The art of healing

S. PATHIRAVITANA

“I have allowed colds, gouty defluxions, looseness, palpitations of the heart, migraine and other disturbances to grow old and die a natural death in me, finding them gone when I have half trained myself to give them shelter. They are better conquered by courtesy than by swaggering. We must suffer quietly the laws of our condition.

“We are bound to grow old, to grow weak and to be sick despite all medicine. It is the first lesson that Mexicans teach their children when, as they issue from their mother’s womb, they greet them in this fashion: “Child, thou hast come into this world to endure; endure, suffer and be silent.”

This quotation came into my mind when the President of the Sri Lanka Medical Association, Dr Sunil Seneviratna Yapa, a few years back referred to a neglected dimension in the art of healing in his farewell address to the SLMA. On a first reading you begin to wonder whether this is the kind of information you should be passing on to people who have a total faith in pills, potions and kasayas (decoction).

On a second reading you also begin to wonder whether the pills, potions and kasayas are truly doing you a world of good, especially with placebos now around the place, (those dummy pills that doctors give you and your remarkable recoveries due to them).

But it is on your third reading that it begins to dawn on you how this man in the above quote, by handling the various illnesses that visited him, survived. To authenticate what he said I had to dive into my memory and fetch from its bottom a bit of information I had stored in it.

And that is the case of an American farmer, reported I think in the Readers’ Digest, whose postmortem revealed that he had left evidence of having endured over a hundred illnesses, including cancer.

Obviously, he may have been a conscientious farmer, who did not have the time, one presumes, to attend to his various visitations from time to time. The quotation and the connection with this farmer’s case and what Dr. Seneviratna Yapa is saying should now fall into place.

In his inaugural address he was saying that our immune principle, normally an excellent security guard, tends to get distracted from its job when the patient starts falling into a depression. To help the security guard we should avoid depression. In other words one should relax and not worry, allowing the bodily defences to do their work in peace.

The man in the quotation is not using the word depression but he is in fact saying the very same thing when he so airily invites any diseases passing by to come and lodge inside.

Diseases are so astounded by this act of generosity that it appears they do not wish to outstay their hospitality. Soon they decide to pack up and go. As he says, “They are better conquered by courtesy than by swaggering.”

The modern technique of treatment, however, has hardly any courtesy in it. Swaggering it may not do, letting the medical reps do that, but the doctors make up for it with their style - one of aggression, both with their drugs and with their approach to the patient.

This is the reason why people are turning to gentler techniques of healing all over the world. No drugs to kill you when they miss their mark. No lakhs of rupees to spend on do or die operations.

For some years now there has been, especially in the West, a call to a halt, even by practitioners of the Western art of healing, in the reckless use of medical drugs. This is due to a growing awareness of the existence of other systems of treatment which are much more wholesome.

Yet, despite the advances made in medical treatment in the West, this latter category of medical practitioners in spite of the hostility of the Western practitioners, their scorn and contempt have stubbornly held on increasing their popularity meanwhile. Things are a little better today with acupuncture taking great strides and the subject itself being taught in medical schools run by the better known American universities.

The change is reflected in the terminology, too. From Quackery, the pejorative term used at first for all such methods that do not conform to the Medical Establishment’s sole idea of healing, to Fringe medicine and then to Alternative and now to Complementary medicine.

The range is very wide; includes nearly every aspect of the human body from tip to toe. Like the term Spiritual healing used by the SLMA President there are many other forms of healing like Reflexology, Acupress, Auto-Suggestion, Osteopathy and Chiropractice (two respectable names for our own kedum biddum veda mahattaya of old), Hypnotherapy, Radiesthesia and so on.

In this lot the case of Emile Coue, the founder of Auto-Suggestion is very interesting.

He was a student of pharmacy and not so well to do. He had quite casually advised one day a patient who had an illness which was not responding to the usual treatment to try a new patent medicine. The result was remarkable. His trouble disappeared.

Struck by this fortuitous cure Emile was intrigued. He took a second look at the bottle of medicine he recommended and found that there was nothing new or spectacular in it.

The only thing unusual about the bottle was the puff the medicine had received from its maker and coupled with the trust he had in Emile the cure had worked.

The matter did not end there. Since he had stumbled on a secret in the art of healing he went on to build a system of cure on mere suggestion. He gained an international practice and fame in the Twenties of the last century on the magic formula of suggestion based on a single sentence - Every day in every way I am getting better and better.

Our doctors too could benefit from Emile Coue’s experience had they the time and patience, for, “whenever a method of treatment is recommended by a doctor who believes in the value of his own advice, there causes in the sufferer... a psychotherapeutic state, a state tending to promote cure.

“This state is the same, whatever the nature of the treatment.”

We are grateful to Dr Sunil Seneviratna Yapa for opening a new chapter in the book of Western medicine for Sri Lanka. There have been old voices in the Western world too, that have sought to bring down the high pedestal on which the Medical Establishments rest in some of the developed countries in the world to more realistic levels. But the task is not easy.