Caring friends said I was under too much stress from a combination of family responsibilities and work projects, so I cut back on those, but I felt no better. In any case, "stress" can certainly cause all sorts of emotional and physical problems, but it's used way too liberally to (allegedly) explain what happens to us, and that doesn't always help.

I phoned Dr. David Leaf, a chiropractor in Plymouth, MA, who knows more about how the body works and about western medicine and alternative approaches than anyone I have ever met. I first went to him about fifteen years ago, and he has made faster diagnoses at a higher rate of accuracy (i.e., 100%) than any professional I have ever consulted, and he has done the same for many people I have sent to him. He also tends to recommend treatments that work faster and more effectively than those that other people suggest. When I called him from California, he said immediately that my adrenals must have been affected. He recommended DHEA (cream or spray, not pills, he specified) and adrenal support pills. I got them from a health food store out here, and the first day, I felt about 40% better. Placebo? I cannot prove it wasn't. But I had expected that the other treatments I tried would help, and they had not, and I almost had not called Dr. Leaf, because I thought, "What can he do from 3,000 miles away?" I called back when the improvement stayed at the 40% level. He told me how to adjust the dosages, and when I gave him the list of ingredients of the particular adrenal support pill I had been taking, he said that, in order for it to work optimally, there were two other ingredients I needed to add. Within the first couple of days of following those instructions, my improvement jumped to about 90%.

If you're like me, you grew up hearing that awful story that is designed to scare us away from chiropractors: Someone went to one and had a chiropractic adjustment that damaged his spine, and it killed him. I have no idea whether or not such a thing ever happened, but what strikes me is that few of us grew up hearing that we should never go to medical doctors, even though we later learned that there are disturbingly high rates of harm and even death as a result of some medical treatments and hospital incidents.

This raises important questions that apply at least as much to psychological health as to physical health: Who decides what is good science and good treatment? We tend too often to think of Science and Medicine as yielding all the truth we need to know, but where is the polymath who can learn about all of the work going on in every field that might shed light on, for instance, post-shingles exhaustion or grief or fear, who can critically evaluate the studies and the anecdotes and tell us what is left? Who gets to tell us what is happening to our minds and our bodies?

I do not dismiss the fine work done by traditional researchers in psychology and in medicine, and I have medical doctors whom I trust. But living in Canada for nearly two decades, I saw by contrast that the United States is an M.D.-dominant country. Only relatively recently are people in the U.S. likely to consider alternative methods. Living in Canada, I developed a sense of when, for instance, it makes sense to see an orthopedist and when it makes sense to see a chiropractor. Living in the U.S., one is inclined to add "a good chiropractor, that is," but one is not inclined to add "a good orthopedist." Why? Because M.D.s as a class here have more status, respect, power, and money than do chiropractors, and the same is true for doctors in contrast to midwives and other kinds of practitioners. It is certainly true for psychologists and psychiatrists in contrast to teachers of yoga, meditation, physical exercise, and the arts, as well as friends, all of whom have been shown to have great powers to help in alleviating emotional pain and increasing the capacities to love and to enjoy. And people in the latter groups do their work without pathologizing those they help and with minimal risk of negative or "side" effects.

One of my longtime areas of specialization is research methodology. From applying critical thinking to bodies of literature ranging from "Are there sex differences in the brain?" to "What helps and what hurts people who are suffering emotionally?" the word grappling has become important to me - grappling with what to make of what researchers claim to have found; trying to understand to what extent they have given helpful insights into our own and others' bodies, emotions, and thoughts; and recognizing the limits of what we can learn from research.

Grappling with how theories about human emotions and behavior help or harm matters to me. In the nearly four decades since I became a clinical and research psychologist, I have never ceased to be amazed by how many myths based on theory or research are widely believed by both psychologists and laypeople. This alarms me, because so often, the myths have been used to justify a myriad of mistreatments, whether by therapists recommending clinical treatments or by others behaving in oppressive ways. All of this is part of the reason this blog is called "Science Isn't Golden."

In my next entry, which will be called, "Bumps in the Middle of the Road," I will describe some of where raising questions about theory, research, and clinical practice has gotten me.