An herbal sister-made salve
Someone called Luna Love peddles her wisdom and spiritualityismness on Facebook. She has a long post titled How We Numb.
Today I had a medical practitioner cut a piece of my vulva off. I’m grateful she let me bring in my own holistic medicines into this strange and sterile environment to treat myself before and after the procedure.
They wanted to inject my yoni with lidocaine and numb the whole area. I said no. They wanted to clean me with something that was hot pink before they cut into me, I said no. Then they wanted to put some strange chemical filled substance on my yoni to stop the bleeding, which was profuse. I said no.
Ahhh…just two paragraphs in and I’m cringing in horror. No to numbing? No to cleaning? No to stopping the bleeding? Wtf is wrong with people? Does she know any history of medicine at all?
I was prepared. I didn’t just do what they told me to do because they’re doctors. I know my body. I know what it wants and needs. I stated my boundaries.
Oh yes, “just because they’re doctors.” Of course. Just because they spent several years in med school learning a highly technical subject in order to know how to do things like surgery on female genitalia without killing the patient – that’s no reason to do what they instruct. Personal knowledge of one’s own body is way better than technical knowledge of bodies in general and medicine in general.
I didn’t want to numb it, I wanted to feel it. Go ahead, cut me, I can handle it. It hurt for sure. Not going to lie, but it’s just sensation. Sensation in my most sacred sanctuary.
Yes, bad sensation, stressful sensation. Maybe she’s so Enlightened that she can feel the pain without stress, or then again maybe that’s not really possible.
We don’t want people to feel pain. We stuff people full of chemicals to avoid experiencing life (…and death). We shop, we watch TV, we use drugs and alcohol to escape this Great Mystery.
Oh some of us do want people to feel pain. People who like to hit and cut and shoot others do want them to feel pain. Nice of her to give them a shout-out.
I did an herbal steam this morning, painted the area with a kava, willow, frankincense paste and iced it until the procedure. I cleaned it with a diluted palo santo extract. I stopped the bleeding with helichrysum essential oil, which acts as a liquid plasma and applied pressure, and have an herbal sister-made salve on it to help heal.
Blah blah blah kava blah palo santo blah blah helichrysum blah plasma blah salve blah blah – how does she know her words work better than the doctors’ words? That is, how does she know the stuff she labels with her Special names work better than theirs? What’s the source of her knowledge? It can’t be just internal, just “knowing her own body,” because she got the words from somewhere. How reliable is the somewhere, and how does she know?
I know this is my work. As the Feminine Leadership Academy Emotional Mastery series just closed last week and I continue to receive clarity on next year’s/my life’s work it continually becomes more and more revealed, begging me to step in more.
My work is, has been, and forever will be about The Art of Remembrance. This to me, is why we’re here on Earth – to remember our Divine Nature and choose to embody it through our beings. The willingness to devote ourselves to doing so takes courage, it takes a brave soul, it takes all of us. To continually surrender to Life’s mysterious gifts and welcome them in when they’re packaged in a way we didn’t expect or want is part of that remembrance.
Numbing is not Living. It’s getting through it all in a haze of sensationless existence.
May we learn and help each other live and die well. This is my prayer, my path, my work, my humble service. May the land that will hold the ‘Center for Living and Dying Well’ be brought forth with ease and grace for this work to be made manifest.
And so it is.
I actually agree with her about resisting numbing and distraction. But the anti-medical woo Feel the Pain shit? Oh hell no.
There are no “chemicals” in kava, willow, frankincense, palo santo, helichrysum.
Right?
I wish I’d known all this before my appendectomy. But that was long ago when I still believed in doctors and anaesthesia instead of My Divine Nature.
How We Dumb.
What would she recommend in the event of brain surgery or an appendectomy? If she were to be brought unconscious into an ER does she have a card in her wallet that says “No” for her?
If I ever get another kidney stone (pray Dog, no), I hope to be made even more numb than I was the first time. Been there, done that, had the catheter removal. Ditto for any future tooth infections or broken bones. I didn’t like the strange waking dreams I had with Percocet I was prescribed after my trimalleolar fracture surgery, but otherwise my encounters with modern medication have been for the better. Pain? Like broken, damaged body pain? No thanks, not if it can be avoided.
Also, if a little more thought had been put into the name of the Feminine Leadership Academy Emotional Mastery series, it could have been FLAME instead of FLAEM.
Just sayin’.
Yoni? Do the wokest of the woke refer to all body parts in Sanskrit nowadays. Guess I’m still the sleepest of the sleep.
I wonder who this paragon of bullshit would have sued had her procedure gone wrong? Not really! She’d blame the doctors for not insisting hard enough on proper treatment, because they knew she wasn’t qualified to make the decisions herself. Proof of the latter being that she made the wrong decisions and the doctors let her, thereby endangering the patients health.
Can doctors refuse to treat people who insist on bringing mumbo-jumbo into their operating theatres?
Just noticed yhat she criticises the sterile environment that professional surgeons work in. If she’s that much anti-medical science and knows her body so well, why the fuck did she go to a professional? Why not just take some scissors and her bag of holistic medicine into her bathroom and snip away herself?
It couldn’t be that she wanted the reassurance of having real medics around in case things went wrong?
The secular woo version of suffering being ennobling through a mystic identification with the suffering of Jesus?
Doctors should totally be allowed to respond to this sort of thing by requiring a signed release form saying, “My inspired ‘knowledge’ is better than the combined wisdom and experience of hundreds of years of medical practice. Ergo, I release the doctors from any and all liability for consequences arising from my refusal to follow their advice on the matter of [insert topic of woo here].”
Oh, and a follow-up: This sort of bullshit just makes doctors even more prone to ignoring valid complaints and critiques from their patients about deficient care–a problem which, we know from multiple studies, affects women patients far more severely than men.
So she increased the moisture present in the area, then applied a bunch of organic matter to it? Yeah, that’ll kill those pesty bacteria. Oh and then she turned down the sterilising swab, and permitted some extra bleeding just to make sure they were especially well fed. Nice.
#1
Don’t be silly, plants don’t have chemicals (ew!). How would that even be possile – they’re natural!
Willow bark does contain salicylic acid (aspirin) and Frankincense contains lots of terpenes, some of which are known to be anti-inflammatory and analgesic. Kava certainly numbs the mucosa.
It’s important to remember that many modern medicines were originally plant derived, or modelled on plant or bacterial extracts. That only tells part of the story of course. Most of these natural remedies that do work are much less efficacious that their synthesised equivalents. There is also no standardisation of dosage possible owing to variability of the source product. Critically, improper preparation could well introduce very nasty contamination (bacterial, fungal, viral or chemical) and you’d never know (in advance) because no useful checks can be performed by a home practitioner.
I’m ok with natural remedies where there is no useful substitute and/or the risks are incredibly low.The rest of the time… No.
As for feeling pain to keep it all real or whatever. Fuck that. I avoid using pain killers, but when I have something chopped off (as I have), bring on the good stuff. There’s enough pain during recovery that you don’t gain anything experiencing the acute bit as well.
Rob, is aspirin a good idea for somebody having bits sliced off? Call me picky but I’d sooner have a coagulent than a blood-thinner.
AoS, I never claimed it was the right treatment! That said, aspirin is mildly astringent as well, so not sure what it would do to blood capillaries in topical application. Maybe the two effects would be antagonist?
Just did a google scholar search – inhibits wound healing, so no, not a good idea. Also, it acts as an exfoliant, so using it on your yoni…..
(funny thing, autocorrect keeps trying to change exfoliant to defoliant, which in this context is slightly amusing.)
Aos, when I said ‘your yoni’ above, I wasn’t referring to your yoni!
Let’s not start that again, my therapist just bought a new Jag off the last episode :-))
My autocorrect wants to change yoni to yogi; try reading the article again with that in mind……
Still chuckling at the picture of a yogi trying to remain serene as you smother them with kava, willow and frankincense paste.
I want to know what the medical procedure is called by the medical personnel involved.
I’m sure it’s not “cutting off a piece of vulva “.
I did wonder, briefly. Could be many things I guess. Surely someone so into the natural wouldn’t be having elective surgery such as labioplasty though?
How does one know if one’s sister is herbal?
Is this Luna Lovegood?
What was being ‘cut’ and why? And if she has such a fountain of sisterly wisdom to draw upon, why didn’t she do the cutting herself? Or allow some Wize Womyn to use an ‘energy charged’ razor blade to do the job?
Woo-woo is the opiate of the (female) masses. A robust, rationalist, feminism ought to have sent these witchy grifters packing a generation ago.
While I will agree that there appear to be more female than male masses that buy into this, there is a substantial number of males who fall victim to all sorts of woo (though usually not about their yoni). Perhaps if the woo consisted of shoving a jade egg up their penis, they would be able to see instantly that this would not be a good idea (even if only out of the enlightened self interest of not having that much pain).
I think it’s just that men tend to fall for different woo – after all, many, if not most, of the males I’ve met believe there is a UFO conspiracy covered up by the government, a substantial percentage of them believe in astrology, biorhythms, massage and chiropracty as cures for all sorts of ailments (massage can feel quite good; that doesn’t mean it’s curing something, only giving a much needed relaxation). And conspiracy theories – definitely a favorite form of woo with the male sex.
It sounds like she was having something like a genital wart or skintag removed. It could have been a skin biopsy but whatever it is, it was obviously a very minor procedure. It sounds like the sort of superficial “minor surgery” that is, in fact, painful but not unbearably so, and very quick to perform adding to her ability to cope with it. A great deal of coping with pain is mental. I suspect her ritual preparations put her in a frame of mind that boosted her ability to deal with it.
It evidently didn’t need stitching so it must have been a very small wound. Small wounds tend to heal whatever you do to them, and the chances of it getting infected are small, given it will be regularly washed by vaginal secretions which are mildly bacteriacidal – to certain bacteria.
Willow bark is a source of acetylsalicylic acid – the active ingredient in aspirin. It is also mildly bacteriacidal. However it is also an acid. It’s included in beauty treatments because it gives the equivalent of a mild chemical peel – it burns off the dead skin cells, which leaves skin smoother and better looking. Given that wound healing requires the laying down of new epithelial cells, using an acid is only going to slow healing. In a healthy person it won’t do much more, and it’ll only do that in a reasonable concentration (say 1 or 2%). The chances of getting that, at least consistently, from your willow bark decoction or whatever, are fairly low.
I have never understood the kneejerk resistance to medicine. It’s the stuff that has been proven to work, in standardised quantities and concentrations. It’s safe. But no, lets mush up plants that haven’t been tested based on anecdote and word of mouth, and use that instead.
The best I can say in this case is that she’s probably not doing herself much harm.
“My most sacred sanctuary”–please, girl.