I am often wary of holistic medicine because it conflicts with what I was taught growing up. You see a symptom, treat the symptom. However, nowadays, there’s a trend in medicine toward treating everything as part of the whole. Eat better. Exercise more.

Then there’s the emphasized holistic approach that almost seems to stem from Eastern medicine. Maintain the balance in your body. Don’t eat too much “hot” foods (greasy, etc.) or too much cold foods (things that are too cool, I never really understood this one). Then recently I learned about chiropractic.

It’s the idea that your aches and pains come from the lack of nerve communication from the spine. That it’s important to get the spine straightened and life managed correctly for the back. The reason that you may have a heart attack or other maladies come from subluxations–pinches of nerves from a misaligned spine. Granted, I was immediately doubtful. Sure, I shouldn’t be sleeping on my stomach (yeah, so I sometimes like the feeling of suffocation) but would that really affect whether I may have a heart attack? Maybe since nerves can be pinched and thus the performance of the heart may not be optimal? Or the lungs? Or why people die young?

Doubts though. I can be convinced that perhaps some pains and aches from the misalignment. Yet everything else? Nothing is that purely black and white. And I am wondering why I persuaded someone to do it…because I thought he had a bad back when I can’t believe it myself.