Drugs; interfacing with The State; adventures

People have asked me why I'm so up-against-the-wall against Western pharmaceuticals in the "war on MS."

One reason can be found in the stories told by articles like this one. My own (and only) pharmaceuticals are synthetic thyroxin and cobalamine (aka vitamin B12). Very inexpensive; it's stuff entirely found in nature, which the pharmaceutical companies haven't (and can't, really) muck about with. One of the latest MS-drugs-du-jour is a tinkering with fumarate. Some Big Company played some chemical tricks with it and made it "their drug" which means they can charge whatever they want for it; fumarate exists in every warm-blooded animal's body as part of the "Krebs cycle," and can be acquired dietarily in mushrooms and, most of all, from figs. The shareholders ain't gonna get rich from Big Pharma trying to put their label on figs.

I hang a lot in the world of Chinese herbalism. Everything they prescribe for me is found in nature anyway. My previous herbalist used to put things like "seven-hole abalone" shells and turtle shells (there's a difference between the top and bottom shells, apparently), and I know someone whose life was changed immediately and for the better by drinking a formula that used a lot of cricket wings. However, the guy I'm seeing now only uses plants. Not "chemicals," plants. Plants that both the West and East know things about. And the East has known about them for thousands of years. Even the patent medicines one can find on the shelves of Chinese pharmacies use formulas that are over 600 years old. And the streets are not covered with the bodies of those who took Po Chai for digestive troubles. Admittedly, China has been known to have manufacturing "issues," but those are completely different from whether the formula works or not. And the Po Chai formula does indeed work; I've been using it for decades, and my herbalist who creates all his own formulas pronounced his approval of me using it.

Not like I don't have enough non-pharmaceutical struggles. Apparently, I've run out of "state disability" funds, which apparently run only for a year. Seeing that what had regularly been deposited into some bank account wasn't there this month, I called the state office; the person on the phone said that it had run out because it had been going for a year, but that (her words) "if I went back to work for a while, it would reset and I could start again."

"That's not really an option," I told her.

"Oh, it says here that you're permanently disabled," she said.

"That pretty much covers it," I said.

"Well, you can go on Social Security, then," she offers.

I thanked her for her help. She seemed pleased that someone simply spoke kindly and "didn't yell at her," I'm guessing that doesn't happen a lot, in her line of work.

All of my musculature is in flux. I'm having plenty of adventures already, thank you very much. No need to acquire more.

Then again, that's what I was thinking when I got The Diagnosis. "Just say no" didn't work there, either.

Oh well. Boredom, I don't have to worry about. And removing "things to worry about" has its own benefits.