I feel pretty good when I go to visit Mira Didinsky, immigrant and self-proclaimed inventor of a pain-relieving massage technique she calls Reflexo-Therapy. But then she grinds her thumbs into my face just below my eye sockets. At one point I’m worried they’ll slip and smash my eyeballs. “You have a lot of tension here,” she says, her words infused with a thick Russian accent.
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“Toxins build in our body from food, from stress, from pollutions. Body on its own can’t adequately eliminate toxins. It needs massage.” After giving me an abbreviated version of her “full-body treatment”–including a bizarre episode of frontal neck massage during which I find myself alternately groaning and giggling–Didinsky piles layers of hot towels and a hot pack on my chest. “The heat will help body sweat out toxins,” she says. I’m just relieved it’s over, and what I really want to do is take a nap.
Didinsky, now 53, grew up in the Siberian town of Barnaul, a few hundred miles northwest of the point where Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China converge along the spine of the Altai Mountains. Barnaul’s key industry was a tractor plant, and people in the town subsisted in part on mushrooms and berries they gathered in nearby virgin forests. When Didinsky was seven she was diagnosed with TB in her right leg, a condition that had caused the limb to twist and shorten by five centimeters. For two and a half years she wore a cast that covered her from her right foot to her chest. It failed to straighten her leg.
She chose Chicago because she liked Theodore Dreiser’s descriptions of Clark Street in Sister Carrie. Shortly after arriving, Didinsky’s husband–an engineer who spoke English–was killed in an accident. “I cried day and night for two years,” she says. At first she didn’t know a word of English, but early on someone gave her an old TV. It received only channels 9 and 32. “I learned English through the cartoon movies,” she says. “Especially The Flintstones.”
On the wall of her office are charts Didinsky made–sketches of the human body dotted to identify pressure points, soft spots on the nervous system that can cause trouble in organs a limb or two away. The gallbladder and stomach can be treated with points located on the sides of the nose, and the lungs with points on the feet, she says. Credentials and aphorisms adorn another wall: membership certificates from the International and American Associations of Clinical Nutritionists, one from the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, and a quote fom Herophilus, circa 300 BC: “When health is absent, wisdom cannot reveal itself…wealth is useless, and reason is powerless.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Lloyd DeGrane.
