Witch Doctors, Telltale Pulses and The Magical Properties of Jade

For those of you that can be bothered to scroll down a couple of entries, you will learn that I saw a shrink for a few fruitless sessions before I decided to stop the therapy. In order tie up all loose ends, the practice asks that you return for one final session to evaluate your progress and see what else might be done to ensure good mental health. Last Wednesday I spent a few hours with my ex-shrink's superior, a man who I met a couple of times a few months ago to allow him to pick my brains and see if they needed help. He's middle aged, laid back, wants to make a film of Kahlil Gilbran's "The Prophet" and thinks Paul McCartney is a dick. Nice bloke. He gave me a clean bill of health but requested that is see a friend of his in Hindhead who was described to me as an acupuncturist, a woodcarver and "an experience". He gave me his details and I called him up and saw him on Friday....

I pull up to the joint and walk to the door - he works out of his home in what I presume (looking at the building) is a long, renovated garage. I knock on the door and a 5'6", slightly round and beaming Indian man throws open the door and yells "hello" at me. He asks me to wait while he finishes up his current patient and I take a seat. The chairs are wooden framed wicker with deep, plush cushions that sink much further than your eyes tell you they will, they're close to the ground and extremely comfortable. The floor is carpeted and over it lies a thick, soft persian rug. There is a rough, handmade wooden coffee-table with a glass top on which is scattered magazines and books, everything from "National Geographic" to "The Great Conspiracies of the Modern World Unraveled and Explained". On the walls hang framed Chinese art and on the ledge of the window overlooking the modest driveway is a large woodcarving of two sumo wrestlers facing each other, preparing for battle. The rest of the room is littered with wood carvings - elephants, lions, scenes of the Savannah. Everything is white or cream or pale green and the room looks and feels (excluding some of the oriental artwork) like a set from the film "Born Free". The room is split by a couple of room dividers, his office is on the other side. There is no door, nor any attempt at sound proofing and I listen to his current patient, a tall, slender, middle aged, blonde woman complain about pains and an inability to sleep on her back. I hear joints crack and a slow, drawn out groan. A few minutes later, Quincy Rabot (silent "t"), Healer Extraordinaire re-appears with his patient who is buttoning up her jeans and sliding a belt round her waist. He shows her to the door, gives some more advice then invites me past the wall dividers. 

He tells me he has to make a phone call and asks me to wait. The office in which he works is smaller than the waiting room and has a long but shallow desk which is a mess of paper, pens, books and trinkets. The only other furniture in the room is a massage table and two chairs - one a cheap, plastic, black office chair that is behind the desk and a large, minimalist, pine framed, tan leather cushioned armchair that has had two large, curved blocks of wood that are screwed to the base of it and definitely did not come with the chair - I sit in it and it rocks uneasily. I look out through large, double doors that face onto a garden that was designed with the East in mind. A thin path, neatly defined by limestone chips meanders through a multitude of small, well-pruned shrubs to a shed at the far end. A stream flows through the bottom and the path becomes a small, arched bridge that looks like it was lifted from the Forbidden City. There's a few bookshelves than line the walls of the office, creaking under the weight of books.

Quincy re-appears and lounges in the black office chair, his arms resting on the chair's, fingers locked and legs stretched out as asks me about myself. He stays relatively still, but when he moves it is with a burst of speed and activity. A martial arts master, he is always in control of what he's doing and frequently bursts out into laughter at the end of most of his sentences. Like everything he does, it comes from nowhere and is big, energetic and short lived. I tell him that I have CFS and was sent here by a psychiatrist who recommended him. He nods and smiles wryly. "Stick out your hands, let me take your pulse" I oblige and wait for a few minutes while he lays his hands on my wrist. "OK, there's a lot of emotional shit going on in your life, started about 18 months ago" It isn't a question and he's dead on. "It's fine, I don't need to know what." he laughs "You also have a blood sugar problem. Look, put you arm up..." I put my left arm out, raised up high. He puts a hand on mine a pushes down "Resist. Try to keep your arm where it is" I succeed. Placing a lump of white sugar on my knee, he tries again, applying exactly the same amount of force. My arm goes straight down, I lose all strength. "I suspect you also have..." he rustles through his desk, finding and then giving me a piece of aluminum pipe to hold, "raise your hand". The same experiment proves that I have a weakness to aluminium (and by holding a phone, electricity). Anytime I'm near sugar, aluminium or a phone receiver my strength evaporates. "What I want you to do is buy a piece of Jade, put it round a necklace and you will wear that for the rest of your days. Jade prevents the effects of aluminium". He asks me to raise my hand and pushes down on it - I resist. He gives me the aluminium - my hand goes straight to the floor. He gives me the aluminium and a chunk of Jade - I resist. "I suspect you also have a left/right imbalance. Cross your legs. Now raise you arm" again my strength deserts me. By this stage I'm a little spaced out by this, remember all the man has done is touch my wrist for a couple of minutes.

Now that he's solved the aluminium weakness with the jade (the electricity is supposedly a byproduct of the aluminium), he's now going to fix my blood sugar. Sliding across the room on the wheels on his chair, he grabs a ruler a few metres away then comes hurtling back towards me. He measures my middle finger and then the width of my palm - my palm is wider than my finger is long. This makes me a protein person, apparently. "Protein type people need lots of meat and very little carbohydrates. Carbohydrate type people (whose fingers are longer than their palms are wide) need lots of starchy food and very little protein. Protein people tend to be shorter and bulkier and carbohydrate people tend to be taller and slender - so being a protein person, if you go and eat a load of potatoes, you'll be cooked" he laughs. The fact that I'm 6"3' and thin leads him to suspect that I my be a middle-of-the-road kinda guy. "You need to eat lots of protein rich food, so anything with a face is good. Very few vegetables and NO fruit". When he tells me that the best way for me to start the day would be with as many rashers of bacon, fried eggs and fried sausages as I can handle, I decide all doctors everywhere should pay very close attention to what this man has to say. Bouncing round the room, he searches for something in the desk "I also want you to post a cutting of your hair and a letter saying what's wrong with you to this address. He's a friend of mine that deals in a specific brach of homeopathy and he'll give you something to help - you won't be out of the woods. But it'll help". Next up is my left/right imbalance. This is a little more hands on. "Alright, what I want you to do now is lie on the massage table and I'll beat you up a bit". He's true to his word. He takes my neck and tells me to relax. My next words will be, "Fuck me, that hurts!". Working down my body (cracking everything he can find on the way), he finishes by grabbing my feet and crunches every joint south of my heel, he laughs and tells me "that was just for fun". Time's up and I go - he wants to see me again in 10 days time.

So, with my full fat diet, realigned bones and wielding a gemstone - I march like some Totem to Alternativity, the flagship of the dope-smoking, dreadlock donning, "far out" Children of Nature - may they rain-dance round my mighty form and signal via smoke to their tribesmen that I am come.