Recently in Healing Category

The Catholic blogger The Anchoress writes:

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) the constitution of a mother while pregnant will have lifelong effects upon her child.

For example, a mother who is severely depressed or experiencing extreme sadness during her pregnancy may suffer some lung ailments: Sadness effects the energy and tonality of the lungs. Ergo, her child may end up having problems with asthma.

Interestingly, Western Medicine is beginning to find the same correlation the Chinese had discovered so long ago:

Mothers who suffer from major depression or anxiety disorders are more likely to have children with asthma and other allergy-based conditions, according to a US study. The association was only found for biological children, supporting a "shared genetic liability" theory.

Ramin Mojtabai, a psychiatrist from Columbia University in New York, US, assessed the relationship between parental psychopathology and childhood allergy in more than 9000 parent-child pairs from the 1999 US National Health Interview Survey. Most of the parents were biologically related to their children, but 554 of the pairs were non-biological.
[...]
Mojtabai says it is unclear why the children of mothers with depression had a higher risk of allergic disorders, but he speculates that it might be related to mitochondria - which are inherited through the maternal line - as mutations in mitochondrial DNA have been reported in both atopic and other skin disorders and in bipolar mood disorder. "Or it could be to do with genetic imprinting - how some genes are expressed when received from one gender, but not the other," he says.

"Other studies have shown a shared genetic risk for allergy and mood disorders in twins, and that people with depression are themselves more likely to suffer from asthma, although we didn't find any strong evidence for that," Mojtabai adds.

The Anchoress adds:

Although Western medicine is relatively young (150 years or so) and the other medicines are ancient, they both have value, and I'm always amused when someone pooh-poohs an Eastern remedy that has been around for thousands of years, simply because it is NOT a new Western treatment. Many people don't realize that well before the discovery of penicillin, Oriental doctors were making compounds of mold and deeply green leaves (chorophyll) to fight infection. So when I find stories like this, which have even the barest suggestion of bringing West and East together, I like to highlight it.

If you have time, here's video of a 90-minute lecture Dr. Sherwin Nuland of Yale Medical School delivered at the National Institutes of Health in March of this year, talking about acupuncture and the things he's observed in China. Dr. Nuland told the audience that based on his own extensive observations, "there are phenomena that cannot be fully explained by the scientific method. Perhaps a new paradigm will have room for Yin and Yang, and Qi channels."

Jerome Groopman, M.D., writing in the NY Review of Books, on the dehumanization of the practice of medicine:

At the conference, an animated discussion followed, and I heard how changes in the culture of medicine were altering the ways that the young doctors interacted with their patients. One woman said that she spent less and less time conversing with her patients. Instead, she felt glued to a computer screen, checking off boxes on an electronic medical record to document a voluminous set of required "quality of care" measures, many of them not clearly relevant to her patient's problems. Another resident talked about how so-called "work rounds" were frequently conducted in a closed conference room with a computer rather than at the patient's bedside.

During my training three decades ago, the team of interns and residents would move from bedside to bedside, engaging the sick person in discussion, looking for new symptoms; the medical chart was available to review the progress to date and new tests were often ordered in search of the diagnosis. By contrast, each patient now had his or her relevant data on the screen, and the team sat around clicking the computer keyboard. It took concerted effort for the group to leave the conference room and visit the actual people in need.

More:

And it would be naive to believe that money is not one part of the exchange between physician and patient. But only recently has medical care been recast in our society as if it took place in a factory, with doctors and nurses as shift workers, laboring on an assembly line of the ill. The new people in charge, many with degrees in management economics, believe that care should be configured as a commodity, its contents reduced to equations, all of its dimensions measured and priced, all patient choices formulated as retail purchases. The experience of illness is being stripped of its symbolism and meaning, emptied of feeling and conflict. The new era rightly embraces science but wrongly relinquishes the soul.

In his book Carrying the Heart, Dr. Frank González-Crussi, a professor of pathology at Northwestern University, has made a sharp departure from medicine as a cold world of clinical facts and figures. Rather, he asks us to return to a view of the body not as a machine but as a wondrous work of creation, where both the corporeal and the spiritual coexist. [Emphasis mine -- RD] His aim, he writes, is

to increase the public's awareness of the body's insides. By this, I do not mean the objective facts of anatomy, for most educated people today have a general, if limited, understanding of the body's parts and functions. I mean the history, the symbolism, the reflections, the many ideas, serious or fanciful, and even the romance and lore with which the inner organs have been surrounded historically.

Read the whole thing. It sounds as if Western medicine is groping its way to insights about the human person and healing that Traditional Chinese Medicine has had all along.

This was the first cool weekend of the season, and it brought my Raynaud's back stronger than ever. My hands were so cold last night that I had to sleep wearing a fleece (to preserve core temperature) and fleece gloves, which only kind of worked. Mind you, it wasn't that cold last night, and the house was comfortable for everybody else. It wasn't really cold in here -- in fact, I like it to be a bit cool in the house. My hands, not so much. They were almost painfully cold, from the blood rushing out.

This stuff has gotten worse with each passing winter, and I am to the point now in which I'm going to have to wear gloves all the time in the winter, even inside. Does anybody else in my readership suffer from this autoimmune disorder? How do you deal with it? A friend of ours has it worse than I do -- or she did have it, until a Chinese medicine practitioner put her on a combination of something called brown juice -- a herbal concoction that looks like diarrhea -- and LC Balancer, which, likewise. Among my idiotic complications is sensory processing disorder, which makes me a supertaster. If this stuff smells and tastes bad, I'm going to gag trying to get it down. But get this: it was the only thing that brought my Raynaud's-suffering friend any relief. In fact, all her symptoms disappeared.

I am thisclose to submitting to the dreaded brown juice/LC Balancer regimen. I can't take this painful cold. Anybody else have any experience with these products?

Thanks to the reader who, in a thread below, brought my attention to this fascinating New Atlantis article about AIDS and psychology in Africa. Look:

It is natural for anyone facing a terminal disease to ask, Why me? This is an exasperated, unanswerable cri de coeur in the rational West--one of the steps of the grieving process, we are told, that we all just need to get through. But many Africans have their own kind of answer to that question.

African tribes are not a homogenous, undifferentiated mass, but the vast majority traditionally held in common a worldview of causation very different from our own. With reference to illness, it is called the personalistic theory of disease. Even today, most Africans believe that any major occurrence, good or bad, has two causes. The first might be called physical: for instance, that a retrovirus causes AIDS by destroying the cells of the immune system. The second is a spiritual, less tangible cause, but is perceived to be no less real. Edward Evans-Pritchard, whose ethnography of the Nuer people of Sudan is a foundational work of anthropology, put Africans' cosmological outlook this way: One might understand that a house collapsed because termites damaged it. But the more important question is, Who sent the termites?

The author, Travis Kavulla, goes on to deliver a fascinating essay in cultural anthropology, and how African religious and cultural beliefs make it hard to treat AIDS in a Western way. His piece is far too complex, and too good, to sum up tidily here, but he discusses how and why treating and stopping AIDS in Africa cannot be effectively done with the mechanical Western model. You simply must embed traditional medicine in a framework of traditional African spirituality. Kavulla writes:

The public-health lobby answers these questions, vis-à-vis one of Africa's greatest calamities, by saying, essentially, "What's wrong with you is you haven't been using condoms." This is the narrow-minded response, much more so than the call for behavioral change. As long as this attitude persists, Western policy will remain discordant with the realm of cause and effect within which Africans are operating. It is hardly news that sub-Saharan Africa is in the grips of a religious and social upheaval. Church attendance is soaring, and even those denominations, like Roman Catholicism, that are hemorrhaging members to evangelical sects are nonetheless still growing in absolute numbers. It is highly uncommon to attend a church service on a Sunday in Africa where the building is not filled to capacity. Christianity, as well as Islam, is a huge force whose day-to-day impact on African lives cannot be ignored. Any successful HIV/AIDS strategy will have to enlist churches, their moral authority, and their enormous memberships.

Only behavioral change will turn the tide against AIDS in Africa, he writes, and the only behavioral change that has a chance of working is that which appeals to the spiritual convictions of African people. Kavulla again:

The Western public-health lobby, bred in a culture that preaches unconstrained freedom of the individual in the realm of sexual relations, is put off by talk of moralizing policies, or of any policy that de-emphasizes condoms. But it needs a dose of its own advice. It must stop imposing its own agenda on Africa. It must realize that HIV has a social dimension that must be addressed, that Africans are naturally wont to view this disease, which perversely inverts the life-giving act of sex, as a moral calamity. The sooner the donor community realizes this, and reorients its policies to fit African realities, the better.

Read the whole thing.

Dr. Abraham Verghese, on how our technologically advanced medicine has become too abstracted from the human person:

An anthropologist from Mars looking at our hospitals might conclude that the 'work' of medicine takes place in rooms far removed from the patient, typically in front of a computer screen. The actual patient and the person-hood of the patient is pushed to the margin of medical attention while the 'iPatient', the virtual patient rules.

He goes on to discuss how a group of doctors he's part of have been talking about the ritual of the medical exam, and why it's important to establishing a healing bond between physicians and patients. And then:

Everyone agreed to this aspect of the exam, the importance of ritual. Then why is it that we so rarely emphasize the importance of the ritual when trying to defend and preserve what is a threatened craft? I think it is because this ritual (like love, steadfastness, loyalty, courage) is not easily measured, and in a medical world that seems to be ruled by psychometricians, if it ain't measured it doesn't exist.

The scientific, empirical mindset has its limits.