Omniplex, I visit the Gents, because missing any part of a film is like viewing a portrait with its eyes obscured.
 
Sometimes in public situations you just can’t get started. So I was very impressed that the good folk of the Omniplex had instslled a motion sensor water jet that serves as some kind of Pavlovian flow accelerator: the sound and vision of gushing works a treat
 
As society obsesses about clean hands, I’m reminded of what my next-door neighbour used to tell me when I was a little lad: “You have to eat a bag of dirt before you die!”
 
In a world where people are becoming allergic to everything from peanuts to plastic, it makes sense to keep our immune systems battling away. I have no doubt that today’s super-clean homes contribute more to immune disorders than they benefit our health.
 
Trouble is, we are bombarded with so much nonsense about health and hygiene, we don’t know if we’re coming or going, so it’s just as well that the Universe made them different colours.
 
We’re told to eat lots of carbs and then told carbs are terrible for us. We are mammals raised on milk yet now, apparently dairy products are no good for us. Lactose intolerance is on the up, so the food industry has come up with a new kind of milk. I saw it advertised in one of those red-top Sunday tabloid supplements.
 
“Milk intolerant? Digest this.”
 
runs the headline on the ad, but in the small print at the bottom of the page they say that this product is
 
“… not suitable for anyone medically diagnosed with galactosaemia, lactose intolerance, a milk allergy or other milk protein intolerances.”
 
Do-what guv’nor? Milk intolerant? Digest this, but not if you’re milk intolerant.
A couple of pages further on I hit their Health Page, where they run an article entitled
 
“Cold and Flu, We’re So Over You!”
 
which offers the following advice on how best to fight coughs:
 
“DON’T: spend a fortune on medicines - a recent study by Which? reported that many well-known cough remedies offer little proof to back up their claims.
DO: help the little ones with honey - research has found it to be an effective way for kids with coughs to sleep. Give them 10g manuka honey half an hour before bed. Medibee Manuka honey, £18.99.”
 
No wonder we’re all confused. Don’t spend a fortune on medicines but take a mortgage out to buy a pot of honey?
 
I refuse to believe that we’re all as dumb as they make us out to be. When you snarf a sausage roll or a slice of chocolate fudge cake, you’re not pretending that you’re eating healthily. We all know pretty damn well that sugar, fat and salt are bad for us, but we’re going to eat them anyway, so my advice is to enjoy yourself. I’m not saying go forth and become morbidly obese, but I do think that it’s counterproductive to worry about eating badly.
 
Devour the cream cake and the bacon sandwich, revel in your cocktail of self-indulgence and self-loathing, but don’t exist on either. Fearing your food is a pointless and dangerous game.
 
Mind you, I’m a long way from perfect in such matters. The other day I found myself caught up in a bizarre game of Chocolate Trading, while making a cup of tea.
 
Carbon Trading is that particularly insane process whereby wealthy heavily-polluting countries pretend they care about the environment by trading their filthy air for ‘clean air’ quotas from poorer, less polluting nations.
 
Well, Chocolate Trading is much the same, but performed on a domestic level. As the kettle came to the boil I reached for the chocolate digestive biscuits, but remembered how the doctor said that of all the bad things that ever existed, chocolate biscuits topped the league. Crammed with butter, sugar and salt, those chocolate digies were death disguised as little discs of heaven.
 
‘Hmmm….’ thought I, ‘I’ve got a bar of 70% dark chocolate in the other room. Doesn’t that stuff dilate my veins? Why, it’s almost good for me! If I don’t eat the biscuits I could probably snarf that entire bar and still feel I’d eaten something good!’
 
Chocolate Trading: digestive biscuits for a whole bar of chocolate and a clean conscience.
Maybe I really am as confused and whackadoodle about health as they say I am.

CCPR: your 3-in-1 one route to health!

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 The brilliant James O'Sullivan at his Traditional Chinese Medicine clinic

The world can live quite happily without another annoying acronym, but CCPR has now become a way of life to me. When dealing with something as unpredictable, individual and vital as my health, I’ve found the best results come from a blend of Conventional and Complementary medicines, alongside Personal Responsibility.

CCPR evolved as the result of my efforts over the last few years to cure the inflammation in my knee while trying to understand what was causing explosive bowel movements and pain in my abdomen.

Conventional medicine started off magnificently when an MRI scan identified a torn meniscus in my knee. Off to the hospital for a quick arthroscopy, back home that night and eight weeks later I was walking without pain.

Full marks to conventional medicine. For years, each time I’d taken a step, the torn meniscus had trapped itself inside the moving parts of my knee. More debilitating than the sharp pain was the way it sapped my confidence. When each step forward hurts, life seems such a struggle.

However, after an ultrasound scan and two colonoscopies, all conventional medicine had come up with vis à vis my gut was that I have IBS, which is conventional medicine’s way of saying:

“We don’t really have a clue!”

Repeatedly I was told by doctors to eat more roughage and drink more water, but as I explained at the clinic, I eat vast quantities of fresh fruit and vegetables and am accompanied all my waking hours by a glass of water, that is drained and refilled regularly. I also love walking and exercising, so I just didn’t fit their IBS model.

Deaf to my protestations, they handed me yet another box of Fybogel sachets and sent me on my way.

Unsatisfied and unwell, I went to see the very excellent James O’Sullivan of Active Health at the Smiling Body Clinic.  Alongside his colleague Eunice, James O'Sullivan is a gem of a man. A calming wise soul and an incredibly skilled practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine, a session with James is a happy blend of mental and physical therapy, after which you leave feeling optimistic and on the mend.

I first encountered him years ago when my back was in spasm. He insisted I told him about my dreams, listened attentively, and then cured me with a single session of Tuina, Chinese Medical Acupressure.

Having studied Chinese herbs, Acupuncture, Tuina, Qi Gong, and Tai Qi under the legendary Hung Shui Chen, James gained extensive clinical experience whilst studying at many Chinese teaching hospitals, including the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine.

More than anybody, James inspired CCPR, always insisting that both conventional and complementary medicines were essential ingredients of healthy living, while his own philosophy states:

"Everybody has the right to better health, movement, freedom, and well-being and each one of us has the ability to learn and practice the techniques necessary to sustain this aspiration"

After each session of acupuncture, my knee improved, and his advice to visualise my inflamed gut cooling down really helped. I’d just lie in bed for ten minutes at each end of the day, concentrating on my Qi, my life force, whizzing around my body, from top to toe, and then I’d visualise my hot angry gut cooling down, easing, calming, and yes, it worked. Within minutes I felt the pain ease.

Trouble was, I still didn’t know what was causing it. Everything I’d read about the vague and unsatisfactory diagnosis of IBS suggested sufferers should eat more fibre, but I was living on the stuff.

So I decided to add the PR to CCPR. Taking personal responsibility for my own health, I started to do the opposite of what the conventional medical practitioners told me. I stopped eating all fruit and veg, and two days later passed the first solid stool I’d created for three years.

For fear of sounding fetishistic, I’ll avoid describing the pleasure I felt.

Gradually I reintroduced my beloved fresh ingredients to my diet, so that now I can eat almost all vegetables (although the onion family can give me a tough time), bananas and blueberries. All citrus fruit and apples are out, and I sorely miss them, but I do not miss the pain in my gut, nor the explosions in the loo!

As long as I stay stress-free (nice idea, but unlikely!) and avoid too much strong coffee, my innards now behave themselves pretty well. Added to the thrill of being well is the buzz that I did it myself. Where conventional medicine could only prove there was nothing seriously wrong and complementary could ease my symptoms, it was only by working on my own problem myself that I found the cause of my illness.

However, when complementary and conventional medicine offer the same advice, it’s best to listen and act. A couple of years after my knee surgery, swelling and pain returned, this time at night. Sharp enough to wake me up, the pain hit my weak spot: sleep. I can do anything as long as I get a good night’s kip, but suffer quickly when robbed of my slumber.

My spirits sank, so I visited both my medicine men.

While one talked of blocked Qi and the other of undrained lymphatic systems, both James O'Sullivan and my conventional doctor used the same word to explain the problem: stagnation.

So instead of avoiding exercise in the morning, when my knee hurt, I went straight for a walk after getting up or worked out on the rowing machine and hallelujah, the pain went away!

So thanks to my doctor, to James O’Sullivan and to the sense I was born with, to care about myself, I’m now almost completely pain free, in both the knee and gut.

CCPR is the way for me. Now I need to go for a walk!

Smiling Body Clinic, 4 St. Bridget's Place, Prospect Hill, Galway.
Monday to Saturday 9am to 7pm.
For appointment with James call 087 785 1158. For Eunice call 087 414 9228