The Reluctant Healer

by Andrew D. Himmel

  When I opened them, Erica was standing directly in front of me, and I assumed that she saw I was on the verge of losing patience, because her expression began to shift away from anger. Her face softened, so I told her about my encounter with Phyllis. She brightened considerably and grabbed my forearm with both hands. Hard. Erica was strong. Not sure whether I mentioned that before. She probably couldn’t lift heavy weights, but she had an unnatural ability to channel any lingering strength in her arms down to her fingers. I felt pain.

  “You had to know that that was weird,” I said. But Erica was too joyful. I did not reciprocate, and she found this delightful. I was being mocked, and I didn’t like it.

  “Can you step back for just one second,” she said, “and appreciate, in the deeper sense, what just happened.”

  “In the deepest sense that I’m capable of achieving, it seemed that you literally assaulted this woman, publicly, without regard to her reaction, without regard to . . . anything other than your need to authenticate yourself, to yourself.” She was still smiling. “Because you did not authenticate yourself to anyone else.”

  “I healed her,” she said. “I know it, in the most profound way that I can know anything.” She reached over and grabbed a glass of wine on the bar, which I supposed was hers, and gulped it down. “I’m on a path,” she said. “And I’m staying on it.”

  8

  The Requirement of Wrinkles

  That should have been the end of things for us. The evening at Cipriani’s had no business being the moment when I felt cemented to Erica. But I had waited too long. I knew it then, and I know it now, as I piece together this chronology.

  Let me be clear. As far as the notion of actually healing someone was concerned, I was not enchanted. I certainly wasn’t convinced. I wasn’t even interested. In fact, I was developing contempt for the entire notion of healing, of mysticism, of alternative approaches. And the development of this contempt was a direct result of the time I spent with Erica, because, frankly, before Erica, I never really paid attention to the realm of mysticism. I was agnostic about the entire field. If I paid any attention at all, it was because PBS or NPR would occasionally run a story about some wrinkled soul with healing powers hibernating in some far-flung locale, and desperately sick people would trek for thousands of miles to bathe themselves in the aura of this enigmatic presence to find that their ailments, which had resisted all previous medical interventions, were cured at last.

  I would watch such shows, and while I wouldn’t accept the notion of supernatural ability, neither would I be contemptuous. I saw these stories more as cultural exposés, as much about the odd life of a healer whose sincerity could not be doubted as it was about the desperate straits of conventional types that I could more easily recognize. There was an intriguing tension between the two types, and the story itself about how the arcs of their lives intersected was fascinating. Add to that just a dash of the breathless possibility of legitimacy, and you had a story that could comfortably linger in your mind.

  But the roles had to be defined. The healer, first of all, had to be wrinkled. Not sure where this was written, but there you have it. Wrinkled and reclusive and laconic. Also, the healer couldn’t be excessively attractive. He (or she) could be interesting to look at, and of course, you would expect the eyes to be expressive, perhaps even just a tad maniacal. But the healer could not be physically alluring. And the healer had to have a quiet confidence in his or her abilities. You come to me, if you would like. If you do come, you enter my realm and play by my rules. But I’m not coming to you.

  And those with mystical abilities had to be removed from my life. They couldn’t be my cousins or friends, because this would trigger a level of scrutiny that I kept holstered. Why bother with scrutiny? I believe in the possibility of everything, without the burden of having to know anything. There’s nothing wrong with that, nothing escapist or indolent. I have a job, a lifestyle to support, a vague goal of doing pretty well in a decent firm so that I can have an established position in an acceptable manner.

  What am I trying to say here? It is this: The healer can’t be in my face, in my life. The mystic cannot be the center of my existence. Yes, I’m using that phrase. Way too soon, right? Except I knew then that it fit, and I also knew that there was nothing romantic about my status. I was becoming entwined, against my will. I was no longer along for the ride. I was hijacked. How did I know this? Because for all of the frustrations Erica caused me, I sensed that her absence would resurrect the void from which I had escaped. How pathetic. Before Erica, I was captive to the bonds of hollow routine, and now, I was simply a different kind of prisoner. But I intuited a redeeming feature, namely, that frustration would be my annoying savior, because—for reasons beyond my pay grade—I couldn’t be frustrated and empty at the same time. So I resolved then to assert myself, not through escape but in gaining control of my captor. I would wrestle with the situation, with Erica. I would contain her. I may have been a reactive type, but this did not leave me powerless. I had my intelligence, my stability, my will. I repeated this to myself many times. I began to believe it.

  9

  The Myth of Intelligence

  Idecided to shove Erica into the public sphere of my life. Time to meet the friends. Time to meet the family. Time to announce ourselves as some kind of established, combined entity. This would be part of the process of managing, of containing. I was not embarrassed. I was not a bystander. See Will manage. See him take control. Go Will, go. Call your friends. Be brave—set up a dinner date with your most cynical, most challenging friend.

  Who would that be? Stefan, for sure. Stefan Ortvald, my tall Danish friend and fellow Friday-afternoon escapee. Stefan had practiced law in Copenhagen for five years before coming to this country, passing the bar, and establishing himself as a rising star in our firm. He had a booming voice and a friendly demeanor tied to an acerbic wit, which could be gentle or withering, depending on his mood. He was entertaining, and he had a quirky girlfriend, Ava the artist, who was involved in some creative but undefined capacity.

  I found that even the act of setting up the date made me feel better. I was on top of this. I was arranging things. We’d spent the last few months on your terms, Erica. You would stake out one nutty position after the other, I would challenge you, you would push back, effectively, articulately, and I would reply. Sometimes I felt sure that I had gotten the better of the exchanges. But always, you were the center, the originator. Well, check this out. The four of us were going to have drinks, to be followed by dinner. And I was setting this up all by myself.

  Dinner was at Mare Blu, arguably the best Italian restaurant in the city. There was a supercharged trendiness to the place, a powerful gravitational force marked by attractive, crisply attired servants, with a thumping indie soundtrack.

  Stefan and Erica disliked each other. Perhaps this carried over from their first meeting at Mikonos. I hadn’t spoken to Stefan about her after our evening together at Mikonos, but something was communicated instantly between them. It may have been Erica’s fishlike handshake with Stefan, with a nanosecond of eye contact, followed by more than a nanosecond of dismissal. It may have been Stefan’s tacit message, Yes, you’re attractive, but I will not fawn; I’m a detached Dane, and I am involved with another.

  I knew Erica wasn’t happy about this dinner date. She did not resist the idea and had acquiesced immediately. But she had come to cherish (hell, I had come to cherish) our reclusive existence in the spotlight of New York. This dinner was jarring, not because it was an announcement of us, of our relationship, but because it marked the end of our time as recluses. Stefan was pushy and loud. As we sat there waiting for our waitress, I could feel our cocoon splintering.

  “Will tells me you are a social worker,” Stefan said, looking directly at Erica.

  “Will should have told you that I am a healer,” Erica replied. She darted her eyes about the table, locating the silverware, the bread, the water.

  “Y
es, well, that is right,” Stefan responded. “Social work really should be viewed in that light. What you do, what all mental health workers do, really, is remarkable. And undervalued.”

  “That is so right,” Ava chimed in. “I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve been to my fair share of counselors. The good ones helped me through some hard times.”

  “I sense we’re holding back here,” I stated. I wasn’t sure whether the panic was noticeable. “Finally, after one hundred and twenty seconds, our conversation is getting to the heart of things.”

  “Well, I am not so good at small talk,” Stefan said. “And neither are you, right Erica?” Erica smiled and nodded ever so slightly, and this put me at ease. Kindred spirits. Fearless conversational tacticians, saying whatever they wanted to. They were creating the bridge on which our evening would reside.

  This seemed to be a cue for Stefan to provide us a detailed history of his upbringing, his quirky politics, and his views on health care. “What I most admire about medicine in general and social work in particular,” Stefan said, “is its insistence on proof and on evidence. We can debate economics endlessly. Same with politics. We can line up an equal number of sharp people holding contrary positions. But less so with medicine. This drug works. This one doesn’t. Crohn’s disease responds to prednisone. Surgery is indicated for a broken arm. And where there are disagreements, passions are kept in check. The truth will emerge based on science. On facts.”

  “Ah, the myth of evidence-based medicine,” Erica said. “This all holds up for easy cases. Scratch an arm. Apply ointment. Fracture a wrist. Place in cast. But the moment, and I mean the moment, you view the problem more globally, that is the moment you recognize evidence-based medicine for the farce that it is.”

  “Well, evidence has some role to play, right?” Stefan asked, his wide smile fading a bit. “You are not advocating for sheer guesswork, are you?”

  Erica’s eyes were locked on Stefan’s. “I have nothing against evidence, but I question the validity of evidence-based medicine, as practiced by physicians. Did you know that . . .”

  At this point, I quickly glanced over at Ava, and I was gratified that we shared precisely the same expression. Helplessness. Exasperation. The communal bond of the bystander class.

  “Did you know that there was a recent study by an English medical journal, two, maybe three years ago? It zeroed in on twenty-five hundred treatments provided by physicians, all of whom were guided by evidenced-based medicine. There was nothing exotic about any of the ailments. So there should have been no reason why the rate of improvement wouldn’t have exceeded fifty percent. Do you know what the results of this study showed? Do you?”

  Erica pushed forward while Stefan leaned back.

  “Here are the results: About thirty-six percent of the treatments were arguably helpful, and eighteen percent were unlikely to be more beneficial than harmful. And even in that category, a big chunk of those was found to be more harmful than beneficial. So that leaves the biggest category . . . forty-six percent. In that category—almost half—the effectiveness of the treatment was found to be completely and totally unknown.”

  I started crunching the numbers but only to see whether everything added up to one hundred.

  “This means,” Erica continued, “that when you are sick and go visit a medical provider, a practitioner of evidence-based medicine, you only have slightly more than one-third of a chance that you’ll actually get treatment that has been proven to be helpful or arguably helpful.”

  Stefan closed his eyes slowly, then reopened them, emitting a trace of condescension. “This only means the doctors may be incompetent or not paying sufficient attention to the proper practices. I would like to see a study where the doctors provided treatment that everyone could agree was evidence based. What would the results show then?”

  “The problem is . . .” And now Erica leaned so far forward that she dominated our side of the table. “You can’t separate the practice of socalled evidence-based medicine from the politics and finance of medicine. There’s money to be made. By relying on evidence-based medicine, our noble, objective practitioners performed probably three million unnecessary surgeries last year alone. Think of it! Think of everything that is involved in any surgery. Even the simplest ones. There is the initial doctor’s visit. The pre-op tests. The review of those tests. Then there is the surgery. You need a room. A nurse. Maybe a physician’s assistant or two.”

  Stefan had decided to stay calm. This barrage would exhaust itself.

  “Then, there is the surgery itself. Then, the post-op care. The follow-up visits. Can you imagine how much money we’re talking about? The brute force of the financial incentive to keep this gravy train running? Think of it! Then, try to think how evidence-based medicine gets to play any role in how treatments are provided.”

  “Where are you getting this number, this three million unnecessary surgeries?” Stefan looked composed.

  “The United States Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. A study entitled ‘Unnecessary Surgery.’ A federal study, conducted by a federal agency.” Here, she turned to me. “A federal agency.” Somehow, Erica had determined that anything federal in nature would have enormous appeal for me. She released my gaze and returned to Stefan.

  “And this only refers to unnecessary surgeries. What about unnecessary treatment in general? Or ailments that need treatment but receive incorrect treatment? Or misdiagnoses! What you have is an incredible, appalling mess. And the end result is that, to a staggering degree, people are not healed by the medical profession. They are, all too often, harmed!”

  “So let us concede all of this,” Stefan said. “I am not an expert on all of these facts and figures, but let us assume, for the sake of argument, that there is enormous waste, enormous misallocation of resources, that doctors habitually get things wrong. The answer surely is to improve the system, not to abandon the system.”

  “The answer is to avoid the system, whenever and wherever possible. The answer is to discover an alternative, more integrative approach to healing. An approach that stays open to other possibilities.”

  “I think I get it,” Stefan said. “The answer is to abandon medicine. Not just the system. Not just the approach. But medicine. Western medicine, that is.”

  “The answer is to embrace alternate modes of healing.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?” Stefan asked. “What is an alternate mode of healing?”

  I wondered whether I should be defending Erica, but she appeared unaware of, or uninterested in, my presence. I glanced again at Ava and noticed that she was looking down, pursing her lips and controlling her breathing. Stefan was oblivious to her as well. It seemed as if the surrounding noise and clatter had died down and the trendy imagery of the restaurant had blurred to ensure the clarity of only one remaining sight and sound: the joined clash of the active participants.

  “In fact,” Stefan continued, “let us bring this down to practical terms. You are discovered to have a cancerous tumor. Let us assume that, despite all the ways this can be treated, there is clear agreement in the diagnosis itself. You have cancer. There is such a thing as cancer, right? There is no alternative cancer, correct? Cancer can exist as an identifiable, objective condition, and all the healers and all the money-corrupted physicians could look at this and agree. You, my friend in this hypothetical scenario, are fucked. You have cancer. Now what?”

  “That’s easy,” said Erica. “Get chemo, so your body can waste away at a horrifying and rapid pace. So your immune system can shut down.”

  “That is way too simple an answer. And it is an answer you give in a debating class. I am talking about a real person. With cancer. That person does not just run off and get chemo. That person thinks about his or her situation, and consults with people in the field, and makes decisions.”

  I was captivated by the staccato rhythm of the exchange, although a fleeting thought passed that Stefan might be bordering on incivility.
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  “And let us stipulate further that the situation is complicated. It is messy. Mistakes will be made along the way to try to arrive at the best approach. Well-meaning people will grapple with tough calls. The point is that you will be consulting medicine. You will be evaluating evidence. You will not let your political or social or economic views intrude on the decision-making process.”

  Erica leaned forward even more. “But what, exactly, will you be consulting? And what, exactly, will you not be consulting? With potential cures, will you give equal weight to nutrition? Detoxification? What about supplements and herbs? Light and sunlight? How about regression therapy? And before you even begin to answer, answer me this: Do you know about any of these approaches? You might just reflexively dismiss them. Fine. That’s fun, to be mocking. But have you studied them? If you’re going to be contemptuous, that’s actually okay. But you have to earn the right to be contemptuous. You have to be educated. And if you’re not, then all you have is a skillful deployment of words but no knowledge.”

  “Is that a compliment? Skillful deployment of words?”

  “Actually, you’re not the issue. The issue is healing. And since you seem to be locked into the western mode of thinking, I won’t even try discussing remote healing.”

  I searched for a distraction, something to derail the gathering intensity, perhaps an unsubtle change of topic, a request to a waiter, anything to disrupt the hypnotic menace of the argument. At this point, Stefan made a slight effort to raise his arm, but Ava, with an absence of subtlety, pushed his arm down. “I’d like to hear about remote healing. Would you consider yourself a practitioner?”

  Erica was not prepared for Ava’s gentle and accepting demeanor and was disoriented. “Well, maybe this is not the right time or place.”

  “No, please, this is the right time. I want to hear about this. I read something about this, I think. Something about chakras? And modalities?”