Quantum Alchemy

I'm obliged to frequent commentatrix Knittergran for pointing me to the amazing Crystal Light Bed. The Crystal Light Bed allows you to cleanse, balance, and align your energies, and if you go to a reputable dealer, you can even commune with certain curated angels, arranged alphabetically from Ariel to Zadkiel. As these things go, this sounds promising to me, inasmuch as my favorite state of being is horizontal.

The Crystal Light Bed is used by various practitioners around the world although it was invented by someone named John Of God, who sounds plenty qualified to me right there. One such is Kalisa Augustine (Kalisa Of Brooklyn), who, according to her website, uses spiritual technology and quantum alchemy to detoxify and purify the electromagnetic field, and Lord knows somebody needed to do that after all these years of neglect. Quantum alchemy is best left to the most certifiable masters of charlatanism, so it is comforting to note that Kalisa is quite blonde and has a nice set of credentials on her.

The basic idea of the Crystal Light Bed is simple. The client lies down on an ordinary massage table, facing up, and seven quartz crystals are set dangling twelve inches above his seven major chakras, pointy side down. Edgar Allan Poe probably had a bed just like it. The seven chakras are aligned, ideally, at various points along the body's median strip from crotch to bald spot, so the crystals are arranged like track lighting. Oh, they're also lit up with colors that match the accompanying chakra color, and polished with a holy shamwow. I would imagine the array concentrates the mind wonderfully, especially the crystal hovering above the Root Chakra. (Don't bother googling the Root Chakra. You all know perfectly well where that is.)

Ms. Augustine of Brooklyn goes on to explain that a crystal's natural structure is a six-sided prism with a terminated end. You definitely don't want the kind of end that goes on and on. This is not actually accurate with regard to any number of crystals I can think of, but it does describe quartz, so we'll let it go this time. She says crystals share this configuration with water and energy molecules.

[Energy molecules are principally composed of excitement atoms and zest, and remain mysterious to science to this day.]

In a nutshell, Kalisa's crystal bed is a "multisensory, meditative, cleansing experience that takes you into greater realms of depth." In fact, you can't really get much deeper.

I am not by nature wooful, but I accept that I too have at least seven chakras, in the same way I accept that I harbor a spleen, somewhere. I'm not intimate with them. The meridians are the pathways for the qi between the various chakras, as I understand it, and it's important to keep them reamed out so you don't clog your life force. This is all somewhat more challenging for me, because one side of my chest--for the moment, we're going to refer to these as "sides of my chest"--is much bigger than the other side of my chest, and that throws off the meridians, which have to make a little pivot halfway to my brain. In general, any sort of reboot of my spiritual body is going to be problematic, because I haven't even taken it out of the box yet.

They don't have a crystal light bed for every possibility. Some believe there are as many as twelve chakras, and the extraneous ones are located outside of the body. For instance, the galactic chakra (#11) is located just above the solar chakra, somewhere above your head where the lightbulb would be if you had a thought, and allows you to transcend space and time and even access the Akashic Records, the library of all that was ever or will ever be human. This is not as big a deal now since the Akashic Records went digital. The Universal Chakra (#12) is even farther out. Theoretically, with the universal chakra you can achieve enlightenment and operate all your devices at once, but it never works as advertised.

Basically, the 12th chakra is out there with Pluto, and I hope they're having a good time. We're not going to worry about it now. It's not practical to make a Crystal Light Bed for all the chakras that might potentially be found. You'd end up sleeping inside a geode.

They Didn't Mind The Quack Quack Quack

Kaiser Permanente is a highly regarded health maintenance organization, and I like them well enough. Certainly I do not count myself among all those whiners you hear complaining about how they took off the wrong leg and stuff, like they're so perfect. I mean, they can do that only once at most, and then it's problem solved.

They've never offered to take anything off of me. I had a fatty deposit on my eyeball once that they figured could stay put. Got something they call fibroid tumors growing inside me and something else hanging out of my urethra like a damn pee deflector, and their surgeons won't get out of bed for any of those, either. They won't even slice off the mole where my eyebrow used to be. Sucker is big enough to throw shade but the only C-word they keep using is "cosmetic." During my colonoscopy, everything looked so good that they not only didn't nip anything out, but they didn't even need to clean the itty bitty camera afterwards. All they ever do when I point out potentially fatal conditions is offer to keep an eye on things.

That's the real problem with Kaiser. They never find anything wrong with me. I've explained to anyone who still listens that there's something wrong with my heart. It skips and flutters and doesn't kick in on a hike until I've gone a quarter mile or so, when it finally says oh fine and starts working again, and sure, then it gets me up a mountain and back, but you can't tell me people don't die in the first quarter mile. They do.

The doctors humor me. They've stuck electrodes on me and put me on a treadmill and hooked me up to machines and did a lung function test and most anything I've asked them to do, and everything always comes out just fine. They're quacks.

Take the other day. My crustacean tubes have been clogged up since I got the flu in February, so I consulted the Ear Nose and Throat contingency. They gave me a hearing test. They stuck doo-dads in my ears and disappeared into a different room and had me push a button when I heard things. Well, evidently, they haven't seen such a good hearing test on an old lady in ages. They couldn't stop gushing about it. Evidently, I could track whales from fifty miles inland. But heck. They stuck the sounds right in my ears. I'd like to see them try it from a few yards away, behind the crustacean tubes' backs.

That's what the nurse-lady did when I was taking my physical exam for postal work back in the '70s. She got at one end of the hall and asked me to repeat what she said, getting softer all the time. "Pancake," she said. "Pancake," I said back. "What?" she said.

That's how you conduct a hearing test. Well, it was silly anyway. Letter carriers never listen to anyone. They had us lift a seventy-pound sack, which was at least germane to the job. For the rest, they could have just dispensed with the physical and issued us bullet-proof vests, and we'd have been fine for anything that was likely to come up in the station.

So the ENT doctor came in and said more nice things about my hearing test and looked in my throat, where he claims he saw my crustacean tubes winking at him and looking tip-top, and then he looked in my ears and told me, breathlessly, that I had beautiful ear drums, and wrote me a prescription for Flonase just for the hell of it and called it a day. They're all about the flattery, Kaiser. Apparently I am a pink paragon of perfection.

Basically, they don't think I'm ever going to die of anything, and that's just medically incompetent. They have no credibility. I'm not buying any of it until someone peers down my throat and up my butt and between my toes and tells me it looks like I have a touch of being about to be hit by a bus.

And they're going to want to keep an eye on that.

Contains Green Flecks

Tests have shown that store-brand supplements from four major retailers contained none of the herbs that the label indicated. In what some say may be a crushing blow to the herbal supplement industry, nobody noticed. Other research indicates that public concern remains low. In one study, bottle of gingko biloba, a memory enhancer, that were listed as containing no wheat, were found to contain powdered radish and wheat, but no gingko biloba. A significant portion of consumers interviewed could only report that they were pretty sure they'd taken them, but maybe it was the day before.

Other herbal supplements were found to contain only fillers like rice and houseplants. This circumstance had been predicted for years by people who had ever been forced to share an apartment with a roommate's philodendron.

There is, in fact, no requirement to test herbal supplements with the same rigor as the FDA tests pharmaceuticals, and labeling requirements are lax as well. The only mandatory regulation is that the brand name reference either Nature or Mother in some way; but by the time that is added along with a picture of a green leaf, there's no room left on the label for an ingredient list such as "contains marketing, misinformation, rice, and the rubber plant from the factory lobby."

Claims made for these products tend to be delicately worded. One pill is said to "support heart health," and representatives of the industry insist that the product does indeed provide tiny college funds for the corpuscles, and it is not their fault if the majority of supported cells opt for the trades instead.

Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah is a steadfast champion of the herbal supplement industry and has been the chief proponent of exempting it from the FDA's strict approval process. He is widely considered an expert in the field due to the vast amount of information he has been given in the form of hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions, and he assured the public that the supplement industry could be trusted to pinky-swear they were on the up and up.

The trouble persists in other areas as well. A frizz-reducing hair product that is advertised to contain no formaldehyde has been found to contain formaldehyde, although corporate counsel points out that the portions that do not contain formaldehyde do not contain formaldehyde.

Observers of the market do not believe these discoveries will provoke much of a backlash among consumers. They cite the reaction last year to the news that the urine of Clydesdales suspected of steroid abuse was found to have the sameDNA profile as Bud Lite. Predictions that Bud Lite consumers would abandon their favorite product in droves proved to be unfounded, when in fact they shrugged it off and,  if anything, exhibited a little more majesty in their gaits.

Likewise Walmart, one of the four companies found to have ginseng-free ginseng tablets on their shelves, expects to weather the current storm. After all, they point out, sales of home furnishings have not been affected by the discovery that underperforming Asian child workers have been used as upholstery stuffing. And they continue to refute the rumor that shredded, dehydrated Walmart greeters  have turned up in the store granola bar.

"It is efficiency innovation like the upholstery stuffing that keeps our prices low," a Walmart spokesman insisted. "And as for the herbal supplements, ours have been demonstrated to be no more nor less effective than the industry standard."

For their part, representatives of the herbal supplement industry stoutly vouch for the efficacy of any pills with little green flecks in them.