Sun, 26 Oct 2008

Tibetan Medicine

A Tibetan doctor give an introductory talk today to our meditation group. Here are my notes from his talk. I hope you find them interesting.

My name is Thubten Tsering. I graduated from the Tibetan Medical Institute in Dharmsala in 1987. I went to work at a clinic in Nepal and gained experience there. Then I went to Europe and got experience in treating Western people. This is my third time teaching in Baltimore. The first was at a conference of different medical systems. The second was at the Towson Dharma House. And now I am here.

Tibetan medicine is based on Buddhist philosophy. The fundamental text is the Four Medical Tantras. It explains how the internal energies function and affect our mind and body. It explains how to consult with patients, make medicines, and expel evil spirits. There are three principle energies (nyepa sum) in the body. If you understand them, no matter what system of healing you practice will benefit. The system of Tibetan medicine started when a Tibetan king invited practitioners of all the systems of traditional medicine to take what was best in each. So it combines teachings from Chinese and Indian medicine. There is a five year course to teach it at the Tibetan Medical Institute. One month of each year we go into the Himalayas to learn to identify medicinal herbs. Medicines are also made from gems and metals.

The three principal energies need to be in balance in order to maintain health. The first energy is rlung, or inner air. The second is rkhris pa, bile, or fire energy. The third is baken, or phlegm, the cold energy. These elements are affected by the corresponding outer elements. Tibetan medicine developed its own system of anatomy based on its understanding of these elements.

The wind energy is light, rough, clear, cold, subtle, and moving. It is responsible for the activity of respiration, the expulsion of urine and feces, menstruation, spitting, burping, speech, gives clarity to the sense organs, and sustains the life energy.

The bile energy is oily, sharp, hot, light, purgative, and fluid. It is responsible for hunger, thirst, digestion, and assimilation. It promotes bodily heat, gives color to the body and provides courage and determination.

The phlegm energy is oily, cool, heavy, blunt, smooth, firm, and sticky. It is responsible for firmness of body and stability of mind, induces sleep, generates tolerance and lubricates the body.

The seven bodily constituents are nutrition, blood, flesh, tissues, bones, bone marrow, and regenerative fluid. When food is ingested, it is transformed into each of these constituents in turn by separating out the waste products products of urine, feces, and perspiration.

When wind is unbalanced, the person will sigh, have a flighty mind, dizziness, and ringing in the ear. There will be insomnia, yawning, pains in the joints and back, and abdominal gurgling. When bile is unbalanced, there will be bitter eructations, headaches, surface fever, and digestive pain. When phlegm is unbalanced, there will be loss of appetite, the stomach will be full even without eating, vomiting, frequent belching, loss of taste, chills, and discomfort after eating.

Phlegm provides the basic foundation. Most phlegm disorders are digestive. Disorders of the brain or nervous systems are mostly wind disorders. Bile affects the heart or center of the body.

Before consultation the person is advised to avoid strong coffee or tea, other stimulating medicines, and strenuous exercise. These stimulate the wind energy and distorts the reading of the pulse. The person is asked to bring an early morning urine sample in a clear bottle. The doctor observes the person's urine, tongue, teeth, skin, eyes, and weight. The doctor checks the pulse and asks questions about diet, behavior, the cause of recent illness and other symptoms. The pulse is taken one inch below the wrist. Pulses are taken to assess the health of each of the organs.

Treatment can include changes of diet, lifestyle, and habits. When these are not sufficient, herbal medicines are prescribed. Or external therapies such as massage, cupping, moxibustion, needles, and bloodletting. Some illness is caused by evil spirits and past karma and must be treated by spiritual practices such as meditation, reciting mantras, and breathing exercises.

Persons with phlegm disorders often are heavy and don't exercise, I tell them to do prostrations. Persons with bile disorders, shouldn't do them because they will get headaches. Persons with wind disorders shouldn't overdo it, because it will disturb their wind further.

The long term cause of all disease is ignorance. The short term cause is negative emotions. Exciting conditions are the season, spirits, diet, and behavior. Health comes from a balanced body and mind. Developing positive emotions such as loving kindness, compassion, and forgiveness reduce negative emotions. So health ultimately depends on removing these negative emotional patterns. There is a yoga of smiling. What is lacking is happiness.

/altmed/ | permanent link

Fri, 10 Oct 2008

Insomnia

Last Monday I gave a talk on homeopathy and the treatment of insomnia to our study group. Here's the handout I prepared for the talk. Maybe someone who reads this weblog will find it useful.

Sleeping problems are an indication of a disordered mind and body. Before trying to solve them homeopathically, we should first look at our way of life and look for the cause of the disorder. We should only try homeopathy after removing the cause or if there is no apparent cause. This is consistent with what Hahnemann say in the Organon. Check for:

Homeopathic treatment can be used in either acute or chronic insomnia. Insomnia is acute if it has lasted for a two weeks or less and has a clear cause. The most common causes are:

If the problem is chronic, it should be treated constitutionally by an experienced homeopathic practitioner. Here are a few of the useful rubrics in Kent's Repertory:

The generalities and concomitants are also important in deciding the best constitutional remedy.

/altmed/ | permanent link

Tue, 19 Aug 2008

Fluoridation Risks

Fluoridation has a long history of being a contentious issue. In an ideal world. people would weigh the benefits and risks of fluoridation and and draw the approriate conclusion. In the real world, partisanship makes each side pick the evidence that supports their position and ignore the rest, Everyone is aware of the pro-fluoridation position, but few know the arguments against it. In fact, the opponents of fluoridation are usually summarized as crazies. So it's worth citing this anti-fluoridation article by the union representing EPA workers, as it's the best summary of the anti-fluoridation position I'm aware of. The article says evidence suporting fluoridation is lacking:

Regarding the effectiveness of fluoride in reducing dental cavities, there has not been any double-blind study of fluoride's effectiveness as a caries preventative. There have been many, many small scale, selective publications on this issue that proponents cite to justify fluoridation, but the largest and most comprehensive study, one done by dentists trained by the National Institute of Dental Research, on over 39,000 school children aged 5-17 years, shows no significant differences (in terms of decayed, missing and filled teeth) among caries incidences in fluoridated, non-fluoridated and partially fluoridated communities.

There is also a discussion of the health risks of fluoride, but I can't give a brief summary, you should read the article.

/altmed/ | permanent link

Tue, 12 Aug 2008

Last Sunday

Last Sunday I opened our meditation group. We had two new people show up and the meditation seemed to go well. That afternoon we had our annual hhomeopathic study group picnic. Karole, who we had not seen in a while, was there and she told us that she had a nasty staph infection that wouldn't heal. She finally healed it with a salve made from manuka honey. Manuka honey is made from the flowers of the plant that gives us tea tree oil, so it combines the antibacterial oprperties of that and honey. According to Karole the cure was quite dramatic, so I thought I'd pass the information along.

/altmed/ | permanent link

Fri, 25 Jul 2008

Frightful Fosamax

Fosamax is the most prescribed drug to prevent osteoporosis, mostly in elderly women. As with many allopathic medicines, it costs a lot, cures nothing, and causes problems worse than those it was meant to treat. As usual, lifestyle changes like proper diet and exercise, are the solution and provide side benefits instead of side effects.

Like other fast-tracked-to-Wall-Street drugs that are effectively "tested" on the first users, adverse reports about bisphosphonates came from patients and practitioners long before they came from the FDA or manufacturers.

Bisphosphonate patients have documented excruciating pain from Fosamax since 2001 and GlaxoSmithKline's Boniva since 2006 on askapatient.com, many calling the drugs "poison" and saying they were forced into wheelchairs.

But only in March did the FDA alert health care professionals to the "severe, sometimes incapacitating, musculoskeletal pain" that bisphosphonate drugs could cause in their patients and caution them to consider whether musculoskeletal pain "might be caused by the drug" rather than the bone condition.

/altmed/ | permanent link

Sat, 19 Jul 2008

Red Meat Worries

It's been a while since I've posted anything on health related issues, but this was too interesting not to mention. Scientists have discovered a small but important difference between man and other primates. We lack the ability to process an a sugar that is present in red meat that other primates can process. The sugar is called Neu5Gc. There's a suspicion that this inability is the cause of degenerative illnesses such as arthritis, heart disease, and cancer.

Prof Varki found that Neu5Gc was foreign to humans, even though we carry a very similar version of the same molecule - which may be one reason why animal-to-human organ and tissue transplants do not work well.

But in recent years, he has come to believe that the implications of this molecular difference are much wider. He has built up a range of evidence that potentially links Neu5Gc, a so-called sialic acid, to chronic disease.

This is because the animal version is absorbed by humans as a result of eating red meat and milk products, and there is evidence that the body views it as an invader.

Eating these foods could trigger inflammation and, over the long term, heart disease, certain cancers and auto-immune illnesses. Prof Varki stresses, however, that "we have not proven any link to disease, just suggested that it is something to explore".

/altmed/ | permanent link

Wed, 26 Mar 2008

Alain's Other Side

Alain Naude is one of Baltimore's homeopathic practitioners. He has a long and distinguished history as a homeopath and gets a mention in Julian Winston's book, The Faces of Homeopathy. For someone so famous, however, there's very little information about him on the web. This is how he likes it. When I posted my note from his talks on the web, he asked me to take them down. A pity, because he had some entertaning stories to tell about Pierre Schmidt. He's well regarded by my friends who have gone to see him. His style of practice is that of a die-hard Kentian. (Homeopaths will know what I mean and I suppose others won't care.)

The "other side" of Alain is his association with Eastern spirituality, especially Jiddhu Krishnamurti. Alain was Krishnamurti's secratary and I've read a book of Krishnamurti's talks where Alain is one of the interlocutors. It seems that Alain gave lectures on Krishnamurti's thought back in the Seventies in the Bay area, which was ground zero for that decade's spiritual bazaar. Charity emailed me a link to a blog post about Alain's career as a spiritual teacher. (Thanks!) The tone of the post is rather bitchy, but the personality that comes through the snark is recognizably that of Alain. Here's a taste:

A portly, tweedy, 40-something Afrikaner, Alain Naude, nee Eugene Alan Naude, really stood out from his fellows, who were mostly wearing orange schmattes and using lavishly vowelled, polysyllabic pseudonyms. He had a credible patina of European culture and a plummy, vaguely British accent. He was setting up shop in a little-trafficked corner of the Bay Area's bustling spiritual marketplace, promoting an out-of-the-counter-culture-mainstream path of his own devise. It didn't require any chanting, name changes, dip-dyed costumes, or barfing: just attendance at each and every one of his discourses, which were delivered to small groups in word-of-mouth locations.

/altmed/ | permanent link

Fri, 15 Feb 2008

Why the Violence?

Yesterday another student went on a killing spree in Illinois. I just want to point out that this sort of murder-suicide was all but unknown when I was a child. This is a new malady caused by modern medicine. The new class of antidepressants, selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have long been associated with violence, mutilation, and self-destructive behavior. As Dr. Alan Gaby explains:

Whitaker cites a study by Dr. David Healy, showing that when people without mental illness were given the SSRI drug sertraline (Zoloft), 20% became suicidal. There has also been a long-held suspicion that Prozac causes some people to become obsessed with killing themselves. The hall-of-fame singer Del Shannon, whose 1961 smash hit Runaway was number one on the charts for eight weeks, shot himself in the head in 1990, 15 days after starting Prozac. According to his wife, Shannon was, at the time, an emotionally healthy individual who had been prescribed the drug to help him through a period of relatively minor stress. Abby Hoffman, the political radical and founder of the Youth International Party (Yippies), also committed suicide shortly after starting Prozac.

Eli Lilly faced a series of lawsuits connecting Prozac with violence, but through some sharp legal tactics managed to finesse the issue. However, later it was discovered that Eli Lilly had hidden evidence connecting Prozac with violence:

Congressman Maurice Hinchey, a member of the Appropriations Committee, which oversees federal agencies including the F.D.A., said the documents date back to the 1980's and include memos between Eli Lilly employees: "clearly show a link between Prozac and actions of violence perpetrated by people taking the drug against themselves and against others. The documents we have show that the company was instructing its employees to hide this information. We're seeing evidence here that it was a conscious act on the part of the company."

One factor all these murder-suicide cases have in common is that the perpetrators have all been under a doctor's care for years and loaded to the gills with prescribed medications, including SSRIs. It's scary to contemplate how common these prescriptions are. If modern America is a scary place, modern medicine shares part of the blame.

/altmed/ | permanent link

Wed, 23 Jan 2008

Drugs Kill

The news of the day is that an actor, Heath Ledger, was found dead in his apartment. It looks now that he died of an accidental overdose of a combination of sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medications. I hope this sad event reminds people of the enormous annual death toll from prescription drugs, more than 100,000 deaths every year. Conventional medicine has turned itself into little more than a delivery mechanism for the pharmaceutical industry. Doctors' appointments are rushed to the point that they're little more than a ritualized, pro forma exercise. You meet with the doctor, tell him your chief complaint, he scribbles something on a pad, and it's over. In functional illnesses, such as insomnia and anxiety, drugs can do nothing but offer symptom relief, as there's no obvious physical problem to resolve. Symptom relief comes at a price, for with regular drug use there's habituation and addiction. And so we wind up with tragedies, some famous, like Heath Ledger, and some not, but still missed by friends and families. There is a better solution, through non-drug therapies such as homeopathy. But in a society where money not only talks, it swears and screams, it's impossible for these not so lucrative therapies to get a fair hearing.

/altmed/ | permanent link

Fri, 18 Jan 2008

The Invisible Hand

Something in the news recently pegged my bullshit meter. Last June the FDA approved a new drug to treat the symptoms of fibromyalgia. The drug is called Lyrica and is made by Pfizer. Recently there's been a bunch of articles attacking not only the drug, but the diagnosis of fibromyalgia. The New York Times led the way.

Other doctors -- including the one who wrote the 1990 paper that defined fibromyalgia but who has since changed his mind -- say that the disease does not exist and that Lyrica and the other drugs will be taken by millions of people who do not need them.

Those who follow alternative medicine know that the New York Times is unusually hostile to it and slavishly devoted to conventional medicine. It's more than a little odd that the New York Times would attack a conventional drug for its side effects unless there was some government action to hang the story on. And there's none here. Even odder, several seemingly independent stories attacked Lyrica and fibromyalgia over several days. Karen Heller, a columnist for the Philly Inquirer, criticizes Lyrica in a drive by shooting on an article about steroids. Alexander Toldt criticizes it in an on-line article, and so does this article for News Inferno. This sort of thing doesn't happen by chance. Someone put out a press release and/or called several friendly reporters.

The question is, who is behind this campaign and what is their motivation? I have no idea. But I do know that self-proclaimed skeptics have campaigned against fibromyalgia as an imaginary disease for many years. An article on the Arthritis Blog talks about the New York Times article and the lack of respect for fibromyalgia sufferers.

I've heard it myself. Although I do not have fibromyalgia, I asked a rheumatologist about the condition not long ago. The doctor said, "Fibromyalgia patients are very unfortunate people." When asked to elaborate, the rheumatologist explained, "Fibromyalgia patients have vague symptoms that don't point to a unique, treatable condition. As a doctor, there's little that can be done for fibromyalgia patients who seem destined within their own personality to suffer." I remember thinking, "Wow, I'm glad I have rheumatoid arthritis and not fibromyalgia. At least rheumatoid arthritis gets a little respect."

Find out who wrote the press release and you'll find out who pulls the strings on the skeptics movement.

/altmed/ | permanent link

Sun, 16 Dec 2007

Lung Disease

Brad wrote a song eulogizing one of his dead friends. There's enough in the description to guess what remedy would have helped him. So for armchair homeopaths everywhere, here is the case:,/p>

This song is actually not about a girl as it seems to imply, but about my friend Jim Bradler, who died in his mid-20's of some kind of weird lung ailment that I never did find out much about. He was from New Jersey and had such a strong Jersey accent it sounded almost like a parody of a Jersey accent. He loved to imitate the vendors at baseball stadiums back east, "Bee-ah Hee-yah!!" (trans. "Beer here") Whenever he saw or even heard mention of some hot chick he'd say, "Gimme 'er numbah!" (trans. "Give me her [telephone] number") Hence the lyrics to the bridge of the song.

He used to have pages of Penthouse magazine plastered all over his dorm room. I remember one girl-on-girl shoot that had the caption under one photo "the scents that mingled with their sighs." That line found its way into the song. He also had striking blue eyes. I'm not gay (and I don't care if you are or not) but Jim was a very good looking man. Maybe somehow that's why it was easier to cast the song as a peon to lost love than to come right out and express what I really wanted to say.

The focus of the disease on the lungs, the patient's striking good looks, and his randiness makes me think that the remedy is Tuberculinum. Too bad more people don't know about homeopathy.

/altmed/ | permanent link

Tue, 20 Nov 2007

Shills

Conventional medicine can be criticized for many reasons, but I think the biggest reason is that doctors have become shills for the drug companies. The doctor's job has become little more than to shove a marginally appropriate prescription slip into their trusting patients' hands. A review of Talking Back to Prozac in the New York Review of Books sums up the problem nicely.

Meanwhile, Healy wonders, who will now be sufficiently strong and uncorrupted to keep the drug makers honest? The FDA, he notes, is timid, underfunded, and infiltrated by friends of industry; even the most respected medical journals hesitate to offend their pharmaceutical advertisers; professional conferences are little more than trade fairs; leading professors accept huge sums in return for serving the companies in various venal ways; and, most disgracefully of all, many of their "research" papers are now ghostwritten outright by company-hired hacks. As Healy puts it, Big Pharma doesn't just bend the rules; it buys the rulebook.

/altmed/ | permanent link

Thu, 20 Sep 2007

Buddhism and Homeopathy

It's odd that I never went looking for information about Buddhism and homeopathy. It's not a common combination of interests. Among well known contempoaray homeopaths who also have an interest in homeopathy, there's Peter Morrell and Jan Scholten, who has this to say about the two:

In homeopathy it becomes clear that disease comes from inside. In this respect homeopathy is akin to Buddhism. There the cause of disease is seen as coming from desires and the disappointments and fears arising from them. The idea that things have to be a certain way results in sadness, anger and frustration when things are not the way as expected. The solution is to free people from delusions, visions of how things should be. In Buddhism this is done with meditation. In homeopathy with remedies. In this sense it can be said that homeopathy is a scientific form of Buddhism. It helps people to free themselves from their delusion and desire.

I don't entirely agree with this, some disease has a physical origin. I'd estimate that a third to a half of all disease has its origin in the emotions.

Dr. Rajesh Pradhanang is a Nepali homeopath who practices at a free clinic in Svayambu set up in a Buddhist monastery. And Herman Vetterling, the author of the first Buddhist publication in America, The Buddhist Ray, had an interest in homeopathy.

I liked a quote I heard from John on the Kagyu mailing list. Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche was asked when there will be an American Buddhism. He replied, "When there are American Buddhas."

/altmed/ | permanent link

Wed, 12 Sep 2007

Homeless

We had our first homeopathic study group meeting Monday, only to find that we no longer have access to the community hall that we've been using. So we're homeless until we find a new place. WE have several possibilities, so things aren't dire. Our meeting was on feet on problems with feet. It sounds a bit odd, I know, but if it weren't for our feet, where would we be? Lying on the floor probably. And we neglect them shamefully. Richard recently graduated from a relexology program, so we also got to hear about feet from that perspective. We plowed through the extrmeties section of Kent's repertory, looking for symptoms associated with different foot problems, such as athlete's foot. And we had our usual chit chat about local practitioners. And gardening, which always seems to come up. So that's the homeopathy report for September.

/altmed/ | permanent link

older | newer

Powered by WebRing.