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by S. Pathiravitana

Blending Medicine is the title of a book which introduces a new approach to medicine. This follows from the enlightened attitude certain governments are now taking with regard to the different methods available for the cure of common ailments that plague their citizens.

The United States, predominantly, has made a sensible decision to give official sanction to some, of what are called, 'unconventional' methods of healing.

Why some of these methods which have been in use for thousands of years are described as 'unconventional' is a bit of a puzzle.

Without such methods I wonder how the Pyramids could have been built or the Great Wall of China or the magnificent tanks and dagobas of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa.

Certainly, not by a sickly people! For only a people with a sound mind and a sound body could even dream of putting up such structures like Sigiriya or the Taj Mahal.

The official sanction that Acupuncture has got in the US is the result of its having passed the 'scientific' test. The only drawback to a host of others getting official sanction is that they have to satisfy a 'scientific' yardstick. But what is a scientific yardstick?

Can the explanation given by a surgeon at a post-mortem examination that 'the operation was successful, but the patient died' be accepted as a scientific statement?

'Unconventional' medical methods have also patients dying on their hands. But the vedaralas are less arrogant and would admit wistfully, ledaa malaata bada num sudda vunaa.

Drifting towards unconventional

For some time now those seeking medical aid have been drifting (the phenomenon is worldwide) away from the conventional towards the unconventional.

Conventional medicine has to blame itself for this state of affairs. Doctors are far too busy to give their full attention to patients who flock to them attracted by the sensational cures by way of newer and newer drugs the media is in the habit of publicising.

As about societies, so about drugs and (to paraphrase Karl Marx), every drug carries with it the seeds of its own way of poisoning the body. It also comes along with a tiny pamphlet printed in small print indicating the possible side effects of the drug.

These drugs have a tendency to hide the symptoms of diseases but end up sometimes by creating their own diseases. Thus a patient being treated for diabetes may end up with hypertension.

So much so medical science has a term for such happenings now - Iatrogenic illnesses - iatros meaning physician in Greek and the OED's definition, 'a disease, symptom etc. induced unintentionally by a physician's treatment, examination etc.' which means you cannot even take him to court either.

The most severe critics of this system have been the doctors themselves (and a minority at that) and only those with a sense of responsibility to the community.

When the drugs for hypertension were first introduced to the market, Dr William Evans of the London Hospital writing to the Royal Society of Medicine in 1954 said that he had seen in the course of his medical career no fewer than 58 of them put on the market with the usual recommendations.

The earlier ones, he said, though failing to do good, did no harm, but 'latterly the more potent drugs have produced uncomfortable and often distressing side effects' and he went on to list the distressing ones as causing among others, nasal stuffiness, conjunctivitis, depressive psychosis, suppression of urine and paralytic ileus (a painful obstruction in the intestine). And his final words on these drugs were 'The discontinuance of these drugs is overdue, they have no effect on hypertension'.

There have been other critics who have been even more devastating. "I believe that more than ninety per cent of Modern Medicine could disappear from the face of the earth - doctors, hospitals, drugs and equipment and the effect on our health would be...beneficial."

This is the opinion of Dr. Robert S. Mendelsohn, a reputed paediatric who was an associate professor of the University of Illinois Medical School and a director of Chicago's Michael Rees Hospital and chairman of the Medical Licensure Committee of the State of Illinois. He died in the early Nineties and was familiar to millions of Americans through his popular radio column The People's Doctor.

Fear of death

Echoing the thoughts of Dr. William Evans of the London Hospital he made this equally shattering revelation - "I wonder just how much of the middle aged population suffers from impotence, not from any psychological cause but simply from the blood pressure medication."

What really sustains the modern medical system, Mendelsohn said, is our fear, a fear aroused by the Pharmceutical industry.

"We are frightened of death. We fear after being told that something has gone extremely wrong with us. In haste, we just don't think long or far enough. We swallow anything that is given to us.

For this reason drug companies sell thousands of tons of pills each month just to pacify those instilled fears - real or perceived. We do not have the slightest inkling of what these chemicals are going to do to us."

If we leave aside his fiery rhetoric for the moment what he is trying to say is that we can get only a ten percent contribution from Modern Medicine and that too for what he calls emergency medicine like the removal of infected appendixes and similar obstructions.

As for the treatment of common ailments like aches and pains, coughs and colds he recommends seeking the help of the practitioners of alternative medicine.

He speaks after his own experience with such alternative treatments. His wife who was suffering from a backache for a long time was finally cured not with Modern Medicine but by a visit or two to a Chiropractor.

Breakthrough System

Blended Medicine is a compilation that may have won the approval of Dr. Mendelsohn. Its second title is The Best Choices in Healing and goes on to say that it is The Breakthrough System That Combines, Natural, Alternative & Mainstream Medicine for More Than 100 Ailments.

Breakthrough means that the climate is propitious today for the growth of alternative medicine which was given only a nodding recognition by the U.S. Government in 1992 by giving it a small corner in the National Institute of Health and identifying it plainly as Office of Alternative Medicine.

It was elevated by the National Congress in 1998 to a higher status with the flattering title of National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and increased its budget from $2 million to $50 million in 1998.

This book, I must say, is of absorbing interest and is bound to help some of us to overcome our nervousness at the sight of a White Coat, because now that the medicine is being blended the coat has turned to one with a many coloured splendour.

The therapies that are included in this book are many and diverse. They range from Meditation to Music and laced in between with several other therapies which cost virtually nothing by way of medication.

Home Remedies

Take for instance the Home Remedies Therapy. Now, we have been warned by Mainstream medicators not to try any nonsense by acting as our own doctors. But I think there is a good deal of truth if not common sense in the remedies people resort to in their homes.

This, for instance, is what Blended Medicine reports on the Therapy for Overweight included alongside therapies from Homeopathy, Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda and Mainstream Medicine.

"Turn off your TV. Television watching is one of the strongest predictors of future weight problems," Dr. Pizzorno says.

In other words the more you watch the tube, the more likely you are to be overweight. It's possible to exercise while watching TV - but for most people television time is couch time. In addition the steady stream of food commercials, fuels cravings."

Then there is advice also to throw away the scales. "Scales can't distinguish among water loss, muscle loss and fat loss," Dr. Goor says. "A more accurate way to measure your progress is to check how your clothes fit. When they get loose, you are losing weight - and pounds as well."

Incidentally, most home remedies are of peasant origin. For, it is said that in Europe only the rich could afford the high cost of medicine in the past.

What a contrast to what we had here, where the king himself acted as physician sometimes and he wouldn't think of asking money for his services which were in any case made available to the people, to rich or poor and even to the dumb animals absolutely free.

Ayurveda

Under the therapies for blood pressure there is one from Ayurveda. "Ayurveda practitioners view blood pressure primarily as a Vata disorder, according to Virendra Sodhi M.D. (Ayurveda), N.D.(Doctor of Naturopathy) professor at Bastyr University Kenmore, Washington. To treat high blood pressure, Dr. Sodhi recommends daily meditation.

He also advocates dietary changes that includes eating more fruits and vegetables, especially garlic and onions, and less salt and saturated fat. And he prescribes an array of Ayurvedic herbs, such as sarpagandha, ashwagandha and arjuna."

You may be wondering how Americans can get ayurvedic Indian herbs. We are told that there are a few places in the States where they are sold. And since the FDA regulations allow them to be imported as foods they are available in some supermarkets.

And, by the way, it is not only Indians who are practising ayurveda in the U.S. There are also Americans who go to India for five or six year courses of ayurvedic studies and comeback with degrees like Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery (B.A.M.S.) from the 200 or so Indian Ayurvedic medical schools.

The diagnosis of High Blood Pressure as a Vata disorder may amuse some of our own mainstream doctors.

According to John Attygalle M.D.(Aberdeen) M.R.C.S. (Eng) who published a book in 1917 titled Sinhalese Materia Medica, the father of Western medicine, Galen, who borrowed his concepts from India "was so obsessed by the literal meanings of these words that he named the vessels that carried red blood 'arteries' (from Greek 'aer' signifying air).

The names Vata, Pita and Kapha, says Attygalle, are really technical terms. " Vatha, accordingly does not mean 'wind' , but signifies all the phenomena that comes under the function of the central and sympathetic nervous system."

So impressed were some Western doctors in the last century with the methodology of the Ayurvedic system that one of them, an American, Dr. George Clark M.D., M.A of Philadelphia, is quoted by Attygalle as having said (reminiscent somewhat of the mordant remarks made by Mendelsohn) after studying half a dozen translations of Charaka:

"As I go over each fasciculus (of Charaka) I come to the conclusion that the present day physicians drop all modern drugs and chemicals from their Pharmacopoeia and adopt methods of Charaka in treating diseases, there will be less work for undertakers, and fewer chronic invalids in the world."

Human face

Blended Medicine should go some way to wipe that snooty smile off the faces of most Mainstream doctors and help them to show us instead a human face. No single medical system can say it is in sole possession of the truth, nor may it set itself up to judge others.

Let us not forget that pot sit (mere coloured water) was the cure of Mainstream Medicine for many common ailments before the sulphas and the anti biotics came on the scene.

One way poor countries like Sri Lanka can cut down on their huge pharmaceutical bills is to open up in the base hospitals in the island shop windows where practitioners of different forms of medicine like ayurveda, acupunture, homoeopathy can be on a register of referrals or made available on the spot for treatment.

We have for instance a vibrant acupuncture centre in Colombo where at present people even from distant places like Jaffna come for treatment. This centre has trained by now so many that they can easily takeover the role of barefoot doctors as China herself has done.

The Vedagama opened up by the late President Premadasa was one such scheme. But the idea should not be to gather these practitioners at one big centre but practice a little bit of devolution to spread them out to make their services available to the public with the least inconvenience.

An additional beneft would be that, hopefully, Pot.sit and placebos could act as the magic cures the crowding in the mainstream hospitals could be reduced and the doctors themselves would be freer to give better attention to their patients.

As every doctor knows 75 per cent of the patients who crowd these hospitals have no serious illness. All that some need is a little rest and recovery is almost instant.

The book is authored by Michael Castleman M.A. regarded as one of the top writers on health in the U.S. and a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Reader's Digest and many other leading journals.

The book is published by Rodale, the founder of the Soil and Health Foundation now called the Rodale Institute.

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