beyond the margins of explanation

This Week in Reading:

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Of all of the books I read last year, this was one of the ones that most profoundly challenged my perspective.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, and an academically trained botanist teaching at the State University of New York. So often, science and traditional indigenous knowledge are seen as two halves of a binary: one modern, one antiquated, one based in facts, the other in spirituality. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer proposes that these two kinds of knowledge are oppositional not in content, but in perspective, and that taken together, each can enrich the other.

I have a long history of distrust in the western medical establishment—a weariness that solidified during an American Medical History class I took in undergrad. The class was almost entirely populated with pre-med students fulfilling their gen-ed humanities requirement, and they seemed to have a completely different experience of the curriculum than I did. As the semester continued, I became more and more convinced that the American medical institution had been established entirely to disempower women who had been practicing traditional healing and midwifery for centuries, and that scientific discovery came at the price of Black bodies treated like lab rats. More disturbing to me than the readings was the way the pre-med students appeared to analyze them. While I grew increasingly alarmed and irate, they placidly described the texts as “interesting” and “informative” in our seminar discussions. These future doctors of America seemed to have no interest in challenging or even acknowledging the inequity baked into the foundation of our medical system— and in six years or so they would have all of the credentials necessary to perpetuate that system on my own body.

However, my growing skepticism of the western medical system did not challenge my preconceptions about alternative medicine. I grew up next door to a naturopathic medical school and had always written off the grad students with their vegan bake sales as kooky hippies. Acupuncture, herbal tinctures, crystals and Reiki healing all fit into the same category of “too woo-woo” to be given serious consideration.

It was only this past year that I forced myself to consider if my easy dismissal of traditional practices was a manifestation of colonialism, white supremacy and the same multi century smear campaign by the western medical establishment that I so resolutely critiqued my former classmates for being continuously hoodwinked by.

I tried acupuncture for the first time this fall. Like many people, I came to alternative medicine out of desperation, at a moment when my daily morning yoga practice proved ineffective at managing my chronic back pain.

I did a lot of research before booking my first acupuncture session. The top Google results are primarily filled with white men who use the words “quackery” and “fraud” liberally. They author long webpages smugly detailing placebo effects, the dearth of clinical trials supporting traditional Chinese medicine and the lack of scientific logic underpinning these ancient practices.

I asked my acupuncturist how it worked before my first session. She told me she was going to place the needles along the meridians of my body, that I might feel them when she placed them but the sensation would be momentary. She said that everyone reacted a little differently, but that people often fell asleep or into a deep acupuncture rest, that I might feel a difference right after the session or a day or two later. But how does it work I pressed her. Does it stimulate nerves? Pressure points? Rewire brain connectors? Acupuncture allows your qi to flow along the meridian lines of your body, she told me. This did not feel like an answer to my question—a question that, to me, would require the vocabulary of western medicine, vocabulary that would legitimize the fact that I was letting a stranger stick needles all over my body.

She placed a dozen and a half needles across my bare body: in my ears, my ankles, my neck, my back. Her description, though lacking the medical terminology I had wanted, proved accurate—the sensation was about one tenth of the pain of a shot, and for only half of a second. I felt a deep, heavy sense of calm, like turning down to a lower decibel of consciousness. An hour later, I felt relaxed and mildly disappointed, my spine creaking as usual as I pulled my socks back on. The disappointment lingered the next morning, when I awoke with soreness not dissimilar to my typical back pain—but by the weekend, the tightness melted away into actual comfort, a feeling that has become increasingly rare for me in the past decade.

Western science is simply one way of understanding the world under and around us, but it is not the world itself. Science, like everything else, is a human construct. The black ants will continue to march along the dirt and build their homes, whether or not we have named each part of their leg, or even know that they exist. The planets will continue to orbit regardless of if we have calculated the equation to chart their path.

Like all human narratives, science is a story that has evolved, and continues to evolve. Theories gain popularity and are disproven; ideas are modified, tweaked to fit more current analysis. At one point, scientists believed that the atom looked like a bowl of pudding, with electrons floating inside like negatively charged plums. This is no longer the accepted model of the atom—we have a new model for the truth. Maybe it is closer to the actual truth of the natural world, maybe this new version, widely accepted for over a century, will be challenged again, until it seems as irrelevant as imaging an atom to be a British yuletide dessert.

Science has value—of course it does. But western science often gets tripped up in its own ego. It mistakes knowledge with truth itself. Truth is seen as synonymous with comprehension— it is difficult for western science to accept truths that are beyond explanation.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer approaches the natural world from the opposite perspective. Instead of presenting herself, the scientist, as the vessel of knowledge— the earth, in all its infinitely complex glory, is the teacher. She is the student sitting at its feet, hoping to glean the lessons the planet repeats season after season. Her approach is rooted in gratitude and reciprocity— instead of taking on the role of a neutral outside observer, she is in a relationship with the land, learning how it works in order to learn how to better care for it, to learn how it has continued to care of her.

We rarely are able to cure chronic pain— we only manage it. Through physical therapy, and yoga, and medication, and dietary adjustments, and lifestyle changes, and acupuncture and whatever else. Western science castigates acupuncture as quackery because it is beyond western science’s comprehension. But pain itself is beyond comprehension. And the methods western medicine offers to treat pain: opioids, invasive surgeries, often times are no more effective of a management strategy than a dozen and a half hair-like needles scattered across my body.

I am thinking about how acupuncture is often successfully used to treat migraines, a condition that remains very mysterious to modern science. I am thinking about how women experience migraines at a rate three times higher than men. I am thinking about how so little research has been done about the causes and treatment of migraines, and how similarly so little research has been done on how and why acupuncture works. I am thinking about the men who sit at the top of the institutions funding the clinical trials Western medicine demands to legitimize anything. I don’t think that all of these things are entirely coincidental.

As science is increasingly attacked by anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers, the left has deified it in order to protect it. Western science has been elevated to a holy doctrine, not to be questioned. In truth, a version of this newsletter has been sitting in my drafts for over a month—unfinished and unsent, so fearful I am of being construed as some kind of anti-science anti-vaxxer. (I am not, to be clear, though I hate that I must add that disclaimer, hate that I cannot trust the internet to read with a generous set of eyes.)

One type of knowledge is not superior to the other, but by broadening our approach we may be able to recognize a truth that extends beyond the boundaries of human explanation.

Unlike vaccines, or healing a wound or curing a disease, there is no quantifiable measurement to pain management, no antibody count or scar tissue to determine the success of treatment. Pain is in our bodies, and in our minds, but moreover, it is within us alone, and only the individual can determine if their pain feels better or worse. How can something whose goal is to lessen pain, be quackery if the recipient feels their pain lessen? Placebo or not, the pain has been managed.

Further Reading:

If you want to feel mad about the American medical establishment I recommend The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot and American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal.