Tuesday, June 24, 2003

Of Course, He's a Doctor! I met with a Traditional Chinese Medical doctor in Columbus last week. I took my friend Hong, since he was very interested to meet someone else interested in Chinese medicine like himself. Hong is originally from China and is a long-time student of chi gong. During the meeting, the TCM doctor was very receptive, very courteous and laughed a lot. He is a joy to be around. I remarked on this later to Hong, and he responded with "Of course, he must have that type of personality, he's a doctor!" I was shocked. I explained that Western medical doctors are trained to have an "air of detachment" around their patients, and that they are warned to "not get too close." Hong was equally shocked. He said "What about having a good bedside manner? Isn't that something Western doctors strive for?" I agreed, but we decided that the term "bedside manner" meant two completely different things in practice in Chinese medicine versus Western. It was an interesting insight for both of us. 6:14:22 PM     Kinesiology as Primary Care I had a chance to chat with a mother and son who were sitting in the waiting room of an applied kinesiologist (muscle testing) last week. The woman was delightful. She seemed to be in her late fifties or early sixties, but her energy level and positve outlook made her seem much younger. The conversation with her fourteen year old son was even more interesting. I asked him if he spent much time at the kinesiologist's office. He said his mother would bring him here for any health issue, from a cold, flu to sore neck or even emotional issue. I almost couldn't believe I was talking to a teenager, he seemed so together and lucid. I asked if he believed it worked. "There's nothing to believe. It just works." I asked him if he discussed his office visits with his schoolmates, he said he did. He said the other kids were very skeptical of what he claimed the kinesiologist did for him, how many things it worked for. But, the boy said, "I told them they just need to try it for themselves." So far, none of them had. My young friend's problems with explaining his approach to health to his friends mirror the same problem in adults. People tend to dismiss holistic health approaches that perhaps "sound weird" as impossible and turn away. Many holistic practices can easily be explained through quantum physics and relativity, but so many of us understand so little of those branches of science that it is hard to begin the explanations unless the conversation is among physicists. And, to my understanding, those sciences are underemphasized in public schooling, even to this day. Relativity is almost one hundred years old and quantum mechanics is easily eighty years old. Why has it taken so long for the rest of us to catch up? After completing my writings about the future of holistic health, I was a little shocked when I realized I had come face-to-face with it in that waiting room that day. Some people have already migrated to my imagined new world, it's just that they don't talk about it much, because when they do, we think they're nuts. 1:33:35 PM

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