My Trip to the Doctor: 6000 miles Give or Take
It is a long sleep inducing trip from Espanola to Brownsville. Its a bit over a thousand miles of desert plains interrupted briefly by the hill country of San Antonio. Not too much to see; sage, scrub and oil wells, then, flat muddy fields stretching hundreds of miles. It is the cleansing purgatory leading to a Mexican salvation 6000 miles from home.
What I am after might be construed crazy, a “quack” procedure to cure my various endocrinological ills including a diagnoses of diabetes which I am convinced is a symptom and not the disease. So, I am off to a tiny village located near Jimenez, Tamaulipas with my good buddy J.D., where a doctor does this operation. I suspect it is not legal and certainly not approved by the medical association. The doctor was “run out” of Juarez.
It is evident that there is something fishy. I travel miles off the main road, then on to several turning mud streets each with a few hovels and pig pens, then to the “house” which doesn’t really fit the neighborhood, cracked pink stucco and with a second story, except that it appears abandoned. No one is there when we arrive. I feel like I have come to a 1950's abortionist. I’m not frightened but I’m not normal.
It turns out we are early. The doctor’s daughter is off getting the piglets (that is neo-natal pigs) that will be sacrificed for my health. She arrives about an hour later in a broke down Ford pickup with a friend who stays awhile because the truck won’t start up again. The doctor is elsewhere and sends a young assistant who also claims to be a doctor.
The procedure itself is quite simple. The two piglets are slaughtered and their skulls cracked open. Their pituitary and hypothalamus glands which resemble white and pink BB’s are removed and washed. The doctor makes about a half inch long incision and inserts the four “BB’s” sub-dermicly, just beneath the skin but above muscle, in the upper arm. Two stitches, five hundred-fifty dollars and it is done.
So you say it sounds weird; I thought so too. Certainly there was a lot of anecdotal evidence to the procedure being effective. Several folks swore that it had changed their lives, to me though that simply meant that the procedure hadn’t had any negative effects or rejection problems. After all, and I do believe the saying, ‘that there is no greater proponent for the quack than his patients’. So I researched what might be happening if it does work.
The first thing one comes up with is that the preferred medication for thyroid ailments is simply dried and ground, “desiccated”, neo-natal pig glands! And of course synthetic insulin is derived from pigs and several other hormonal treatments, like those for adrenal problems, as well. Could fresh be better?
Another thing one finds is that the procedure is not new, the Chinese have been doing it for sometime now and the Mexicans for about thirty years. There is also some evidence that the Mayo Clinic has also done some experiments with this but I couldn’t find any documentation.
Though, no one would tell me exactly what they thought was going on (and I wouldn’t have understood anyway, my Spanish is non-existent), this is what I think is going on:
The pituitary and hypothalamus are the “system masters” for the whole endocrine system and most hormone creation/secretion. Pig and human glands and hormones at this level are remarkably similar. I think that the inserted glands encapsulate like a cyst between the skin and the muscle and are stimulated by the same hormones that stimulate our own glands and similarly release minuscule quantities of hormones acting like a “booster” to our own endocrine system until they finally dissolve about 5 years later. This is no different than a super long term “patch” that might be administered for birth-control or some of the new insulin administration techniques. It just might work.
It has been a week and frankly I think its working. Actually, the first day I noticed that my eye sight seemed to have cleared. My blood sugars are also near normal though my energy levels (what I had hoped to cure) seem about the same. The doctor said it takes 90 days to become fully effective, maybe I’m rushing it. Though even now it looks like about 6000 dollars a year in medications won’t be needed anymore.
