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Showing posts from January, 2011

Reflecting on relexology (and a golf ball)

In my late parents' flat was a stone that was often left underneath a chair in the living room. I remember my father being given that stone (nearly six inches long) by a friend soon after we moved to the Tanglin Halt flat. He said to rub his feet on the stone for good health. I was only very young then and I thought: was there magic in this stone? how could rubbing one's feet on this stone give one good health? Father didn't actually use it as instructed. It was just there, left there, for years and years. At university I remember a lecturer talking about traditional medicine. He spoke disparagingly of such, referring to "a bit of dried bark". How could we place our faith on the healing powers of a bit of dried bark when we have the whole backing of science on antibiotics, etc.? You see, where I was growing up, we revered everything that was "scientific". The west was scientific, so we revered it. Anything that was non-western and/or non-scientific was d