An Open Letter to my Colleagues and My Profession

[I sent this to "Acupuncture Today," but they don't really do Letters to the Editor, so I decided to post it here...]

I've been going along practicing small town Chinese medicine for 26 years, and growing more and more dismayed at my profession's agenda and trajectory. My dismay is associated with the trends illustrated by two articles in this month's (May 2026) Acupuncture Today: the first claims that using automated online scheduling is the way forward for acupuncturists within the VA; the second approvingly cites "the latest thing from China regarding the constitution," and its claims that "By clarifying the relationship between constitution, disease, and pattern differentiation, the standard strengthens professional credibility, supports research, and enhances patient-centered treatment."

I can't tell you how much I think these are the wrong things for our profession to hold onto; further, that they are exactly the wrong direction for us to move in. Both are rooted in surrender to the biases and expectations of the intellectually unbalanced West, and if we have ANYTHING to offer at this moment in human history, it is to continue to steadfastly insist that, "No, balance of mind, body and spirit is more important than any trend of language, philosophy, politics or economy." This takes confidence, even stubbornness, but without holding our ground we just make ourselves into another "auxiliary" branch of Western medicine -- incomplete, deficient, and forever subservient to the allopathic approach.

For starters, TCM itself was such a ceding of ground to the West -- an attempt to make Chinese medicine more palatable to Western science and more consistent for its varied practitioners. News flash -- it didn't work. The language of TCM is still too subjective and too dependent on context for the West's intellectuals to ever approve. AND the outcomes are less successful than the outcomes derived from TCM's organically-grown antecedent, Classical Chinese medicine. So just as in some Bronte sisters novel, we subjugate and debase ourselves and still don't get the attention of the lords and ladies. Now, in our desperate (and somewhat pathetic) efforts to ingratiate ourselves with gatekeepers, we volunteer to give up autonomy by pushing forward with robotic scheduling? Will you next suggest that we allow AI to help us with treatment planning and pattern differential? You know, so the rich and powerful kids on the playground will play with us? THEY WON'T, no matter what we do -- we don't just speak a different language -- we pay attention to a different understanding of existence, and there's no getting around that basic fact. If we had any security, confidence or professional pride, we would continue to stay our course, providing excellent alternative medical care, and continuing to let people come to us in their own time, whether as individuals or as part of larger groups like the VA (which very much DO recognize our value). 

To be clear: I have been a VA Care in the Community provider for about 10 years; I participated in the Medicare study that resulted in acupuncture for LBP becoming a payable procedure; and I have accepted Workers' Comp and No-Fault insurance since the beginning of my career (in 2000). I am not suggesting that we remain peacefully in our hermetic caves, waiting for patients to fall from the skies, but I AM suggesting that our political and cultural lobbying efforts, which were looking promising for a while, have suddenly taken a foolish and fearful path which completely overlooks our actual power. Our power doesn't lie in aping Western medicine, speaking their language and essentially fulfilling their ideas about "dry needling." Our power lies in preserving and practicing the oldest continuous form of aboriginal medicine in the world, repeatedly demonstrating that it is safe and effective in situations where science and the intellect alone are not, and repeatedly seeking new arenas (like pandemic medicine) where our approach is plainly superior to Western approaches. Yes, they have all the money and all the power, but they also are making blunder after blunder after blunder by ALWAYS giving science the last word and ALWAYS choosing human-made, two dimensional symbols like numbers and letters rather than engaging with the complexity of the three dimensional world that we actually inhabit and that our medicine attempts to understand. 

Most controversially for the intentions of this letter, native-born Chinese practitioners are the LAST people we should be looking to for advice about the direction of our medicine. Given the sometimes murderous gyrations of their nation since 1949, the only certain thing that we can say about such providers is that they are survivors. I am big on survival myself, but surely we can aspire to something higher than simply surviving a despotic system and trying to guarantee ourselves, through political and bureaucratic means, a certain number of crumbs from the table? Acupuncture is engaged with eternal truths which will reasonably be expressed in different ways, with different strengths and weaknesses, by different cultures. American, or at least Western, approaches to acupuncture have little to offer in terms of tradition, but we are very ingenious and energetic, and we don't like taking "No" for an answer. Possibly we'd be better off leaning into our cultural strengths rather than trying to ape a different culture as we continue to work to create a bona fide American style of acupuncture. However, this doesn't mean CHANGING ACUPUNCTURE -- although Americans are seen by the world as being naive, brash and reckless, we don't have to extend our tendency to disrespect to the actual practice and philosophy of the medicine. Indeed, it is a larger betrayal to surrender to AI and the scientific method than it is to question, even to  challenge, practitioners from our medicine's native land.  

Specialization; appropriate insurance reimbursement; standardized education. These are all reasonable, logical goals to strive toward, and we will always lose if we only aim at reasonable, logical goals. The scientific, binary West is better at logic than the philosophical, three dimensional East is; is pursuing logic at all costs; and fealty to logic is what is taking the West (and the rest of the world, which has largely bought in) straight off the edge of the cliff we all find ourselves upon.

Not only CAN our community do better; it MUST do better. Most of humanity agrees that we're on the wrong trajectory, and we practitioners of Chinese medicine are all about trajectories -- that's our expertise! Yes, they're fuzzy sometimes and meander when you want them to go in a straight line, but if there is anything to our method it is rooted in understanding trajectories. The trajectory of American acupuncture is currently toward an existence as third class medical factotums who can speak medicalese real good, but are no more effective or any different than the physicians we are aping, because we will merely be practicing a hamstrung, primitive and bastardized version of what physicians already endorse. And we will be mocked and blamed when our hamstrung, primitive and bastardized techniques don't work very well.

Happy to discuss it more, if anyone is listening, but finally wanted to get it off my chest. 

Thanks for your time.

Trey Casimir M.S., L.Ac.

Sharpshooters and Surfing

As an acupuncturist in the scientific, go-go modern West, one of my pastimes is to listen for things that science doesn’t understand and then attempt to explain those things using my education and experiences as a practitioner of breath-centered exercise and classical Chinese acupuncture. I heard a good one on the radio the other day.

There is an insect called a sharpshooter which has developed an effective evolutionary response to a big challenge it has. It drinks so much sap (80 times its body weight per day!) to get its nutrients that it has to pee like crazy, and it's so small that if it peed the usual way, it would constantly be inundated with its own urine. So the sharpshooter developed a unique and efficient way of getting rid of all that pee. Through a series of spring-like muscles and other structures, the sharpshooter flings urine away from itself like a machine gun, and here’s the interesting part: after it leaves the sharpshooter’s body, the urine droplets speed up! This shouldn’t be possible, according to the physical sciences – the stone can’t fly faster than the catapult’s bucket was moving. At the moment, scientists are hypothesizing something to do with the droplets being deformed and then springing back into shape – they think the rebound accounts for the increased speed.

However, an American acupuncturist says, “Surfing! And Frisbee! I bet rotation is involved, somehow.” In surfing, by traveling diagonally across a (rotating) wave a surfer can accelerate to speeds way higher than the forward speed of the wave. And a skillful Frisbee player can throw a disc so that it seems to pause and then speeds up (an air bounce, among other throws). In each of these cases, rotation applied against an existing plane of motion (a Frisbee against an air current) or leverage applied against a rotating plane of motion (a surfboard’s skeg against a rotating wave) results in acceleration beyond that of the existing plane of motion. Physics tends to only focus on the initiation of the movement, and assumes simple and predictable vectors of movement after it is initiated. However, life shows us other possibilities.

My bet is that the sharpshooter’s “buttflicker” (the technical term, believe it or not) also provides spin, or rotation, or a spiral in football terms, to the urine droplets. This spiral helps the droplets screw through the air, just like a football or Frisbee, helps the droplet regain its form, and combined with the rebound effect scientists have hypothesized, seems likely to add enough kinetic magic to account for the acceleration that has been observed. Because the droplets are tiny and essentially transparent, spin is probably very difficult to detect, but I bet it’s there.

Bringing things back to the human sphere, I don’t think its an accident that we Frisbee players and surfers tend to be philosophical people who regularly live outside the mainstream, seek alternative approaches to common problems and tend toward being iconoclasts. We have been told our whole lives that there are immutable laws – of physics, morality, legality – but we have been able to see with our own eyes that those laws are NOT always immutable – there are various situations where they don’t seem to apply. When it comes to “immutability,” a single exception blows the whole thing out of the water, and we surfers/Frisbee players/acupuncturists are perverse enough to say, "Nuh, uh," and to keep on saying it.

This is the thing that surfers, Frisbee players and acupuncturists have to offer the Western scientific world, if it cares to listen: sometimes it is the movement that is meaningful. Science focuses on the structures, chemistry and mechanisms of life, but because that focus is especially trained on the pathological, actual normal function sometimes is overlooked. There are consistent, regular illustrations of nature’s ability to accelerate across a plane. Among other things, focusing study on this reality may unlock some of the mystery surrounding dark matter; may help with deep space calculations of star ship movements; and may help us better understand the way things work right here on our tiny, beautiful planet.

Including understanding more fully how bugs pee.

"Halos of Dark Matter..."

 I just heard a story on the radio about the cosmos that included an astrophysicist saying these words: “There’s a halo of dark matter surrounding each galaxy.” This made me very excited. I did some research and found this on Wikipedia:

“A dark matter halo is a hypothetical component of a galaxy that envelops the galactic disc and extends well beyond the edge of the visible galaxy. The halo's mass dominates the total mass. Since they consist of dark matter, halos cannot be observed directly, but their existence is inferred through their effects on the motions of stars and gas in galaxies. Dark matter halos play a key role in current models of galaxy formation and evolution.”

I have always had a problem with the concept of dark matter. Since it’s invisible, why is it assumed to be material? I know, I know, its mass is inferred due to its apparent influence on gravity and the expansion of the universe. However, it so happens that this assumption about the meaning of this unexplained dynamic (“there’s a whole bunch of invisible matter that causes a gravitational effect”) is very similar to a common, poorly examined assumption about the nature of yin qi. Yin is substantial, wet, cold and receptive, even attractive. Frequently it is treated as though it is passive, but receptivity is an active state. Similarly, the concept of dark matter implies a bunch of inert stuff that exerts an influence strictly due to its (passive) weight and mass. Astronomers and astrophysicists keep looking for a bunch of invisible stuff – matte black clods of dust or cloaked space drek. However, I think it’s unlikely they’ll find it, no matter how clever their telescopes become, because I don’t think it is stuff that is causing this effect – I think it’s a movement. Specifically, an attracting/sensing/pulling movement that asymetrically balances the more obvious pushing movement that arises out of the core of the universe.

The reason I was excited about the term, “a halo of dark matter” is because it echoes one of my first coherent ideas about the action of acupuncture, which was one of the original concepts that inspired this essay. Behold.

An Analogy for the Mechanism of Acupuncture

Copyright 2009, Trey Casimir M.S.L.Ac.

A patient recently asked me how I thought acupuncture worked in scientific terms. I’ve heard this question many times in nine years of practice, and didn’t have an answer, but told her that I thought it had something to do with the undifferentiated nerve fibers that occur throughout the sub-dermal level of our bodies. These fibers do not have a connection to the central nervous system and were found by accident by scientists looking for something else in the 1990s. Those researchers thought that perhaps the fibers were involved in the pain response, but didn’t really know or understand their purpose. I have always wondered if these undifferentiated nerve fibers might be associated with proprioception, but in any event I have reasoned that whatever else an acupuncture needle does, it penetrates this layer of nerve fibers when it is inserted into the body.

In casting about for a way to describe this that might make sense to my patient, a computer network specialist, I suddenly had an idea and said, “Maybe these nerve fibers work like a wireless computer network. Maybe what has been previously described as a mystical “aura” or “subtle energy” is actually like a wireless communication system within the body.” And I felt pretty pleased with my metaphor. However, my patient took it a step further the next day. She told me that in thinking about what I had said, it occurred to her that every wireless network she had ever worked with periodically needed to be hard-wired to the server– after adding new hardware or software, in order to re-sync the wireless with the wired system, they had to be briefly connected with wires and re-booted. Maybe, she suggested, the acupuncture needle fulfills the role of the wire acting to re-sync the wireless system (the undifferentiated nerve fibers) with the server (the central nervous system).

Exchanging physical, mental and/or spiritual trauma for the computer system’s trauma of new hard or soft ware, I think this makes more sense than any other explanation I have heard for explaining the mechanism of acupuncture. As I further reflect on the main adjustments one can make to influence an acupuncture treatment (the amount of time the needles are retained, electrifying or heating needles, suctioning the flesh upward around a needle, or otherwise stimulating the point by moving the needle up and down or twirling it), the more I like the analogy. I have no idea how to turn this analogy into a hypothesis capable of being tested, but it comes closer than any other idea I have heard for explaining the full range of mechanisms I have witnessed in nine years of practicing and 20 years of receiving acupuncture.”

Maybe it’s just me, but “undifferentiated nerve fibers occurring throughout the sub-dermal level of our bodies” sounds a lot like a “halo of dark matter surrounding every galaxy.” If I am correct about the Law of Signatures being a true thing; and if my statement that 90% of movement starts at the center and radiates to the extremities and 10% of movement starts at the extremities and radiates back to the core is true; and if I am also on the right track with this analogy of the action of acupuncture, then this “halo of dark matter” is actually a “halo of pores.”

The dark matter theory arose to explain clear astronomical observations that showed gravity mis-behaving, but dark matter is a place holder, an “x” in an equation. It may well have a material aspect, but it seems far more likely that the importance of this dynamic has to do with movement rather than matter. Specifically, an attracting movement, or a gatekeeping movement, like a membrane of celestial ion channels. This would account for the coherence of galaxies, and would also offer a possible explanation for the perplexing behavior of the universe. If galaxies can actively take in, or “sense,” then there are other transactions taking place between galaxies than are described in the simple, unidirectional models of physics. We don’t need sharper telescopes or bigger rockets– we need to change our expectations to include the likelihood that the universe is listening as well as making noise. True, 90% of the universe’s energy goes into making noise, but the 10% that is devoted to listening will actively upset every model that scorns, ignores or forgets it.

My New Mantra

Live long,

Die fast,

Leave a tasty corpse.

DEPRESSION -- Is It Sometimes a... Misunderstanding?

I was seriously depressed twice, when I was 16 and again when I was 19. Incapacitated by a sense of utter pointlessness and complete dread. As in many cases of depression, mine took the form of an internal dialogue, and the ultimate conclusion to that dialogue was to discover the great void that surrounds us all, all the time, separating each of us inexorably and universally from everything and everyone until we pointlessly die. With each episode I spent some weeks completely derailed, then gradually limped back to faking it until I could make it, then kept limping as fast as possible away from the direction of the depression. I didn't think of it at the time, but depression was definitely a "place" that I would either fall into or avoid.

Fleeing depression took me away from the Academy and into the dance world. Eventually I became a yoga instructor and then an acupuncturist, and now feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be, doing what I'm supposed to be doing. As an American practitioner of body/mind/spirit medicine, I'm constantly going back and forth in my mind about Western concepts vs. Chinese concepts, literal anatomy vs. energetic anatomy and other puzzles of physical, mental and spiritual existence. Sometimes (more and more) I fall on the Chinese side of things (which includes spirit in its calculations and so seems more complete -- more three dimensional -- than scientific medicine in describing the human condition), and sometimes I fall on the Western (rational, reductive, quantitative) side of things, when it comes to conclusions. However, sometimes I think maybe I have hit on something new, that I haven't seen, heard or read about in either the Western or Eastern literature. About 25 years ago I had an experience that maybe fits in this last category.

[One of the frustrations for a rational person when they read or hear about body/mind/spirit approaches is how vague and uncommitted the language is. There are various reasons for this, but one of my main reasons for being such a hedger of bets is that I don't want to tell a lie by accident -- as far as I'm concerned, every acupuncture treatment is an experiment with needles, and judgment is withheld until the outcome is observed. This kind of reverse engineering of a medical procedure is anathema, even malpractice, from a Western point of view, but is typical of all traditional treatments -- first you reassure yourself about the potential risk, then you take the leap and try, then you examine the outcome. So I will regularly cite my experience as a reason for doing a treatment or suggesting an approach, but always encourage my patients to make their own sense of the situation and would suggest the same for you, my dear reader. I understand that this is frustrating and unsatisfying for a rational person, but it is not accidental, and I don't see an ethical alternative approach.]

In the late 90s I was doing some yoga, not particularly thinking about anything, when suddenly I thought about the anatomy of the brain -- two hemispheres divided by a central fissure. In the stream of consciousness state I was in, I immediately stacked a couple of ideas together: What if my previous depressed internal dialogue was one half of my brain fruitlessly questioning the other? And what if the existential void I discerned was actually my questioning hemisphere's misinterpretation of the gap between the two halves of my brain? And with that, I went to the place where the depression lay (I knew exactly where it was, because I'd been purposefully avoiding it for about 20 years), faced the void and jumped in.

By this point in my career I was very comfortable with using my breath as in internal guidance system -- sometimes anchoring me, sometimes goading me, but always a safe, truthful and consistent physical mechanism to which I could orient myself. So as I dove into the void, I kept my attention on my breathing as a lifeline. It was acutely uncomfortable in there -- I was right back where I had been when I was 16 and 19. But after a minute and a half or two, I was through it, landed on the other side, and in that instant, my latent depression and my fear of my depression utterly and completely evaporated. Since, I have felt very confident in my understanding of my situation -- my depression was not what I thought it was, but was instead a big old anatomical misunderstanding with myself, which my youthful energy, imagination and over-confidence turned into a terrifying and un-approachable monster. 

In preparation for writing this piece, I also realized that each time I became depressed I was in the thick of intense intellectual introspection -- trying to break things down as far as possible to get the purest possible understanding of the nature of existence. That's the intellect talking -- it assumes that everything can be broken down, and that way lies the Truth. It turns out that is only sometimes true. In my case, I would now add to the list of questions that inspired my leap into the void, "And what if, by trying to break things down so far I was actually using fewer and fewer of the neurons in my brain, so that by the time I was depressed it was one tiny neuron looking at the fissure between the two sides of my brain, making the fissure seem that much more enormous, inescapable and overwhelming?"

Not all depression is the same, and I wouldn't recommend my technique to anyone who hasn't spent extensive time working with breath and getting comfortable with using breath as an internal sea anchor. However, 35 years of working in this arena have taught me that our intellects are not as smart as they think they are -- they certainly don't have all the answers. And sometimes their misunderstandings, or incomplete understandings, can have fatal consequences. 

Aimovig, the internet, and the end of the world

Alienation, dissociation, psychopathy. This is a standard progression of a certain type of aggressive and destructive mental illness. It is also now the (un-examined, unexpected and unintended) standard operating procedure for modern humankind.

David Abrams’ mind-blowing book, “The Spell of the Sensuous,” recommended to me by the brilliant writer and my reluctant sometimes-mentor, Ruth Steck, elegantly and articulately lays out the start of humankind’s migration away from nature. However, since its publication in 1996 humankind has continued to churn as fast as it can away from the realities of nature, and with the development of the always-on internet and new drug breakthroughs, we may have passed our children through the sieve of no return. Time will tell.

Old people are always dissatisfied with young people, and part of that dissatisfaction arises from fear, mostly the fear that the kid will crap out and be unable to pass along the family genes and history. My current alarm includes that eternal tendency, but modern conditions expand that fear and make it species-wide – I’m not just worried about MY kids, I’m worried about all of them. I’m not the first to express alarm over the tendency of young people to prefer alternate reality to reality, but I see it as part of a larger tendency of humankind, rooted in Western culture but now a global phenomenon. That tendency, as laid out in Abrams’ book, is to place ourselves outside of Nature, and to believe that separation is always available and is always a reasonable approach. From a body/mind/spirit perspective this is a surrender to the mind – “reasonable” and “logical” arguments always prevail in our current social discourse, and “science” always gets the last word – but from the b/m/s point of view such deference results, always, in an incomplete and unbalanced approach to life. The mind also has this one consistent, negative tendency – arrogance. The mind tends to believe that it knows all there is to know, or at least all the important stuff. Ideologues today, as always, understand this on some level and appeal to the most ignorant and most arrogant, and tend to do pretty good business. For that matter, “business” itself is a weaponized product of the mind, and is all about rationalizing and justifying exploitation, theft and abuse in the name of making a buck. “It’s not personal; it’s just business,” is a lie, and always has been. The lie is now so widespread that it has taken over many people’s entire reality and left us in a state of (a few) haves who are willing to continue to full-throatedly live the lie, and the rest of us have-nots, who aren’t willing to abandon the shreds of our common humanity in order to be a little better off than the neighbors. Still, the lie has the force of a black hole at this point, and we either need to come to our senses and rocket away from the lie, full-throttle, or make plans for our coming annihilation.

Personally I am a dark salmon and, having spawned, my focus is on the next generation. I will continue working for the rest of my life and still engage with the issues of the day, but I am mostly out of ambition, other than to support and protect my children. Along with that, I am not particularly addressing people my age so much as the younger people who will inherit the world we olds hand off to them. We are now, as a species, at a moment of specific and unique peril that we have never experienced before. It has been slowly and then rapidly creeping up on us, and we are now in its jaws. I am not at all sure that our species will survive this moment, because I don’t think our species understands or recognizes the nature of the peril. In fact, our typical response to peril is exactly the wrong thing to do in this situation. When we modern humans hear, “danger,” our defensive response is to run away. If we can’t get away, then we have an internal defensive response called dissociation which is a kind of internal running away. However, WE are the danger, or at least one part of our approach to life is, and we can’t run from ourselves.

The number one mistake people express about the body/mind/spirit concept is a belief in “mind over matter.” This is possible; happens occasionally, briefly; but is absolutely not a reasonable target for a healthy lifestyle, and is profoundly pathological as an expectation of life. This is now pretty much the un-examined expectation of most people in the modern world. “Better thinking” is the answer to every problem, “wrong thinking” will make you sick, and “mindfulness” is needed to overcome stress. And in a larger sense, “AI is the answer to all our problems – stronger, faster and easier thinking is always the answer to everything.” Uh, no. It’s not. In fact, the intellect is the source of some uniquely human pathologies, including the ones listed in the first sentence. Since it tends toward arrogance, it is unlikely to consider some alternative perspective, such as is contained in classical Chinese medicine. The modern, logical world would rather be right than be happy, and hasn’t yet discovered that one can be logical, unhappy, and also wrong.

Some say the answer is to turn back to God, but there’s no going back in this life, no matter what the sci-fi movies say. Some say we should focus entirely on physical health, eating good food, doing perfect exercise and getting weekly massage. Nice work if you can get it, but it’s no solution, either, although it must be said that the physical is typically the starting point for evolving away from a purely mind-centric existence. The actual thing we must do to save all our lives is to figure out how, as a species, we can live a life that is balanced between intellectual, physical and spiritual needs. Various individuals have achieved this state, and aboriginal societies around the world have, too. But no modern society has even attempted to balance these three parts of existence in their culture. The oldest civilizations (Chinese, Hebrew) have an understanding of this concept and contain more than the usual number of seekers trying to live in balance. Europeans, too, especially Scandinavians, are edging closer and closer to this approach, but they’re unafraid of socialism (but also hostile or indifferent to spirituality). However, modernity in general, as represented by the USA, is too busy, too impatient and too greedy to do the slowing necessary to re-orient our society. This imbalance has been the case for some time – a hundred years at least – but has been accelerated by the development of the internet and social media at one end of the spectrum, and may have passed a crucial tipping point at the other end of the spectrum with the recent introduction of Aimovig. 

The internet “puts the world’s knowledge at everyone’s fingertips,” as if that’s going to answer all the world’s questions. It’ll answer, all right, but without context or experience, and will balk if you ask the “wrong” question. AI is even worse, notorious for providing well-crafted lies. And social media! Makes our young people believe they are failures because they don’t have a million followers and a monetized Youtube channel! Easy to see how the internet’s influence could make one pull away from reality, becoming less social and less connected to actual humans in favor of connecting to avatars and other strangers who share your interests. Maybe you’d even start thinking that the answer is to disconnect from the Earth and move to Mars or somewhere else… But this is an accidental side effect of a novel technology being managed by impatient, greedy and inexperienced young people. The truly chilling development is in medicine, where the organic rubber meets the scientific road and we find out whether it really IS a good idea to give thalidomide to pregnant people. 

Aimovig, aka erenumab-aooe, is a medication that aims to prevent migraines, and its mechanism, purposefully and thoughtfully developed by skilled, intelligent and very well-educated people, is a horrifying nightmare to an acupuncturist, and should be a nightmare for any thoughtful person. The scientists who developed Aimovig figured out which peptides are involved in creating the connection between the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. Aimovig interferes with the production of these peptides at the genetic level so that your central nervous system becomes less-connected to your peripheral nervous system. In other words, Aimovig literally disconnects your feelings from your brain. Literally. Physiologically separates you from yourself so you can’t feel things. The main organic illness that causes this dynamic is leprosy, but even without the gory visuals, what person with any experience of life would think that this is a good idea? Separation, the great trick of the mind that allows us to feel superior to animals (and other races/religions/ethnicities), and which, unchecked, leads to the three horsemen of the first sentence, is now provided in pill form, in hopes of preventing migraines. Full disclosure: it is my belief that acupuncture works by re-connecting the central and peripheral nervous systems, so I don’t just see Aimovig as a really stupid and destructive idea, but also as a direct attack on the form of medicine which I practice.

Which brings me to my final observation. That thing about, “rather be right than happy..?” The most heart-breaking thing I have experienced in 24 years of acupuncture practice (and I have experienced it repeatedly) has been provided by those people who have success with acupuncture – their symptoms improve or go away – yet because they can’t understand or explain it, they refuse to believe it and even reject the whole experience. And this is where, with our wonderful big brains and our amazing technologies, we’re dumber than dogs. If you make a dog feel better, it will lick your hand and wag its tail. Only a human will bite the hand that gives it relief because that relief doesn’t fit their preconceptions. And whereas a dog can get smarter, because it’s open to any new experience, humans are fully capable of closing their minds to new evidence, knowledge or wisdom that doesn’t comport with what they already know, and so are capable of limiting their own understanding. One of the main differences between us and dogs? They have so much neural information coming in from their noses, ears and tongues that they have no choice but to stay connected to the world around them, even if it makes them otherwise “dumber.” If our species doesn’t make it, I hope some more doggish creature takes our place, and I hope they maintain a connection to dog medicine, which involves licking it until it feels better or falls off. Almost as effective as Aimovig, and way safer for… everything.

A Brief History of Humanity

Some millennia ago, some ape-like creature looked in a still pool of water, saw its reflection and thought, “Wait a minute – that’s me!” It showed other ape-like creatures this trick, and soon there was a whole tribe of “people,” who recognized themselves in the reflection and recognized that they were different from other “people,” including animals.

Recognizing their separateness made certain things easier for the ape-like creatures – they could kill and eat other animals with much less stress, for instance, because they were different/separate/not-me. The ape-like creatures could also see that they were different from the environment, so they began to excavate, to dam rivers, to farm and otherwise exploit the rest of the separate-from-me world.

The ape-like creatures continued to evolve and grow their societies, but retained various connections to the rest of the world, especially through long-time practices like hunting, fishing and farming. Like any other animal, the ape-like things had to pay attention to the water, the woods and the weather to know when to plant, hunt or fish. When they went to war they reverted almost entirely to their pre-reflection selves, although war was only possible because they saw themselves as separate from whoever they were fighting. In body/mind/spirit terms, they were almost completely physical – the biggest, strongest and most connected to the physical world won, in general.

Not all the ape-like creatures were big and strong, though, and as their species’ dominance over the other animals became more and more established, the ape-like creatures had time to wonder. This gave rise to shamans, priests and other spirit guides, and the ape-like creatures went through a spiritual phase of existence, guided and ruled by other ape-like creatures who claimed a close relationship to God. Curiously, the ape-like creatures became very afraid and distrustful of the physical world during this phase, diminishing the social status of hunters, fishers and farmers and turning away from sex and other pleasurable aspects of the physical world.

Then along came Rene Descartes, who said, “I think, therefore I am,” and the ape-like things were off to the races. If thought was the thing that made the ape-like creatures exist, and if awareness of their individual existence made them different from the dumb animals and the quiet Earth, then the sky was the limit. Literally – flying and leaving the Earth are universal fantasies of the intellect. It almost goes without saying that the mind feels nothing but discomfort and contempt for the physical and spiritual worlds. 

Now (September 17, 2023) we are at a point where our willful, purposeful separation from the rest of existence has led us to the brink of global climate and culture collapse. And what are our responses? To create AI, which has no connection to the natural or spiritual worlds at all, and to make plans to leave the planet once it’s ruined, the greatest separation of all. Some try desperately to “go back” to some former halcyon time. But for these “golden age” ape-like creatures too, the mechanism of their solutions, the avenue of their efforts to reclaim the past are the same as the other ape-like creatures’ forward looking solutions – to separate. From the immigrants, from ape-like creatures with different religious beliefs, from government and from other representatives of the modern world. 

We have become a uni-directional species that appears to be speeding toward a cliff, and the common feature of this rush to self-annihilation is this habitual but now purposeful and sometimes violent tendency to separate. This tendency has become the favored strategy, even the monopolistic strategy for the species. Even the stupidest, least thoughtful among us say, “I’ve done my own research” as justification for whatever self-destruction they may be practicing. 

There is no going back. We can only go forward. However, we must go forward in three dimensions, because this is a three dimensional world. We must learn, as a species, how to integrate our bodies, our minds and our spirits in our decision-making and actions in the world. This means observing the consequences of our actions on the world around us and making adjustments, which is a big drag for forward-rushing, separate-from-others animals. However, we have no choice – we either resume paying attention to everyone and everything else who shares our planet or we will become extinct. And our extinction will arise directly from our own incompletely considered actions, which is poetic justice that the separate-from-others ape-like creature doesn’t typically even recognize.