“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”—Sharon Begley.

Aside from the PEG, technological medicine had never anything to offer me to treat any of my symptoms and certainly nothing to address the underlying disease process. So I was left to come up with a compendium of alternative therapies while I kept investigating any other options that might still of use.

First, I saw an acupuncturist who prescribed some herbs. I went to a slew of acupuncture sessions none of which made any difference. I was somewhat hesitant to take any herbs not knowing what they were exactly or how they might affect me, I reached out to a clinical herbalist (I didn’t even know that was a thing). I took the herbs for a bit, but after a while decided to give up on this acupuncturist. The thing that did it for me was he was apparently getting flustered his interventions weren’t working, so he decided one day to bring out the big acupunture guns by making a small cut into each of my thumbs. That’s right, you didn’t misread it. He felt by giving me two tiny cuts that this would somehow magically heal my symptoms. I chalked this up to this “doctor” as a phony and stop visiting him, but I didn’t give up on acupuncture. I soon found another. 

Second, I found this rather strange therapy calling itself craniosacral therapy. Now on the one hand, this is about as crazy as the thumb-slicing acupuncturist, but I was getting more desperate as time went on, so I decided to give this a try.

Third, while it was a given that altering diet could not impact any of my symptoms, I entertained a number of crazy diets per suggestions from my acupuncturist, psychiatrist and alternative medical practitioner. Of course, none of these had any detectable effect. 

Fourth, I read in an alternative medical book that physical massage could help with depression (and i was extremely depressed at this point), so at one point, I was actually seeing two massage therapists! 

None of these therapies helped with any symptom, but they apparently did something for my psyche since I continued with them for a while until…