Healing Self, Healing Others

There is an unseen tether that ties the body and the mind to the spiritual, the earth to the heavens, certainty to the unfathomable, water to wet. Can there be spiritual without body, without material? That seems like a stupid question. Of course, we say, spiritual is beyond the body--superior to the body? Inferior? Perhaps anterior or posterior to it? It is without the body, it is no body. Can the same be said for the mind? I don't know enough to confirm or deny that one but certainly the mind affects the health of the body. I remember as a boy once willing myself sick so that my mom's boyfriend would leave early that night. I thought I was faking it until early that next morning when I woke with chills and a fever. What happened? A coincidence? Perhaps. But consider the pains from depression, the weakened immune system associated with stress, or even how the mind can lag and become melancholic when the body is sick. When our body comes to its end we might consider that it is just us, a lone consciousness, that remains and that tether, that something unseen that strings this all together now, is a compass to direct us where Nature's considered for us our next stage for inquiry. But in the meantime it is a conscious material self that becomes us, that is because of us that we must work to understand so as to better fully express the quality of what it is to be human. Of course philosophy, literature, architecture and the fine arts of all cultures past and present teaches us that those expressions of humanity are not without their quality and quantity, so what is so special about understanding the whole of the human body? I like to think that this is the apex of human study; the closer we come to unraveling the mystery of the trinity that manages the miracle of the human form and function the easier it can be for us to begin to fathom what we are not, then consider the potentials of what we can be. That's what I'm working toward: to know the body in this living material manifestation so that I may better comprehend the matter of me without. It sounds pretty heavy, but I think the process of every human potential lends itself to a path toward self discovery.

When we study the miracle of body through its viscera and physiology, the strength of its muscles, its vulnerability to disease (consider how something smaller than a single hemoglobin can disrupt the balance of this universe of us as easily as we microbes can interrupt the Earth's homeostasis), through its complex functions to transform matter into energy, its system of defense against these microbial invasions, how can we not consider this phenomenon separate of the miracle of mind and the miracle of spirit? How, too, can we not consider the influence of the cosmic and earthy nature in which all this did manifest? The body is not alone in the process of living. When the body ceases to communicate with mind and spirit and the balance of Nature, this is death.

The University of California San Francisco's Osher Center for Integrative Medicine has a series of televised lectures about current research concerning the science behind the health value of this trinity--mind/body/spirit medicine, for example, or the "truth" behind psychoneuroimmunology (that is, how the body's natural defenses can be compromised and/or strengthened by the various states of our mental and spiritual well being). The Center calls this series a "mini medical school for the public". All videos can be viewed on their YouTube channel uctelevision. Here are links to two lectures in particular that better illustrate mindfulness in healing:

Mind-Body-Spirit Medicine

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UmteTW868I&feature=channel_page

Here Dr. Kevin Burrows, a physician and director of the Mindfulness Programs at the Osher Center, shares his research on mind-body (one word) medicine, and his hopefulness as science begins to corroborate what ancient wisdom had come to understand through thousands of years of study. In the last 15 minutes of his lecture Dr. Burrows introduced another branch of this tree of study that has led me to wonder further into this mystery. It is the work of Dr. Larry Dossey, a physician and proponent of Complimentary and Alternative medicine, and editor of Explore: the Journal of Science and Healing.

I'll be brief in this post about Dr. Dossey and hope to explore my studies of him in a later post. When Dr. Dossey was editor of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, he wrote that there are three eras of medicine. Three eras of medicine? He doesn't mean the history of medicine--western or eastern--that helped to define our concepts of medicine. He means modalities of healing. You can actually find an article of his published in the current issue of Explore titled "Mind-Body Medicine: Whose Mind and Whose Body?" that includes a table detailing these eras from which I've sourced my information.

Medical Eras:

Era I

Space-Time Characteristic: Local

Mechanical, material, or physical medicine

Description:

Elements of Era I are causal, deterministic, and describable by classical concepts of space-time and matter-energy. Mind is not a factor; “mind” is a result of brain mechanisms.

Examples:

Any form of therapy focusing solely on the effects of things on the body are Era I approaches, including techniques such as acupuncture and homeopathy, the use of herbs, etc. Almost all forms of “modern” medicine— drugs, surgery, irradiation, CPR, etc—are included.

EraII

Space-Time Characteristic: Local

Mind-body medicine

Description:

Mind is a major factor in healing within the single person. Mind has causal power and is thus not fully explainable by classical concepts in physics. Era II includes, but goes beyond, Era I.

Examples:

Any therapy emphasizing the effects of consciousness solely within the individual body is an Era II approach. Biofeedback, relaxation, self-hypnosis, imagery, visualization, and placebo effects are included in Era II.

Era III*

Space-Time Characteristic: Nonlocal

Nonlocal or transpersonal medicine

Description:

Mind is a factor in healing both within and between persons. Mind is not completely localized to points in space (brains or bodies) or time (present moment or single lifetimes).

Mind is unbounded and infinite in space and time, thus omnipresent, eternal, and ultimately unitary or one. Healing at a distance is possible. Elements of Era III are not describable by classical concepts of space-time or matter-energy. Era III includes, but goes beyond, Era II

Examples:

Any therapy in which effects of consciousness bridge between different persons is an Era III approach. All forms of distant healing, intercessory prayer, some types of shamanic healing, diagnosis at a distance, telesomatic events, and probably non-contact therapeutic touch are included in Era III.

____________

* There have been scientific studies regarding the efficacy or at least the recordable effects of certain Era III therapies such as distance healing, pranic healing and medical qi gong. Through TheSSEChannel by scientificexploration.org you can view excerpts of various SSE Talks explaining the scientific studies of these healing therapies. The talk concerning the pranic healing is especially interesting. Here's a brief description from the video channel:

Title:
An Extensive Laboratory Study of Pranic Healing Using Cells in Culture Subjected to Gamma Radiation

Summary:
A long-term study showed that pranic healing techniques (believed by practitioners to be "Qi or life-force energy") significantly enhanced the survival rate of cells subjected to radiation.

About the author:
Joie P. Jones, PhD, Department of Radiological Sciences, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA USA.

For more, visit www.scientificexploration.org

The second video of the two I found most interesting to the subject of mindfulness in medicine (Era II medicine) is Coping with Stress-The Truth About Psychoneuroimmunology (or PNI)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R9mD-iJZIg&feature=channel_page

Margaret Kemeny, Phd, Professor of Psychiatry at UCSF talks about her research on stress and how our ability to manage it affects or health and well being. What I like about this lecture is how clearly she explains the chemistry and physiology behind the what and the how of these effects.

***

What is the bottom line here? I guess the big question here is What is healing? We are aware of the body's ability to fight disease and infection and the influences of mind and spirit and environment to do so, but we also know that sometimes the body can be overtaken too powerfully and needs a little to a lot of help to pull through; and, of course, we know that sometimes no matter how much outside and inside help delivered, the body's fight for survival just can not be won. My mother is a Registered Nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit in Texas. She knows the battle of managed care for the sick and dying. In the case of 23 week old newborns, for example, what can you say about the health of the tiny patient and the state of his or her mind and spirit in regards to its suffering and potential healing? The work of the healthcare practitioner is to facilitate the intrisic healing mechanics of the body. But in cases such as these when the body was not able to mature to full-term in the womb and is then unable to viscerally function properly without the aide of machines and pharmaceuticals engineered to substitute the body's various deficiencies what can one do but manage the symptoms complicated by such a premature birth and work feverishly to simulate the mother's in utero landscape with warm lights in an incubator, IVs, synthetic surfactant (to increase pulmonary compliance or to keep the alveolus from collapsing under the force from the high surface tension of the water in the fluid that surrounds the alveolus), and a feeding tube? Who doesn't turn to prayer in one form or another to compliment these treatments? Or the gentle touches from the family and their encouraging words? This too is complimentary medicine. It is the rudimentary, most ancient of healing practices we could ever afford: love and compassion. Regardless of the healing modality, regardless of the science or era of a medicine, we can't always save the patient, but we can let them know that through all the pain and suffering they might endure they are not alone in this process and that all is being done to help them through. This is the best that any of us can ever hope for or hope to give. So yes, touching is good.

Magic in Medicine and the 13 Ghost Points

I am no scholar of the history of medicine or the anthropological etymology of traditional healing practices around the world, but I can guess that the medicine of early human was a split between the heroics of emergency care and the magical battle against the demons of disease. It was Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's improvements on the microscope and his subsequent studies of microbiology that lead to germ theory and immunology that faltered these supernatural conclusions. Now we use words like bacteria and virus, autoimmune disorder to describe the monsters that, seasonally or otherwise, usurp our body and mind. Most of us cannot see demons or devils or ghosts so we dismiss the notion as superstition and therefore not of physical importance. But we can at various magnifications witness, study and categorize the germs representing these superstitions. No longer do we count on the shaman's communion with the Spirits and our ancestors to intervene to exorcise the pernicious influence out from our body. It is pharmaceutical science we believe in, it is pharmaceutical science that works. But was the treatment by the shaman or the priest any less effective than our modern science? Was the non-scientific understanding of the clinical nature of the devil-for-pathogen any less accurate than the science of how a pathogenic enzyme weakens a cell wall thus allowing a virus, say, to hijack the cell in order to industrialize its "evil" genetic material? A devil by another name doesn't sound so sweet; but, really, were our ancient brothers and sisters of the healing arts off the mark when they considered our spiritual and mental delinquencies a correlation--if not a direct cause--of the ghosts and devils that ravaged our well being?

Let's consider the human form. It is a sack of ghastly viscera held between an armature of cartilage and bone; it is a machine of complicated circulatory pumps and muscular devices able to manipulate matter and do work; it is a material construct of a spiritual consciousness; it is a biological super-bug; it is alive. Regardless of how we approach the object of us and its function, we understand it as comprised of three elements: the body, the mind and the spirit and as a result of the balance between the communion of these three, susceptible to illness.

Chinese Medicine is one of many medical traditions that embrace this natural trinity when considering the health of each patient. Of course it is not without its history of demonized conditions exorcised through ancestor worship and prayer, repentance, etc. Illness within the body was understood early on as consequences of the patient whose actions were out of sink with the movements of nature and reflected in the body through various patterns of the 8 principles: hot, cold, damp, dry,internal, external, yin & yang. What about mental/brain disorders and emotional disturbances? Particularly mania and epilepsy was thought to be the work of ghosts. Ah... But these ghosts or devils could be tamed and led outside and away from the body by a physician utilizing, through acupressure or acupuncture, a prescribed pattern from the thirteen ghost points developed over 2000 years ago.

See below:
13 Ghost Points *

GV26 --Gui Gong--Ghost Palace LU 11

LU 11--Gui Xin--Ghost Convincing SP 1

SP1--Gui Lei--Ghost Fortress PC 7

PC7--Gui Xin--Ghost Heart BL 62

BL62--Gui Lu--Ghost Road (Fire needle 3-7 times)

GV16--Gui Zhen--Ghost Pillow

ST6--Gui Chuang--Ghost Bed (Fire needle)

CV24--Gui Shi--Ghost Market

PC8--Gui Ku--Ghost Cave

GV23--Gui Tang--Ghost Hall CV 1

CV1--Gui Cang--Ghost Hidden (Moxa only)

LI11--Gui Chen--Ghost Official (Fire needle 3-7 times)

Hai Cuan--Gui Feng--Ghost Seal (Needle or Prick)

*Source: www.tcmstudent.com/study_tools/Ghost Points.html which sourced the information from "Sun Si-Miao's Ode to 13 Ghost Acupoints for the Treatment of Mental Disorders". American Journal of Acupuncture. Vol 20, No 3, 1992, p267-268.


No longer are these points used to exorcise a patient of their demon but, interestingly, to help treat various onsets of psychological illness such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, mania, epilepsy, etc. But how often do Western practitioners of Chinese Medicine use these points to treat a patient's mental illness? Would they even describe these points as "ghost points" to their Western patients? Are these practices still used in the People's Republic of China? In his March 1979 article Mental Illness in China: A 'Contradiction among the People', Joel Greenberg reports about two groups of American psychiatrists who visited the People's Republic of China to study the treatment practices of Chinese psychiatric doctors on a growing patient population of mentally ill. Oddly enough, the subject of ghost points was never addressed in the article. Of course the common practices of herbal prescriptions, acupressure, acupuncture and moxabustion were used in conjunction with Western pharmaceuticals ("antischizophrenic drugs") and a dose of communist idealism: "'The doctors believe that patients have arrived at wrong conclusions because they have not made thorough investigations' into their illness. In-hospital classes are held, where the patients study Chairman Mao's philosophical works and articles on how to handle 'the contradictions among the people,' or interpersonal difficulties."

The points that were needled--"in front of each ear canal for phobias; at the temples for ruminative states and at the mandibular joints and vortex for schizophrenia"--do not appear to match any of the 13 points listed above. But this is Chairman Mao's China. Traditional Chinese Medicine has publicly replaced Classical Chinese Medicine practices. "Superstition" in Chinese medicine has all but been completely rid of and the integration of Western science and biomedical theories and practices is the mainstream in Chinese hospitals and with the government trained "barefoot doctors" administering aide and health education to rural China.

The literal ghosts of illness and disease were replaced by figurative ones which still let us consider the mind-body disturbance that elicited the imbalance that fostered the pernicious influence to ravage the body and the mind. Then those figurative ghosts were busted and now remains the symptoms of disease to be managed. More and more, though, through the integration of Western and Eastern medical practices into mainstream medicine and the health care reform's focus on wellness and prevention, we're learning that managed disease care doesn't have to be the singular work of modern medicine. Health care professionals can actually promote health and wellness in the communities by educating the public of the curative magical practices of our bodies. The act of someone fostering wellness in another may be without its magical paradigms, but there is something sacred to the act, the ritual of giving of oneself to help heal a stranger in need. Modern healers may no longer be our village shamans or country priests but they can be guides to help us see the invisible that afflicts us, to understand the intentions of that heated influence and to educate us to know our bodies, our lifestyle (without judgment) and our environment so that we may avoid future altercations with the Devil pathogen that's keeping us from enjoying the full life we all deserve.