When I told Jared and Andrea I was going to be writing an article about Bob Nemeth, their faces lit up.  "Bob is awesome," said Andrea.  "Yeah he is," concurred Jared.  "You should call your article, 'The Awesomeness of Bob.'"

I had never really spoken to Bob.  He's an afternoon guy and I usually come into MTW in the mornings.  But I had seen him all over the MTW website and heard Bob's name mentioned so many times that he had become a character in my mind well before we sat down face to face, like the title character in a Moliere play who doesn't enter until the end of the first act. 

When Bob and I met for our interview, it was the end of lunchtime and he was finishing his soup.  While I waited for him to be done with his meal, I tried to attach my preconceived Bob notions to the man sitting in front of me.  I knew he specialized in injury recovery and did lots of things with sciencey sounding names like Spinal Reflex Analysis, Rehab Myotherapy, and Myofascial Release.  Bob's skills are legendary at MTW.  Stories of him helping a woman who's right leg was one and a half inches shorter than her left (when he was through there was only a normal half-inch difference) and helping a little girl who's brain was not developing properly were common around the office.  I was half expecting a no-nonsense practitioner with a medical approach and half expecting a contemplative energetic-healing guru.  Turns out Bob is a little bit of both.

We sat down and I immediately found Bob to be an incredibly calming presence.  Before we could get to all the boring stuff (How long have you been a massage therapist?  Why did you get started?) he wanted to tell me about a workshop he had just been to.  Matrix Energetics is a relatively new form of energy work that taps into the field of possibilities, and the reality that on the smallest level, anything is possible.  He was so excited to talk about the new skills he had learned and how he planned to implement them into his practice, I could barely get a word in.  From the moment we started speaking, I was struck by Bob's passion for healing.  Here was a man who had been practicing holistic bodywork for thirty-one years, and he came at it with the enthusiasm of a young person who has just discovered his life's work. 

Eventually we started talking about his personal journey.  "Massage and bodywork have always been about healing for me," he told me.  "Before I became a massage therapist, I had gone through a process of healing myself.  When I was younger, I lived an extremely self-destructive lifestyle.  It got to the point where I could feel it hurting my body.  I knew I needed to make some big adjustments. 

"In 1972, I made the decision to heal myself.  I quit all the bad stuff and changed my diet.  I started studying with herbalists in Worcester and up in Canada.  My interest in herbs eventually led me to to the Cristos School of Natural Healing in Mexico.  That's where I studied with the incredible herbalist and healer Dr. William LeSassier. 

"There was so much to study at Cristos.  I studied herbalism and some acupuncture, and I found the bodywork I experienced incredibly inspiring.  This was my introduction to hands-on healing.

"When I moved to Portland, Oregon after Cristos, I needed a job.  My experiences with bodywork and my own journey of healing had been so moving, I knew I wanted to pay it forward and help heal others.  This was 1978, and chiropractors were all the rage, but I decided to go into massage therapy instead.  At the time the industry wasn't anywhere near what it is today.  It was actually pretty difficult to find work.  I got very lucky.  A posh athletic club that had had massage facilities since the early 1900's had a massage therapist position open up right as I was getting my certification.  Everything just aligned.

"After Portland I lived in Seattle for eight years and then in Marin County in California.  I loved the West Coast, but a myriad of circumstances eventually brought me back home to Massachusetts.  I do miss the West, but it's nice to live around my family again."

I asked Bob about some of his specializations.  Again, he became animated.  "Rehab Myotherapy isn't just about muscles, but also about joints and bones, and also about the synthesis of alignment.   Your body isn't a frame of bones with tissues draped over it.  Everything is connected like a spiderweb.  If you tug one thread of the spiderweb, the whole thing changes shape.  Your body is like this, and it carries with it numerous impressions from traumas throughout your lifetime."

Bob is also an ordained interfaith minister.  Eventually, his goal is to combine all of his practices, the bodywork, the energy work, and spiritual healing, into an overarching, truly holistic healing practice.  "I want to alleviate suffering, be it physical, mental, spiritual, or some combination of the three.  In my experience, it's usually a combination."

It was time for me to experience the awesomeness of Bob for myself.  I told him about my chronic hip and and knee pain on my left side, which is my most pressing and persistent problem, and my jaw, which I have a bad habit of clenching.  Bob decided Rehab Myotherapy and CranioSacral would be the best modalities to treat these problems, but he wanted to start out with some energy work. 

The energy work was different from other subtle energy works I had received before.  We were both standing up, and most of the time his hands never touched me, but hovered about six inches away.  I tried to clear my mind and just "notice what I noticed," as he instructed me to do.  It was a profoundly relaxing experience.  I felt warm vibrations flowing from my head to my feet.  Occasionally parts of my body would seem to move on their own.  At times I almost fell over.  When it was over I felt like I had just stepped out of a warm bath.

After that, it was time for more hands-on bodywork.  Myotherapy was different than any massage I had ever had.  I lay down on the table fully clothed, in jeans, a belt, and a sweater.  Bob moved my limbs around in circles, aligning this, gauging that.  The term "body mechanic" may have flickered into my consciousness a time or two. 

Bob told me things about my body I had never known, but that made perfect sense.  "The way your sacroiliac connects to your pelvis is tilted.  You have no range of motion on your left side below your hip."

My left hip and leg.  My "bad leg."  I asked him if the twisted pelvis was why my leg was bad.  "It's not a 'why' situation," he said.  "It's just how it is.  Everything is connected in this specific way, and the pain is simply another part of the configuration."

Bob brought my limbs through very precise rotations.  He held my shins and moved my legs through their full ranges of motion.  As he bent and twisted me, I could feel the relationships between the muscles, bones and joints changing positions, finding their proper places and settling into them. 

When I was lying face-up on the table, Bob illustrated the tilt in my pelvic bone.  The left half was higher, and the right was angled downward.  "That's easy enough to fix," he said.  What happened next was one of the strangest experiences I had ever had during bodywork.

Bob put one hand on each of my hips and steadily and deliberately moved my pelvis.  I don't mean my legs and spine went with it like when you shake your hips on the dance floor.  I mean I could feel my pelvis shift, and all the connecting bones staying put.  The relationships between bones and pelvis changing in the joints and sockets.  It was like everything slid over. 
 
It's something I've never thought about before.  My hips can actually be in a position other than where they have been.  We think of our bodies as these ultimate constructions that just sort of "are," and we have to deal with them.  But our bodies are movable, are changeable, and sometimes we get into a pattern over a long period of time that twists our bones, our foundations, into painful ways of relating to one another.  It's just like a group of long-term friends.  It's the issues that are left unaddressed that lead to strains.

He finished with CranioSacral (a subtle manipulation of bones in the skull and upper spine) and facial massage.  He did some of the same bone adjustments with the bones of my face and jaw. 

When I stood up, I was amazed.  My whole body felt right.  The pain in my leg was dramatically decreased.  Walking home, I didn't even favor it.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to mention this, but another unusual thing happened after this session.  A few months before I had gone into the dermatologist with an embarrassing red birthmark on my lip.  She assured me that it wasn't harmful, just a dilated blood vessel, but she said it would never go away without an expensive laser treatment.  It was bright red in the middle of my face and had started to make me very self-conscious.

The morning after my bodywork with Bob I looked in the mirror and something looked different.  Upon closer inspection I realized that the birthmark was completely gone, as if it had never been there.  I remembered the energy work Bob had done with me the day before.  I had been thinking about the birthmark, but hadn't mentioned it because I didn't think it was something he could do anything about. 

I don't know if the energy work was why the birthmark went away.  Maybe it's not even a "why" situation.  Anything's possible.

I was recently contacted by Onyva for an interview about The Boston Healing Blog.  It was fun to be the interviewee for a change.  Here's the interview.

I'm going to get a little personal on you here.  I have a major celebrity crush on Jamie Oliver.  I have ever since his charming, laddish debut with "The Naked Chef," in which 23-year-old Oliver cooked uncomplicated, delicious, from-scratch dishes in his bachelor pad kitchen for small groups of his young, attractive, very lucky friends. 

Since then, Oliver's become a veritable do-gooder, tackling poor nutrition in the British school systems and then Britain at large.  As if that weren't enough, this NY Times article made me love him even more.

It wasn't just Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, in which he travels to the most obese county in the country to examine the citizens' diets and inspire change, or even his British restaurant Fifteen, which provides training in the culinary arts for underprivileged youths. 

It was actually the interactive timeline detailing high points in Oliver's career, specifically the fact tat in 2005 he slaughtered a live lamb on television, much to the outrage of animal rights groups.  Speaking as someone who used to choose not to eat meat at all (and I still don't eat very much), I find this on-air butchery to be a powerful statement.  It's one thing if you make the decision to be a vegetarian, but one of the major problems with the food industry is most people don't know, and don't want to know where their dinner comes from.  If you choose to eat meat, you should know that every steak, big mac, rack of ribs, and chicken breast you put in your mouth was hacked off an animal that was once living, breathing, blinking, and thinking to whatever capacity animals can think.  And unless you watch your food as it's slaughtered, there is no way to guarantee that the animal was killed humanely, even if it comes in a package marked "free range."

I'm not saying we all need to chop the heads off our own chickens, but I believe awareness of the process by which our cheeseburger makes its way from the bone to the china is the first step to changing our diets for the better and reducing the food industry's gargantuan carbon footprint.  People in this country eat an insane amount of beef, and why shouldn't they?  Beef is everywhere.  It's cheap.  It's fast.  A diet including fresh local produce (which is some of the most carbon-neutral food you can buy) is still largely thought of as posh and even snooty, while a diet consisting of roast beef and pepperoni pizza is thought of as cheap and easy, the diet of the working-class hero.  I largely blame the marketing of these products for these images, because in reality, beef is not cheap, and it is not easy.  It takes a whole lot of work and resources to raise cattle, and if you thought cutting a lamb's throat was awkward and gruesome, imagine slaughtering a butchering a four-legged mammal that weighs 1200 lbs.  In fact, the carbon emitted from the United States' cheeseburger production alone far exceeds the emissions from all its SUVs. 

I doubt forcing everyone to stare into the eyes of a cow as its skull is punctured will create a nation of vegetarians, but the attitude of "I don't want to know about it," held by so many omnivores is a big indicator of a larger problem.  I've shocked so many meat eaters with my admission that I've killed and cleaned my own chickens.  "I just like to pretend the meat grows as it is," I've heard people say.  "Like, in the package wrapped in plastic.  Like on a tree."  As long as we maintain a culture of shirking the responsibilities that come along with our consumptions, people will continue to consume with wild abandon. 

In the end, it's about awareness, which is a concept I feel like I stress again and again in this blog.  Whether it's awareness of your body's configuration and bad habits, awareness of the tension you're carrying, or awareness of what you put into your body and how your actions affect the planet, I side with Socrates, who stated over a millennium ago, "The unexamined life is not worth living."  I'm not saying one needs to be spiritually enlightened to make healthy choices for themselves and the planet, but if everyone watched an animal butchered once a month, maybe they'd assign a little more weight to their mealtime decisions.

I figured a good way to end this entry would be with a video of Mr. Oliver himself demonstrating how commercial chickens are killed.  I was going to embed the video, but methinks the nature of it is more suited to a link.  Warning: this is graphic, but important.  

Now, who wants a drumstick?

It's no secret to most of us that there are some ailments and conditions that traditional Western allopathic medicine just doesn't seem to do too much for.  For these elusive conditions, many people have experienced profound benefits from various complementary healthcare modalities, such as acupuncture, massage, Ayurvedic therapies, Reiki, herbal therapy, and other bodywork modalities. 

Here's a quick list of conditions that seem to respond well to complementary health care:
 
Allergies,

Chronic Fatigue,

Headaches,

Skin disease,

Addiction recovery,

Lyme disease,

Injury recovery,

Chronic pain,

Menstrual irregularities,

Anxiety,

Depression,

Arthritis,

Fybromialgia


But I was curious.  Why do complementary health care practices seem to work so well for these areas where allopathic medicine tends to fall short?  Is there something about these conditions that makes them especially receptive to holistic care and less responsive to Western pharmaceuticals?  If so, what does that say about the nature of complementary health care?

I'm not a practitioner myself, so I asked a few of MTW's massage therapists what they thought.

Krista:  Those types of things are imbalances that build up over time.  Reiki is about balancing chi, acupuncture is about balancing the flow of the meridians, and massage therapy is about balancing the muscles and tissues of the body.  Western medicine is great for acute stuff, where you can go in and say, "There's the problem, let's get rid of that element," but the more amorphous stuff like allergies and chronic pain, that's an imbalance.

Andrea:  Western  medicine usually introduces something foreign into the body to treat a disease,  whereas acupucnture and massage release and manipulated energy already in your body.  Western medicine looks at a symptom and says, here's what I can put in the body to make that symptom subside, but holistic medicine looks at the body as a whole and tries to get to the source at an energetic level.

Richard:  It's all energetic.  Every cell in your body is a miniature power-plant constantly using and creating energy.  Western Medicine is about seeing things as chemicals, whereas we think of things as a structural or energetic imbalances.  You can affect an energetic imbalance with a chemical, but you're not going to resolve it.  That's what Western medicine is about.  Treating symptoms with chemicals.  We try to resolve the problem at its energetic root. 

Susannah:  All of those examples are things where the conditions of your body have been compromised.  The goal of complementary medicine is to restore your body to its healthiest conditions.  I use acupuncture for chronic fatigue and it's helped immensely.  The changes in the body are subtle, but I feel much better and more energized after an acupuncture session.  It's about getting my body to an overall place of wellness rather than just expelling the idea of "disease."

Natalia:  Massage promotes circulation, venous return blood flow (that's the blood that flows back to the heart to be re-oxygenated), and breaks up scar tissue.  It increases flexibility, range of motion, and nerve damage recovery rate.  And of course it has mentally calming benefits too, but I'm afraid people get so hung up on the mental benefits of massage that sometimes they overlook all the immediate physical benefits.  A massage does a lot more than just relax and mentally rejuvenate, though those are definitely two of of the benefits of massage.

Jared:  Complementary health care emphasizes the preventative.  Western medicine tries to fix a problem after it already exists.  But why not try to prevent it from happening, or try to make it less severe if it does happen?  Western medicine looks at one thing at a time.  One symptom.  One body part.  They don't see the connection between chronic fatigue and the body it lives in.  In acupuncture, naturopathy, etc., they assess the whole person to figure out a sort of grand plan of how to treat that person. 

Complementary health care actually tries to prevent the disease, whereas it's well-known that the goal of most allopathic medicine is to maintain the disease.  In allopathic medicine, their business comes when they have symptoms to treat.  Common practice is to relieve the symptoms temporarily, but they usually leave you wanting more.  Think about it.  When was the last time you went to the allopathic doctor?  Most of us go to the doctor when we're sick, and avoid it at all costs when we're feeling well.  But complementary health care strives to keep us feeling well, so we don't get sick in the first place.

For instance, when you get sick, your body's pH becomes acidic.  A common holistic practice is to make sure your body's pH remains basic, which makes for a generally inhospitable environment for disease.  Through the food you eat and the way you live, you can literally change the pH of your body so that sickness can't even live there.

Your body is electromagnetically charged.  It's constantly sending impulses from one place to another.  If we learn to create harmony within that flow of energy, we can change our health for the better.


It seems the closest thing to a consensus we have is that complementary health care seeks to balance the body in one way or another, and these specific diseases seem to arise more from an imbalance of some sort rather than an acute "cause." 

Have you had experiences with any of these diagnoses and complementary health care or allopathic medicine?  Leave a comment and tell me what you think.