A Russian cure for addiction - spanking


Michael Stuart Kelly

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Whipping therapy cures depression and suicide crises

The above article came out in Pravda, March 26, 2005, and I became aware of it from an e-mail I just received from New Intellectual Forum (submitted by Craig Smith).

Although some of this is tongue-in-cheek, the idea of stirring up the production of endorphins (the feel-good hormones) and endorphin receptors is not a bad one in terms of attacking the physical symptoms and physical causes of addiction.

Endorphin stimulation is also accomplished with acupuncture.

As an aside, there is a post I once made on the old SoloHQ. Here is part of the post to give the background for a story on an Indian manner of enhancing endorphin production:

There is a wonderful novel of historical fiction about the Lakota Indians by a friend of Ayn Rand that I read several years ago, "Hanta Yo" by Ruth Beebe Hill. This lady met a guardian of the culture of a dying tribe, spent a few years with him relearning all the legends, customs, rituals, songs and everything else about the Lakotas, became fluent in the Lakota language, threw away about 1,000 pages of a book she had already written, wrote a new book based on an actual set of painted commemorative hides, translated her whole book into Lakota, then translated it back into English using a bilingual dictionary from the beginning of the 1800's. It is simply stunning.

The book is about the encounter of the Indians with the White Man. It gives an excellent rational perspective of this culture clash. (I especially got a kick out of how the Indians viewed slaves, as black White Men, and their difficulty in understanding slavery because they did not practice - therefore understand the concept of - property rights for real estate.)

A charming sequence—something more dramatic than spanking—in this book has always made me salivate in terms of wanting to film it.

A member of the main Lakota tribe in the book had been killed by an enemy tribe. The way the Indians solved the problem back then was the present ARI way for dealing with Islamist states - go kill as much of the enemy tribe as possible and as quickly as possible.

Within the Lakota conception, the collective was only as strong as the weakest individual, so if the collective was not good for all individuals, it was abandoned. This was illustrated by one of the warriors of the Lakota tribe receiving an arrow in the chest during the attack. It did not kill him, but he did go into a coma. The Lakota tribe needed to run away as quickly as possible, but they could not leave an individual member behind. So they carried him and walked, despite the danger.

The problem was that the arrow was still sticking out of his chest. A metal arrowhead had been used and the Lakotas had not seen metal before, so they were afraid to remove it.

The enemy tribe had already had contact with the white man and had received some metal pots in trade. The white men had unsuccessfully tried to teach them how to use the pots. The traditional Indian way of boiling water was to put the water in a skin pouch, heat large stones in a fire and put the hot stones in the pouch with the water and wait until it boiled. The enemy tribe did not adapt to using metal pots for boiling water or cooking. They preferred their tradition, but they did discover that they could use the metal for arrowheads.

The Lakota tribe sent a runner to fetch the medicine man and it took a few days to bring him back. At this point the wounded warrior was almost dead. The medicine man arrived and quickly put the tribe in three circles around the wounded warrior, who was lain out in the middle. He started singing and beating on a drum, but gave the drum over to an assistant while he danced and sang and lit up a pipe. He used it to purify the three circles with smoke. He went to the warrior and, with a jerk, pulled the arrow out of his chest. Blood started gushing. He held up the arrow to the three circles, then suddenly broke it in half and threw it on the ground.

He turned and started singing and dancing around the warrior, and all the while the drum was pounding. Meanwhile, he kept fiddling with something in his hands. All of a sudden there was a flash of movement. He had unrolled a whip and had cracked it against the warriors cheek right near his eye. The three circles of warriors looked on stunned. The old medicine man did not stop singing and dancing. The drum kept pounding. He cracked the whip time and time again against the wounded warrior's cheek during this ritual.

At first the wounded warrior's eyes started flickering. The whip irritated him terribly and he started getting very angry. As the whip would not stop, he slowly sat up seething with fury, then got to his feet. Once he was finally up, with blood gushing from his chest, the old medicine man quickly went up to him and spit into the wound. He had been chewing on a group of special medicinal herbs. They caused the bleeding to stop almost immediately. Giving a signal to the drummer to stop, he stopped singing and dancing and announced that the wounded warrior would now heal.

I have loved this story ever since I read it. Now I know why. It's the endorphins!

(But still, I don't think it is a good idea to translate this thing into Russian right yet. They might get some ideas...)

:)

Michael

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Michael: "A charming sequence—something more dramatic than spanking—in this book has always made me salivate in terms of wanting to film it."

Hanta Yo was made into a television movie in 1984. The title was changed to The Mystic Warrior -- a title Ruth Hill detested. Nor was she at all happy with the film as a whole, but was powerless to stop changes in her script.

Barbara

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  • 5 months later...

Well, one does not have to resort to spanking to get an endorphin rush.

Other ways include:

Chocolate

Chilli

Standard-Issue sex

Thrill Rides

Horror Movies (that actually scare you)

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