NorCal Voices features a mix of local writers, young and old, writing about their lives, their individual passions and their communities.
Read excerpts on The Bee's Opinion web page at www.sacbee.com/opinion:
Beating cancer the natural way: If anyone can do it, Mom can
Posted by Raheem Hosseini
My mom is a stubborn woman with an ironclad will as unbreakable as her German accent is enchantingly deceptive. Because she may sound like one of the Brothers Grimm's few sympathetic adult characters, but when it comes to traditional medicine, she purges her forest of foreign nostrums like a big bad wolf devouring woodsmen.
My immediate relatives and I long gave up fighting her demands to live cleaner, more natural lifestyles, swallowing whatever holistic aliments she prescribes. Green barley powders, granulated super foods, multivitamin supplements – they all go down the gullet without protest.
My poor father has loyally accompanied Mom on all sorts of natural health fads, from strict veganism to regular colonics to Bikram yoga to raw foods and so on. The vegan trend was sparked when Mom and I traveled to Chadron, Neb., in 1996 to stay with an excommunicated Seventh-day Adventist preacher and his third wife and her two daughters. …
Jim's approach was simple: Teach himself what Western medical treatment was supposed to accomplish and find holistic methods of doing the same thing. …
For my mom, who had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma two years earlier, this meant drastic dietary changes, constant juicing, mud baths, salt baths and really hot baths that were supposed to trick her body into thinking it had a fever and produce more white blood cells. …
Mom's original diagnosis in 1994 sent her on an odyssey for a natural cure, setting us on some deceptively promising and occasionally bizarre courses. There have been dead ends and some brutal hills. Each road we struck out on was frustratingly untrodden.
To hell with it. Someone has to be a pioneer. My mom has already lapped the average survival rate of three years five times, and she's done it without a single prescribed pill or antibiotic.
During these next 15 years, I expect miracles.
I think I'll pass on 3-D television
Posted by Ash Roughani
Don't have an HDTV yet? Well, you may not expect what's coming around the corner, then: 3-D television. Yup, that's right: a full three-dimensional visual experience right in your living room.
TV manufacturers unveiled these new television sets at a trade show in Japan last week. Now, I'm nerdy in my love for new technology. But there's something about the thought of having to put on 3-D glasses to watch TV that I can't get past. And, frankly, I have no interest in watching "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" in three dimensions.
I guess I'm worried about what this could lead to down the road. Are we going to get ports drilled into our necks so that we can plug electrochemical sensations directly into our central nervous systems? Of course, that may not be too much of a leap from some modern pharmaceuticals that are available today.
Maybe I'm being alarmist, but I think I'll pass on the 3DTV. Good news for the Esquire Imax, I suppose.
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