Marginal medicine: as healthcare becomes increasingly difficult to access, what does it mean to re-connect with traditional therapies.(culture)

My first memory of alternative medicine was that it wasn't an alternative--it was just part of growing up. Getting sick usually meant I'd have to lie on my stomach while my mother tubbed Eagle Brand medicated oil over my back and scraped a quarter across the skin. The icy-hot burning sensation, that sinus-cleating, overwhelming scent of the menthol, and the strangely painless scraping never failed to impart relief from dizziness, nausea, the flu--whatever ailment had me under the weather and in the grip of a "bad wind," as my mother called it. The coin's tracks left dark red stripes, evidence of the wind's toxins releasing themselves from my body, she explained.

That was as much as I understood of how this remedy worked. It was the first line of defense when my sisters and I caught our inevitable flues and fevers each Kansas winter. In kindergarten, the telltale marks just above my shirt collar once led a white teacher to pull me into a bathroom stall to examine the rest of my body and ask whether my parents beat me.

Don't get me wrong, we did go to the local St. Joseph's Hospital every once in a while. The one hospital visit I remember was to the emergency room after I'd spilled boiling-hot soup on my thigh. Eventually, we got a regular family doctor, after moving to Los Angeles when I was 10. Dr. Hoang, cheerfully ruthless with the shots, was the one Vietnamese doctor my dad knew in Chinatown, and luckily he took Medi-Cal.

By the time we got the Kaiser insurance that came with my dad's new job as a social worker, I had entered the world of junior high angst, orthodontics, and trips to urgent care if I so much as got a cough. My dad was determined to take advantage of those co-paid doctor visits, not to mention all the pharmaceutical drugs. He grew annoyingly familiar with the names of antibiotics, topical creams, and other prescription meds--which he'd use when he nagged us to "eat your medicine."

For me, any kind of health treatment has long been something to be avoided if at all possible, associated as it was with the long miserable waits in clinical lobbies and the anxiety of watching my parents struggle with bureaucratic hurdles in English-only. How ironic then, that I would find myself newly interested in Eastern medicine, homeopathy, holistic well-being, etc.... that whole constellation of everything from folk remedies to traditional healing practices known as "alternative therapy." I've been open--perhaps too open--in my curiosity about everything from Indonesian jamu and Chinese Qi gong, to magnet therapy and even "past-life regression."

A loved one's incurable disease and our own helplessness in the face of it have brought our family to this strange impasse. Forced engagement and renewed frustration with internists, specialists, and HMOs have also left us with the desire to dabble in acupressure and aromatherapy as if there wasn't a time when these pursuits would have seemed exotic and laughable as the accoutrements of health for rich white people.

The trouble was that I wasn't just searching for a cure. I was looking for something else as well--familiarity, comfort, culture.