The Witchdoctor Will See You Now!

Have you seen this new TV show?



It's only just started showing here in HK but already I'm loving it because I believe in this, I really do, and not just because our gardener during my childhood, Iferami, was the local Bete - Fijian for witchdoctor - and I knew him to be a really lovely old man with a real gift for understanding trees and plants.

It's more that I often think Western Medicine is so arrogant believing it has all the answers because you only have to scratch through that voodoo "Trust me, I'm a doctor" surface to realise it certainly doesn't, and, in all honesty, I think my mother was right and that most western medicines have the wrong Ph balance for the body and really - "like a bad motor mechanic" was the phrase she used - taking western drugs just sets you up for a new batch of problems down the line.  Mum may have been a nurse trained in western medical techniques but, from her experiences, ended up very anti-doctor, despite marrying one, and very anti-western-medicine too, and my father eventually came to agree with her.  My dad even started saying shortly before he died "After practicing medicine for 50 years, I came to the realisation that western medicine is all about science and not at all about healing, so, if you want to heal, you really don't need doctors."

My brother, also a doctor, agreed with mum and during the decades he worked around the Third World always made a point of paying courtesy calls to the local witchdoctor at his latest appointment, to get to know him/her and, if he considered him/her/them competent - and they always were - to find out how they could best work in conjunction with each other. And also, after they became friends, to discover what these witchdoctors knew and how they treated certain ailments, and frequently discovered that certain 'voodoo' therapies were vastly superior to the ones he himself learned in medical school. Good stuff like a sharp blow to the side of the head, in a certain spot, cures tintinitus. Western Medicine tries to cure it with antibiotics.  Say wot???

These days he also teaches some of these techniques at a medical school in Victoria and I got a huge laugh watching "House" recently when Taub mentioned a certain healing therapy that Big Brother himself brought out of the deep jungle in Borneo.

I think there's so much reason for respecting what we're taught to think of as "voodoo". I've already mentioned in here about visiting a local healer in Laos who, within seconds, treated me for a strange patch of numbness on my foot which had my regular doctor convinced I had MS ... however I refused to take the batch of expensive tests needed to confirm his diagnosis because I'm not a Viking and have, as far as I know, no Viking ancestry and knew that the gene for MS traveled on the Viking haplotype, and so this was definitely a crock.  And the diagnosis from my healer in Laos? That I should stop hooking one leg around the other when watching TV.

And I've also told you how I was so impressed with him that when I came down with that mystery ailment in Luang Prabang (most likely that new strain of dengue fever) I immediately went to see him and he gave me a healing massage and mixed me up a rather nasty herbal tisane and told me, in sign language, to go home to sleep, and I slept for 14 hours straight and woke up right as rain.

Truly he was a truly miraculous old man.

We really should be considering this 'voodoo' stuff, you know.  The Chinese are already taking it seriously. Natasha, a friend up in Guangzhou, is currently studying "What Asian Witchdoctors Know." at university in Southern China.  Apparently this is a HUGE subject up there. Natasha started out studying western medicine but gave up when she realised "it's all about selling drugs for the big drug companies." so turned to Chinese medicine but gave that up when she decided there wasn't enough science involved, but then she came across the subject of Asian Witchdoctor Medicine and enrolled and discovered it's all about discovering the chemistry of Witchdoctor tisanes and cures, and has been so enamored of the learning that she's stuck with it for the past few years.  Go Natasha!

And there's also Maryanne in Innisfail who makes up Australian Aboriginal Witchdoctor Cures and sends them off to a friend in C.S.I.R.O who is always amazed at the chemistry involved, with the batches always turning up amazing amounts of various whatevers normally associated with healing.

And we should never forget that the two first gentlemen who circumnavigated the world - Sir Francis Drake and Ferdinand Magellan - had two very different outcomes with their treatment of scurvy. Sir Francis consulted his local witch-healer and brought along vast quantities of her recommended treatment of lemon barley water, while Ferdinand trusted the then-current medical treatment which consisted entirely of blood-letting.  And, yes, Sir Francis lost exactly no one in his crew to this killer disease, while Ferdie lost over 1300 sailors.

So I'm there! I'm really THERE with witchdoctor medicine. I think we should all follow Big Brother's example and get to know what witchdoctors know.

And let me end this by telling you a very interesting little story. I was out at dinner during a big international Medical Conference in Fiji and we were all talking about Draunikau - Fijian witchdoctor medicine - and one of the British doctors said to Big Brother "Just how scientific is draunikau?" and Big Brother, who was in tight with the local Bete, said "It's about 60% science and 40% voodoo hooha!" and the British doctor laughed and said "That's about the same as western medicine."  and then the doctors all looked at each other and laughed uproariously and said "Actually, it's better than western medicine." and that when the night degenerated into a hilarious raucous discussion on just how much better.