Sleep, Pray, Drugs: The O-Zone

Perhaps you should never fully trust anyone whose business card reads "Belief System Re-Patterning through Psychobiology." In fact, anytime someone describes his or her profession with a series of prefixes followed by the vague "-ology," you should definitely be wary.

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In my defense, I wasn't given his card until after I had gone for the treatment. Actually, my first warning sign was that this specific remedy had been recommended by a phone psychic located in Amsterdam.

"My office is located in an artist studio complex near some trees off of Canyon Road," he directs me after setting an appointment time. The practitioner has the soft, assuring voice that alternative therapists apparently spend long hours cultivating at every Academy of Metaphysics and Complementary Biophysical Medicine. This voice is friendly and excitable, as if to convey to their clients "Yes, I am as enlightened as my flowing outfits and patchouli-scented body portrays, and if the force is right, I will gift some of this illumination upon your sick and quivering soul." In reality, it only hides their deep concern over a lack of clients and mounting unpaid bills.

I initially imagined this man to be in his mid-40s, gentle, with a long, horsey pony tale, decked in shirts with colors named after deep-ocean-swimming fish. But as soon as I hang up the phone, I am flooded with doubts. Who is this creepy old man, now balding (but still with the ponytail) whom I have just agreed to meet on a Wednesday afternoon, sight unseen? I imagine an office filled with old doll heads and his greeting me with a casual—absolutely way too casual—"So while we do this treatment, you need to be naked...and clearly, for scientific reasons only, I need to take pictures." I shrug off my day-mare; by now I'm willing to try anything, and ozone therapy sounded about as legitimate as the previously failed Fixing My Mysterious Disease Experiments #1 through 687.

Prayer flags hang under every portal and doorway. He is standing outside, waiting for me. He doesn't fit my mental picture, and I begin to relax, a smile creeping over my face. He is young, tall and clearly works out; muscles bulge out from his tight-fitting polo shirt and curve through his khaki pants. But as he turns to head inside, I become tense again. A ponytail swings wildly halfway down his back. His office smells like goddess love and day-old feminism. The décor is neo-Asian fusion, and I half expect him to offer me a pork belly spring roll with ginger cardamom dipping sauce. But alas, he only asks me to take off my shoes, revealing another surprise inside his own boring brown shoes. It is frighteningly clear that he hides his true self in this sock choice, his preppy outfit just the beard to his gay hippie interior. These socks are truly freaking me out. They are the brightest pink, decorated with mushroom-high psychedelic swirl patterns and bubbly unicorn horns curling up his ankles.

The first 10 minutes feel like a bad date. I am telling him about my medical problems. If I stop speaking, there is just this terrible silence (except for the smug bubbling of the portable rock waterfall sculpture in the corner), and he is looking increasingly confused. To be absolutely thorough, I begin to explain a minor genetic blood condition that I have, when suddenly he interrupts me, perking up for the first time since my tirade began. This of all things apparently got his attention.

"Did doctors tell you that you have this condition?" he says very slowly and deliberately. I nod. "That's very interesting, because you know, not all genetic traits are permanent. Just because you have the gene doesn't mean you are stuck with the condition forever." I am speechless, but in my head I am screaming, "No, I am pretty sure that is exactly what GENETIC CONDITION means. If my DNA tells half of my red blood cells to be deformed, then that is what they are going to do!" My internal rant is interrupted by the metaphor spilling out of his mouth: "You see, DNA is an antenna."

This would not be the last metaphor of our illustrious session. Some of my other favorites included the absolutely brilliant, "Ozone therapy is natural wildfire that helps the forest to regenerate, but we don't want a big huge blaze that burns everything down" and my personal favorite, the priceless and illogical, "Ozone is the gas pedal in your car and when you press it down, your engine receives gasoline and can then have power and move, but that doesn't happen when there is a banana in the tail pipe." I mean honestly, what is this guy talking about?

We move on to the diagnosis phase. Muscle testing is not for the faint of heart. It is a highly unscientific and often ticklish procedure. This method involves testing those things that make your body weak, as the patient holds something in one hand and the practitioner tests the strength of resistance in her other arm. We begin with a control test. He hands me a beer, nice and cold and expensive enough to indicate that he's not that far behind on his bills. I hold it to my chest with my right hand while my left hand is held out to the side. With two fingers, he pushes down my left arm. "See that?" He's really glowing now, beaming two inches from my face. "Even though you may have wanted the beer, your body knew it was not good for you, so it made you weak."  The truth is that my body did want it, and it wanted it badly, because it was a hot summer afternoon and I hadn't had a beer in six months.

Control test number two: he hands me a cordless phone and turns it on. "The electromagnetism from this phone will make you weak," he says. He pushes on my arm, but I know his game now, and I make my arm strong. He is actually struggling to push it down, so he pushes harder, and we are both beginning to sweat a little with the effort. He gives up (victory!) and places the phone back into its receiver, mumbling, "Well, that was just to prove a point." I almost feel bad. I can feel his shame in so obviously failing to do just that.

With the control test phase over with, we begin the diagnosis phase in earnest. One by one, I hold tiny glass bottles filled with strange substances and he does the arm thing. Now I am the one having fun. I can't help myself so I ask, honestly curious, "How can my body know if it wants these things when I don't know what they are and there is a glass barrier between them and my hand?" When his pause turns into prolonged silence, I think I've stumped him. Actually, he is just drawing in an enormous breath so that he can spend the next five minutes explaining that everything in the world has a different vibration, even diseases and viruses, and plants and teletubbies, without the annoying distraction of having to stop and inhale oxygen. "Your body has an electric field, so it picks up on all these vibrations all the time, even through glass!" Shit, he is even more animated now than ever before.

Eventually, he announces that the magical vibrations show that I have a mycoplasma infection and some mild candida, and do I have problems with my teeth?

And so the treatments begin.

Step 1: Headphones go into my ears, and I feel a strange coldness as ozone gas is pumped into my head. A whiff of it leaks out from my ears and stings my eyes and nose, sending me coughing and gagging. All I can wonder is whether this shit can get you high; thankfully, we quickly move on to Step 2.

As my earlier prescience predicted, this involves me getting undressed. Seriously. Then I squeeze myself into a giant white egg-shaped ozone steam-box that sits on his porch. My head sticks out the top, and my neck is wrapped in a towel to create a bondage-type seal. He latches the door with great force, making sure each clasp is good and tight. Now I am fully trapped. I notice that he is wearing Armani jeans and realize that he must not be too desperate for clients at all. But there is really nothing I can do at this point, now that I am naked and locked in an egg. I really wish he would leave so I could just sit there and sweat buckets in peace, absorb this ozone wildfire without anymore of his input, but he sits down and gets all chatty about books and movies and biodiesel. When he makes some comment—"those magpie birds in the trees behind us are just such characters"—I begin to feel the sad desperation that an egg must feel just before it is cracked open to become an omelet.

The treatment ends, and I take a shower in his closet-sized bathroom, scrubbing off ozone sweat as fast as I can because the door doesn't want to stay latched and it's possible he's already standing in the bathroom watching. He gives me a jar of the ozonated water and two small tubes of pills that cost me more than most things I own. They are sugar pills coated with the vibrational essences of flowers, and I figure, what the hell, I'm in this deep already. The label reads—and I really take this one to heart—"Look to the vibration of flowers for peace of mind, happiness and harmony."

I am about to jump out the door, but not before he regales me with one last lesson. He imparts upon me the dictionary definition of colonics, with all the unnecessary and unpretty details. In my discomfort, I half-jokingly mention a friend who believes coffee enemas can heal anything, and while I talk he stares back at me with a look like coffee enemas had saved his life. As a final gift, he hands me directions for a do-it-yourself coffee enema that were so worn and tattered he must have been holding them in his sweaty palms the whole time.

In the end, the best part about the whole thing was that I was now $120 poorer, my savings merely becoming a vital contribution to his ugly sock fund. Free to be me and you.

Santa Fe Reporter