In high school, I was taught us the wonderful story by Guy de Maupassant ‘The Piece of String’ which is a really sad story of a man who was a social outcast to begin with but who simply picked up a piece of string on the street and was vilified his entire life for having stolen someone’s wallet that had been lost the same time as he picked up that piece of string. Even as he lay dying, he said “It was only a piece of string.“
The remainder of this essay:
In my sophomore year in medical school, we were taught pathology by elderly and world famous teacher, Emmeric VonHamm, MD, whose specialty, incidentally, was venereal disease. He even wrote chapters in the major medical pathology textbook on venereal diseases. Dr. VonHamm had this strange way of lecturing. The medical students sat in a progressively elevating theater format surrounding the stage he was on. The audience was straight ahead and while his head looked straight ahead, his eyes were focused up at the ceiling: 1 of the strange idiosyncrasies of people and life. One funny story he told was when he was an inexperienced medical intern, he had a patient who kept pleading with him to remove his kidney for what sounded like reasonable cause. That was way before standard laboratory tests and X-ray techniques were available for the evaluation of kidney disease. Eventually VonHamm gave in, and removed that kidney: post-operatively the patient was very appreciative and said “Now I got rid of both of them.“ Obviously, the irony was that surgery would now be lethal for that patient.
During the lecture of his specialty, he discussed the venereal disease syphilis. He called it “the thief of the night” because the disease was doing it dirty work and destroying without the patient even being aware that there was a problem: “thief of the night.”
This whole essay is simply the recall of a discussion I had yesterday with a very youngish 52-year-old Black RN who was currently out of work on disability because of important and disabling neck disc surgery but she was recovering and was now back in school towards becoming an AdvAnced Practice Registered Nurse/APRN. She had been a smoker who stopped by using Nicorette chewing gum but recently she had begun to notice throat trouble and even nodules in the neck area which she correctly related to chewing that gum for the 7 years that the Nicorette gum had successfully helped her stop smoking. She was also significantly overweight by about 40 pounds and because she stopped the Nicorette gum with resolution of her throat issues, still she was referred her to an Ear Nose and Throat/ENT specialist. But she had begun CRAVING/eating sweets and recently gained 6 pounds. Besides being lively, engaging, positive, and energetic her blood pressure was now elevated a 145/95 and that blood pressure was grinding away silently as a “thief of the night” predisposing her to heart and kidney disease and stroke. Switching problems is not the healthy solution. 95% of hypertension is CURABLE naturally with no medications by getting the patient to change what they do dietarily: reducing salt, animal protein, alcohol, and overweight.
So next I gave her my best guess for why she had a craving for sweets. First, I pointed out the symbol of YIN and YANG which is two comma-shaped opposite forces but interconnected structures that go from one into the other. The top comma shape, bulges into the bottom comma shape, and the bottom comma shape bulges into the top comma shape. It is about balance. Next, I explained to her the concept taught to me. Food energetics were explained to me in the following fashion: if you have a hamburger and French fries from McDonald’s, energetically, that is not a ‘balanced’ meal–both a hamburger and the salted French fries are yang-tightening-down forces. There is no counter balancing but necessary up force until you add the Coca-Cola which is sweet-sugar-yin up force: recall the yin and yang structure of the 2 energies going into each other in order to achieve balance.
She was craving sweets to get “balanced” from what she had done earlier in terms of yang foods or having a too strong and dominating nature-this brief discussion of yin and yang is more than a bit narrow, but will do for now. A metaphor that I used at that point was: what if I promised to give her $1 million if she would walk around on just one leg for the next month-no cane, no support, just hopping around on one leg. That might last a couple of minutes but she would necessarily get BALANCED(!) and begin using both legs again very shortly. The same goes for her body: it must get balanced! So, to repeat, she was likely eating foods like meat-salt-eggs earlier in the day that created tightness-down energy and therefore she required the foods that would get her balanced and that was looser-up-out foods = the sweets.
Like so many of us, she needed a rethinking/altering of ALL she was doing so that she could remain calmly in balance and not automatically be “forced” to eat sweets. At this point I mentioned the old Jackie Gleason TV show portion called ‘The Honeymooners’ in which Jackie Gleason as a bus driver of only moderate intelligence would say of the difficulties of life that he as Ralph Kramden said to his wife Alice, “It’s bigger than the both of us.” Such is true of the food energetics that “force” us to get balanced based on what we previously ate.
As a physician, I must say with rare humility, I have no idea whether that entire explanation, besides possibly being entertaining, did any good whatsoever motivating my patient to change what she did after that office visit. Nonetheless, it is my yin-yang nature to do that and honestly, I have been somewhat effective, in general, educationally. Of course, I also use medications when necessary.