"Cholesterol is at 172, good," the doctor says.
"And your HDL is 85, great," the doctor says.
"But your liver enzymes are ten times normal, bad," the doctor says. "What kind of medications are you on?" Apparently the anti-liver ones. This means I'm either an alcoholic or I have hepatitis, neither of which seems very likely since I don't mingle blood much and drink less now than ever. In fact, as my cholesterol count is so much better than four years ago, I think the one-a-day wine has been helpful.

"We're cutting you off of all wine and all ibuprofen until we figure this out," doc says. I'm going to get so crabby.

Oddly, all this follows on starting with a wholistic practitioner. And I know it isn't her treatment that is driving this. All the bloodwork was taken before then. I already wasn't sure I was believing in this new approach to living, but I thought I would close my eyes and trust in the East. Now the Western MD's are going to step in and get aggressive. Maybe the best rule is to simply avoid the doctors. Any kind.

I went to see my new age doctor. She has studied six different medical systems, including Western. I figured there were, at most, two. They hooked me up to two electrodes that in the span of 4 seconds reported that at a rest, my body burns 1600 calories a day. Pretty good, the doc says to me. I would have been happier with 3000. I told her that I have been fatigued and angry a lot, but when I mentioned menopause to my girlfriend, she told me to shut my face and get on a fast track to this doctor, that it was probably some other gland or body process that was beating me down. "You know, life isn't always our ovaries," my BFF insisted.

"It's your adrenal glands, I suspect," the doctor said to me at the end of a two hour session. I thought she was going to pin it on my thyroid, a popular diagnosis here where thyroids wear out faster than winter tires. So I was pleased she had something unique for me. What's an adrenal I wanted to know. But instead of a lot of info she gave me a laundry list of supplements, including licorice for the adrenal gland. I tried to look up information about faulty adrenal glands. I was three quarters down my first hit read before noticing the term "Veterinarian."