Marginal medicine: as healthcare becomes increasingly difficult to access, what does it mean to re-connect with traditional therapies.

My first memory of alternative medicine was that it wasn't an alternative--it was just part of growing up. Getting sick usually meant I'd have to lie on my stomach while my mother tubbed Eagle Brand medicated oil over my back and scraped a quarter across the skin. The icy-hot burning sensation, that sinus-cleating, overwhelming scent of the menthol, and the strangely painless scraping never failed to impart relief from dizziness, nausea, the flu--whatever ailment had me under the weather and in the grip of a "bad wind," as my mother called it. The coin's tracks left dark red stripes, evidence of the wind's toxins releasing themselves from my body, she explained.

That was as much as I understood of how this remedy worked. It was the first line of defense when my sisters and I caught our inevitable flues and fevers each Kansas winter. In kindergarten, the telltale marks just above my shirt collar once led a white teacher to pull me into a bathroom stall to examine the rest of my body and ask whether my parents beat me.

Don't get me wrong, we did go to the local St. Joseph's Hospital every once in a while. The one hospital visit I remember was to the emergency room after I'd spilled boiling-hot soup on my thigh. Eventually, we got a regular family doctor, after moving to Los Angeles when I was 10. Dr. Hoang, cheerfully ruthless with the shots, was the one Vietnamese doctor my dad knew in Chinatown, and luckily he took Medi-Cal.

By the time we got the Kaiser insurance that came with my dad's new job as a social worker, I had entered the world of junior high angst, orthodontics, and trips to urgent care if I so much as got a cough. My dad was determined to take advantage of those co-paid doctor visits, not to mention all the pharmaceutical drugs. He grew annoyingly familiar with the names of antibiotics, topical creams, and other prescription meds--which he'd use when he nagged us to "eat your medicine."

For me, any kind of health treatment has long been something to be avoided if at all possible, associated as it was with the long miserable waits in clinical lobbies and the anxiety of watching my parents struggle with bureaucratic hurdles in English-only. How ironic then, that I would find myself newly interested in Eastern medicine, homeopathy, holistic well-being, etc.... that whole constellation of everything from folk remedies to traditional healing practices known as "alternative therapy." I've been open--perhaps too open--in my curiosity about everything from Indonesian jamu and Chinese Qi gong, to magnet therapy and even "past-life regression."

A loved one's incurable disease and our own helplessness in the face of it have brought our family to this strange impasse. Forced engagement and renewed frustration with internists, specialists, and HMOs have also left us with the desire to dabble in acupressure and aromatherapy as if there wasn't a time when these pursuits would have seemed exotic and laughable as the accoutrements of health for rich white people.

The trouble was that I wasn't just searching for a cure. I was looking for something else as well--familiarity, comfort, culture.

Not surprisingly, many of us have been cut off from our cultures' healing arts in the struggle to get by. As I talk to my friends about this, I find it's often the case that they too recall old family stories and half-remembered bits of knowledge. A West Indian friend tells of his great-grandmother who was an obeah woman. Another friend who's Latina occasionally consults her curandera, and my Catholic aunt still trusts in the cures of shamans. We continue to grasp at these ties though much of our living connection to these arts has been lost, and the way back to them is not so easy or so clear.

After watching some of my friends and family cope with gall stones, diabetes, cervical cancer, lupus, and depression, I am beginning to believe that connecting to traditional healing, and a more integrative way of taking care of ourselves, is not just an option but a necessity.

"Sometimes, black folks look down on folkways, laying on hands, all that, because it's not high tech. Because we're brainwashed to think the access to 'high quality' medical care is more important," says Kweli Tutashinda, an African American chiropractor who emphasizes working with communities of color. Nevertheless, Kweli believes more people of color are turning to alternative, or complementary medicine, and that there is a growing need for training and access to more skilled practitioners in community-based practices.

My acupuncturist, Dafina Kuficha, says part of the challenge is to distinguish from the "bandwagon of New Age medicine." Her work is steeped in a mix of Chinese herbs and needles, her own family roots in Native American and black Louisiana midwifery, and a strong dose of Eastern spirituality.

"People of African descent really have been used and abused in medicine," she reflects. "I used to be concerned that I wouldn't have African American patients. But they came in droves."

The office Dafina and Kweli share at the Imhotep Wellness Center in Berkeley is a little warren of small rooms, outfitted either with black and white photos of Kweli in Iyengar yoga poses or Dafina's acupuncture charts. The rest of the walls are covered with posters of Malcolm X, Bob Marley, Frida Kahlo, and Muhammad Ali, along with all kinds of cultural artwork, in an effort to make their patients feel welcome.

Kweli is the more overtly political, philosophical one; he hands me pamphlets with essays he's written on "control, technology, and personal/social transformation," and lets me know that he's helping to start a new organization of African American holistic healers in the Bay Area. Dafina, meanwhile, always takes it back to the spiritual. She lets me go after a long session of needles, candles, and energy work, with the words, "We're here to transform who we are as human beings--from a place of wisdom, not desperation."

Does alternative medicine really heal? I'm often asked if it's worked for me, what difference it's made in the way I feel. Beyond the immediate stress relief and the gradual influence to shift toward healthier habits, the most important change for me has been feeling more responsibility, and more control, over caring for my and my family's health.

Somewhere between using Body Shop products and taking up Bikram (I've done both)--between that and thinking of health only on emergency room visits, we're fashioning a politics and practice of fighting for our health.

Tram Nguyen is editor of ColorLines.