Mehmet Oz on Speaking of Faith

Mehmet Oz is a cardiologist who gets why heart patients are so pissed off (finally!), and understands where alternative medicines can help. This is a great interview from the great public radio show Speaking of Faith.

Right now I'm seeing a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner, who I'll call Dr. K. My cardiologist recommended him, which blew my little mind. Dr. Matt and I are on a first-name basis now, after four years, two heart attacks and a cardiac arrest. We have achieved a state of clear with each other.

He knew as soon as I got out of the hospital that I'd be hitting them Internets looking for supportive/complementary therapies, if only to mitigate the side effects of the allopathic meds I'm on, which are not trivial. (Biggest problem: I'm absolutely exhausted a lot of the time.) He said, look, I know you, I know what you're going to do, and I just beg you, please do this with supervision. He said Dr. K understands drug interactions, please go see him.

So I'm seeing Dr. K. While his English is way better than my Chinese, which is limited pretty much to "ni hao!" and "xie-xie!", his accent is really thick. I find that it makes me listen harder, interestingly, and I remember what he says without taking notes. He did some acupuncture on me (immediately got the blood flow going in my compromised arm) and prescribed some Chinese herbs and also tai chi practice.

I'm brushing up on my tai chi forms--it's been years, I can't even do cloud hands properly any more--and taking these really disgusting herbs. I mean, wow. I thought I'd taken some foul Western herbal medicines. Valerian comes to mind. Valerian is almost palatable compared to powdered snakegourd rind (gua lou pi) and cordyceps mushroom (ling zhi). It got me wondering: Is this Dr. Matt's revenge?

I'll let you know how the treatment is going. So far, I'm a bit worse (ache-y mostly), but that sometimes happens at the beginning of TCM treatments as the liver clears out.

Snakegourd. *shaking head* the things I get myself into...