Pioneers of a new medicine: meet a group of renegade doctors who are part of wave of change revolutionizing American medicine

Vegetarian Times, Feb, 1997 by Eric Patterson, Luise Light

In 1974, when James Gordon M.D., a young psychiatrist, strained his back performing yoga incorrectly, he did what any Harvard-trained M.D. would do. He went to see the best orthopedist in Washington, D.C., where he lived. For two months, he dutifully followed orders, resting in bed and popping muscle relaxants. However, Gordon's condition failed to improve, even after treatments by numerous specialists, so reluctantly, he began making arrangements for back surgery.

"I didn't want surgery," Gordon recalls. "I had seen too many people left worse off by it." Dissatisfied with the last option given to him by Western medicine, Gordon decided to try an unorthodox approach. He placed a call to Shyam Singha, an osteopathic physician from London who had cured a friend of partial deafness with spinal manipulation. Gordon had met Singha a few months earlier and couldn't decide whether he was a charismatic healer or a quack. However, now Gordon was desperate and open to alternatives.

Singha told Gordon to stop taking his medication and eat nothing but pineapple for a week. "What he said sounded absurd," Gordon recalls. He asked Singha, why pineapple? "Pineapple has malic acid," Singha explained. "Malic acid affects the lung and colon. In Chinese medicine, the lung and colon are the mother of the kidney and bladder." Mother of what? "The bladder and kidney are connected to the back," Singha said.

"I didn't understand Singha, but I did what he said," Gordon recalled. "He had a certain authority [in his manner], and my hope of getting well was stronger than my skepticism. Besides, there seemed no harm in eating pineapple for a week." Within three days, Gordon was laid up with a 103 degree fever, and his back was no better. "That's good," Singha told him, explaining that Gordon was experiencing a "healing crisis," meaning that he had to get worse before he could get better.

By the seventh day, Gordon was about 90 percent cured, and after a local osteopath adjusted his spine, his back trouble vanished completely. "From then on," says Gordon, "I had a whole new perspective on health care." Gordon decided to devote his professional career to exploring alternative healing methods. Today, Gordon heads the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C., a small organization he founded that teaches relaxation and stress reduction techniques to locals and professionals.

In his private practice, Gordon treats patients with conventional medicine but also with acupuncture, Chinese herbs, nutrition, massage, yoga and even dance movement. He is a clinical professor of psychiatry and family medicine at Georgetown University, where he trains medical students in preventive medicine, combining Western and Eastern healing traditions. "I teach them that their task is to be compassionate and to treat patients with respect and love and help to free them from fear, loneliness and pain," says Gordon.

He also chairs the scientific advisory council of the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM), a part of the National Institutes of Health, which sets the government's research priorities in alternative medicine, a program some view as the first crack in organized medicine's wall of opposition to unconventional therapies.

In his new book, Manifesto for a New Medicine (Addison-Wesley, 1996), Gordon calls for a marriage of conventional and alternative therapies and says patients need to be partners in their own health care. "I give people the tools to take care of themselves in ways similar to those I learned to help myself."

AN EXAM ROOM

REVOLUTION

A beefy man with a woodsman's dark beard is sitting shirtless on the examining table. Ron, a carpenter, has come in for his periodic acupuncture treatment to control chronic migraines and lower back and neck pain. He's probably not the type you'd expect to seek out alternatives to Western medicine, but here he is, willingly letting Don Catino, M.D., stick him with acupuncture needles. Ron says, "Doc and I have been through a lot together, back surgery, prescription drugs, physical therapy and cortisone shots. I tried everything, but nothing worked. I was in pain all the time. Then, about two years ago, Doc suggested acupuncture, and I tried it. I was pain-free after two treatments. Now, I just come in for flare-ups and tune-ups."

Catino, a tall, slender man in his late forties, would look equally at home making rounds in a big city teaching hospital as in his homey office in rural New London, N.H. He is a board-certified internist with a specialty in geriatrics as well as an associate professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, N.H. Impeccably trained in conventional medicine, it was only after a decade in private practice that Catino realized his training hadn't given him the tools to help 70 to 80 percent of the patients who walked through his door.

As Catino inserts the slim, flexible needles in Ron's face, neck, wrist and feet, he explains, "I'm picking up the most powerful points on what the Chinese call the `bladder line' as well as some tender points around the scar on Ron's neck from back surgery. What we're trying to accomplish is to stimulate movement and free flow of energy, Qi (CHEE), from one side of Ron's body to the other. We know that in the process, endorphins, growth hormone and serotonin are released, which have anti-inflammatory action and produce an overall sense of well-being, a kind of drug-free high. Acupuncture is safe and practically painless, and it helps up to 80 percent of my patients who are failures with allopathic [conventional] medicine."