There was a US Senate hearing, years ago, on alternative medicine practices — most of which were resented by the American Medical Association. Yet, some medical schools in the US began to include study courses on patients’ emotional issues, nutrition, and so on, while acknowledging that there was a certain mind-body connection — a credo long espoused by complementary and alternative medicine [CAM] physicians.
Dr Bernie Siegel, MD, the renowned paediatric surgeon, and best-selling author, who documented his clinical experiences, with what he says obviously represents a connection between the palpable, visible, audible human body and mysterious forces and mechanisms interpreted as ‘mind,’ is one among a galaxy of distinguished physicians that have reported that their findings support such a doctrine. The list is representative, not complete: Dr Deepak Chopra, Dr Larry Dossey, Dr Andrew Weil, Dr Brian Weiss, Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Dr Dean Ornish, Dr C Norman Shealy, and several others.
Mind-Body Connection
Mind-body ideas, in this tempestuous century, have not only have resurfaced, they have also established themselves as much as they were set forth by our ancients — Plato, Aristotle and Galen — aside from Florence Nightingale, several centuries later, who suggested that health is a balance of body, mind, and spirit, and that illness is as much an outcome caused by emotional needs as the disease per se.
As Dr Rudolph Ballentine, MD, the acclaimed author of Radical Healing: Integrating the World’s Great Therapeutic Traditions to Create a New Transformative Medicine, says, “The integration and interaction of Western and Eastern medicines make for an exciting path. ‘Radical Healing’ is built on these unifying concepts; they are the practical essence of a medicine that is simple and universal, rooted in the perennial principle of healing as personal evolution,”
Dr Ballentine adds, “Each of the great healing traditions has arisen in its own culture to help resolve problems peculiar to that setting, so each — e.g., Ayurveda, homeopathy, Traditional Chinese Medicine [TCM], European and Native American herbology, nutrition, and psychotherapeutic bodywork — has its weaknesses as well as strengths. By integrating them, superimposing one upon another in layer after layer of complementary perspectives and techniques, we can arrive at an amalgam that is far more potent and thorough than any one of them taken alone.”
Dr Phillip C McGraw, PhD, the author and television personality, is one of the most influential and beloved proponents of positive life change — a fulcrum based on a better educated attitude. In Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside, McGraw provides the basis for a self-improvement strategy that easily applies to choosing healthcare: “Trust that you are the best judge, by far, of what is best for you. At the same time, be ruthless about testing your thoughts. Verify that your own internal responses and interpretations will stand up to the test of authenticity. Give yourself permission to generate as many alternative responses as possible. Pursue only those that are Triple-A [Authentically Accurate Alternative]. Replace any response that causes you trouble and pain with one that moves you towards what you want, need, and deserve.” With all that is available to us in our hungry-for-information culture, Dr McGraw advocates accountability and the courage to identify and evaluate options. “Insight without action,” he argues, “is worse than being totally asleep at the switch.”
The Encyclopedia of Complementary and Alternative Medicine is just the right antidote for lack of awareness, or information, on the subject. It provides a comprehensive source of definitions, explanations, and perspectives from ancient to modern in an accessible format. If you come across an isolated term pertaining to alternative, or complementary, medicine, you’d look it up within its pages for identification and cross-reference. The Appendixes also provide all-at-a-glance information guides on various aspects of the CAM and integrative approach in wellness and illness.
Vibrational Medicine
As Dr Richard Gerber, MD, author of the much-acclaimed A Practical Guide to Vibrational Medicine, contends, “According to the new perspective of Einsteinian and quantum physics, the biochemical molecules that make up the physical body are actually a form of vibrating energy.” He observes, “During the early part of the twentieth century, [Albert] Einstein came up to the startling conclusion that matter and energy were actually interconvertible and interchangeable. His famous E = mc2 mathematically described how matter and energy were interrelated. Einstein said matter and energy were, in fact, two different forms of the same thing. At the time Einstein came up with this conclusion, a few scientists could entirely understand its magnitude. [That] since all energy vibrates and oscillates at different rates, then, at least at the atomic level, the human body is really composed of different kinds of vibrating energy.”
“Vibrational medicine is an approach to the diagnosis and treatment of illness based upon the idea that we are all unique energy systems. The concept of the body as a complex energetic system is part of a new scientific worldview gradually gaining acceptance in the eyes of modern medicine.” More so, in the eyes of mainstream America as well. To highlight the spirit of Frank Sinatra’s pleasant remark, “I’m for whatever gets you through the night,” it has been reported, no less, that eight of ten patients have tried alternative treatments, and of those, three-quarters reported success. Given the prospect that thousands, upon thousands, of alternative practitioners, Americans seem more than willing to try ‘whatever works.’ This only translates to combining traditional Western medicine with alternatives.
Timeless Healing
Dr Herbert Benson, MD, a pioneer in mind-body medicine and author of Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief, observed that alternative medicine is given serious due in light of the traditional practice of Western medicine. He observes, “Writer Luigi Barzini, suggests that Americans are compelled to act because we believe ‘the main purpose of a man’s life is to solve problems.’ Despite the fact that the body is the grandest problem-solver there is, quietly and perpetually sustaining life, overcoming billions of obstacles without our conscious imperatives for it to do so, we don’t trust it. Instead, we turn to our medicine cabinets. Our doctors’ first impulse is to prescribe something for us, and we fully expect to emerge from these visits with a prescription in hand. But, at the same time, record numbers of Americans are spending record numbers of their healthcare dollars on unconventional healers — chiropractors, acupuncturists, herbalists, and so on — who they trust will care more about them as individuals than as sums of parts. While some studies show that patients are generally happy with their own doctors, managed care, with its provider lists and required numbers of patients a doctor must see each day, makes this relationship between doctor and patient harder to preserve.”
Dr C Norman Shealy, MD, PhD, author of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Natural Remedies, and well-known and respected neurosurgeon, argues that the physician’s role is to be a ‘triage officer,’ one who quickly assesses the status of patients and what immediate treatment they need. Triage is usually associated with victims of accidents, war, or natural disaster and is geared to saving as many people as possible.
As Dr Eugene A Stead, Jr, PhD, Shealy’s professor of medicine, said, “A triage officer would stand at the door when a patient was significantly ill and advise when medicine, or surgery, was truly needed to save life, or function.” He often advised that when life and function are not at risk, as in the vast majority of symptomatic illnesses, the patient should “go into the department stores and choose that which most appeals.” The ‘department store,’ of course, was his analogy for all the alternative methods of healing that are now available to us.
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine [NCCAM], at the National Institutes of Health [NIH], formerly known as the Office of Alternative Medicine [OAM], is bolstering that “department store.” The NCCAM was established by Congress in 1998 to stimulate, develop, and support research on complementary and alternative medicines for the benefit of the public.
Other valued figures have also contributed admirably to a more global view of healing. The Harvard-educated novelist and filmmaker Dr Michael Crichton, MD, a guest essayist in The Power to Heal, observed: “Accompanying the use of more refined technology to prevent and treat illness, psychoneuroimmunology [PNI], the science that deals with the mind’s role in helping the immune system to fight disease, will become a vitally important clinical field in the years to come — perhaps the most important medical field in the twenty-first century, supplanting our present emphasis on oncology and cardiology.” Besides, the encouragement of healthy thinking may eventually become an integral aspect of treatment for everything from allergies to liver transplants. What this would prophesise is that our present concept of medicine will disappear. In other words, compelled by patients and its own advancing technology, medicine will change to focus from treatment to enhancement, from repair to improvement, from diminished sickness to increased performance.
For all its seemingly old and newfound accolades and anecdotal successes, of what we call alternative medicine really began when humankind first recognised the need to deal with and counteract abnormalities and ailments that emerged in their lives. Our ancients developed their own medicines, and treatments, that ultimately involved acknowledgment of a mind-body connection, from whatever nature provided.
If this isn’t an advance, a back-to-the-future of complementary and alternative medicine [CAM] and integrated medicine, in a world that is in a tizzy today, what is?
Dr RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR, PhD, is a wellness physician-writer-editor, independent researcher, critic, columnist, author and publisher. His published work includes hundreds of newspaper, magazine, web articles, essays, meditations, columns, and critiques on a host of subjects, eight books on natural health, two coffee table tomes and an encyclopaedic treatise on Indian philosophy. He is Chief Wellness Officer, Docco360 — a mobile health application/platform connecting patients with Ayurveda, homeopathic and Unani physicians, and nutrition therapists, among others, from the comfort of their home — and, Editor-in-Chief, ThinkWellness360.
