The Eyes Have It

I went to a holistic nutritionist yesterday who performed iridology and live cell analysis on me. Both of these practices are listed on a quack-watch site, but so are a bunch of other alternative methods. I was open to give it a shot because quite frankly I feel a bit off but subtly enough for a conventional doctor to say I'm perfectly well. It's not that I'd put all my eggs in the iridologist's basket either because I believe, with the exception of medical emergencies, our bodies are our best care givers, intuition included. But I needed some guidance to what I feel is a slight imbalance going on within.

Initially, he was straight forward and stern because I think half of his practice is advising people to not eat McDonald's and such, but when he realized that I was on an earnest road to optimal health, he softened and said less, which I appreciated. He performed the live cell analysis first. A slide of my blood - taken from a prick - was put under a powerful microscope and appeared on a large, dark monitor where my cells were outlined in white. This technique captures something very beautiful about us, as living organisms, that we are made up of galaxies. It's exactly what it looked like. I counted quite a few as he searched the slide of just one drop. Immediately he noticed a slight B vitamin deficiency. A couple misshaped red blood cells told him so. This kind of surprised me though I'm not sure why when this is an easy deficiency to have as a vegan. He said that my thyroid was a bit off too, which surprised me more. But he explained that the thyroid is a B vitamin gland. And later, I got to thinking about all the other things that could effect the thyroid and coincidentally and almost shockingly my girl Michelle from Weaker Vessel brought up something in my last post's comments that has also been on my mind for a while: The ill effects of soy which has, test after test, been connected to thyroid issues and big hormonal imbalances in women. I know, I know, isn't soy supposed to be the miracle food? Don't 200 year old Japanese people thrive off of soy, but from what I've read, cultures that we swear use tons of soy actually do not use it as much as we think (Americans super size everything) and they certainly don't process the living shit out of soy neither. Soy can be fashioned into anything, can't it? What do you want? A sword? A flower? A wiener dog? OH, IT'S ALL SUCH A GODDAMN RAZOR'S EDGE.

That's about all that was said about my cells though had he said more, I would have been suspicious. If he had brought up more issues, I would've known he was reaching. He brought up two very legitimate things -- the B vitamin lack and the mild thyroid imbalance -- that I will address with a blessing from my intuition. Then he looked into my eyes. The right side reveals the mother's genetic issues, the left eye the father's. On the quack-watch site, they blasted iriodologists that diagnosed patients with ailments, but the guy I saw said he used this technique only to uncover a family history as to have a better map of a potential genetic mine field. After looking into my Mother Right Eye, he wrote on the sheet, "Bronchial, notch on the pancreas." My mother has severe asthma. My grandmother died of pancreatic cancer. From my father's eye, he wrote: "PANCREAS, lower back, small notch on liver." He said, "Does that sound right?" I said, "I didn't really know my father at all." The profundity of this information sunk in just then. The iridologist was giving me a view into that which has been a mystery to me. He said, "It seems diabetes was prevalent on your father's side. It's good you live like you do." He added, "I also see that he had a sensitive system." We sat in a few seconds of silence, in his dark office with my blood cells still swimming on the monitor next to me. He said, "Not enough of the sweet life, it seems." I looked down at my hands and cocked my head. He was dead before I was two. Not enough sounds about right. The nutritionist finished by saying, "You have a good constitution. Very good health. It's good you're balancing out the little things now as you go into your 40's. It will make things so much better for you." He sent me on my way with a couple suggestions for herbs, a blood cleanse to help with my detox, a thyroid balancer. He told me to take the multi vitamin I have a home, for god's sake.

And that was that. He all but yelled NEXT as I left. I bought some supplements and I feel a little better, emotionally for sure. I'm silently and mildly thrilled that my father -- a man I never talk about or hardly think of -- danced around in my eye, with his diabetes and his sensitive lower back, if just for a few minutes.