Health Gazelle: About

About

This site is owned and run by one woman named Michele who happens to have a form of Cystic Fibrosis and a son with the same diagnosis. It began as one page on my homeschooling site originally entitled "When Plants Attack!", where I had a couple of recipes for saline solution and some information on how I used them. It had a big growth spurt in May to June of 2006 when I was still unemployed (and therefore had more time on my hands than I typically do these days) and something I said on a homeschooling list got me mired in an argument I didn't want to have. I ended up writing an email explaining some of what I was doing to get me and my son well, against all odds and flying in the face of what conventional medicine expects for us. Then a few people began asking if they could forward my email to someone they knew who had a child with CF and began asking me questions about what we were doing. I edited those emails and put them on the site so other people could share a link instead of asking my permission to forward my emails.

Below is an edited excerpt from an email I wrote recently. I hope it will help people understand what I am up to here.

The site wouldn't still be up if someone hadn't sent me a check for enough money to pay for webhosting for a year when I was really broke and the hosting service was expiring. I didn't ask for that money. I just mentioned that the website might come down when the hosting service expired. It means a lot to me that there are people who value what I am doing enough to support it, in spite of their own burdens since this was a member of the CF community. And, frankly, I don't have any desire to move forward with this project if there isn't grassroots support. What has worked for me involves a lot of lifestyle changes. I believe very strongly that those types of solutions have to be voluntary and have to be customized to the unique situation of the folks trying to get well. I don't think a top-down solution will work. It looks to me like top-down solutions are part of the problem.

I also am very skeptical about the merits of charity. Rewarding people for having serious problems tends to grow those problems. For example, welfare was intended to help "poor, single moms and their chldren". By defining it that way, the social contract was changed and the numbers of poor single moms and kids growing up in poverty with one parent grew tremendously. In contrast, Habitat for Humanity is not a charity. They do not give away anything. You put in sweat equity hours. You help build your own home. You help build the homes of others. You purchase your house, but you get it at cost and without interest. Since interest can account for 2/3 to 3/4 of the cost of a home over the life of a 30 year mortgage, that's a huge savings. Since the houses are generally gotten cheap and fixed up with donated labor and materials, "at cost" tends to be substantially below market rate. I think Habitat for Humanity is brilliant. I don't know how to create a similar model that helps people get well. But I do know that I don't want to accidentally encourage people to stay sick. I feel conventional medicine makes that mistake in so many subtle ways. Instead, I want to help people actually get healthier. If I can't do that, I would rather do nothing than contribute to the current vicous cycle of problems.

So even if I could afford to pay for the site out of pocket, I am reluctant to go back to doing that. For one thing, I believe that handicapped people need to be respected and that telling people they are "a charity case" robs them of self respect. I believe that the very act of making someone define themselves as broken enough to qualify for things like welfare harms their identity and self concept. I believe telling people over and over that they do not have the power to get themselves well and must wait for someone smarter than they are to do something amazing and discover "The Cure" and thereby rescue them is a terrible thing with terrible consequences and contributes to how much people are currently suffering. To me, it is critical that the CF community rise-up and take ownership of their right to heal and their power to act on their own behalf. I believe they need a vehicle to help them do that and not a savior to do that for them. I have no desire to be anyone's savior, if only because they have a bad habit of ending up gruesomely murdered or executed.

So I have spent a fair amount of time wondering what will work to help other people actually get well and avoid some of the traps you see with so many programs aimed at helping people (like Welfare). So far, the only thing I know for sure is that sharing information is a good thing. Therefore, I continue to try to grow the site and continue to try to reach out to people via various email lists and online forums. It is important to me that the information remain freely available. At this time, I have no desire to write a book because I want the information to be available for free and because I have a big problem with handling paper so I feel the Internet is a "cleaner" means to distribute information. But it is also important to me that I not be cutting my own throat for the benefit of other people. Not only is it bad for me to martyr myself, I believe it is unhealthy for other people to have me do that for them. I think it encourages people to see themselves as victims and to behave in a predatory fashion and feel okay about that. There is enough of that in the world. We don't need more of it.

So I continue to try to figure out a means to make this site not only support itself but also pay for some of the time and effort that I put into it. That is the only way it will be sustainable. Otherwise, my time and energy will eventually have to go into other things.

18 January 2009

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