Ten Principles of Epigenetic Medicine
The winds of grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail.
—Ramakrishna
Today, as I write these words, I’m sitting on a bench in a park on one of Northern California’s sunny winter days. My laptop and a notepad sit on my lap. I watch as my youngest son, Alexander, plays in the sand with his bucket, spade, trains, and cars. “I’m digging for buried treasure!” he exclaims excitedly, as his toy rake hits a buried object. Then, as he unearths it, he says, “That’s garbage!”
A toddler runs up, his drooly smile proudly revealing two brand new teeth. He picks up Alexander’s toy train and begins waving the pieces about. Suddenly, he discovers that the engine and the tender snap together. He snaps them and unsnaps them over and over again. He’s just discovered a major secret to the way the world works.
Meanwhile, Alexander has run to the slide. After a few minutes, he and a diminutive little girl discover that they don’t have to slide down the slide in a seated position. They experiment with going down sideways, head first, and on their backs. They have to show me each new trick. First Alexander counts: “One, two, three, twenty-eight, seventeen, nine, hurry, watch me!” and then he slides down.
As I contemplate the discovery of epigenetic control of genes and watch the joyful play in front of me, I realize how much scientific discovery resembles the playful children in the park. We humans discover how things fit together. We experiment with hypotheses, some of which fail. Even after we’ve made an exciting new discovery, we are not content. We immediately push forward into new territory. When our knowledge crosses one horizon, we quickly push forward to another, with scarcely a backward glance.
Applying the discoveries of epigenetic control of the genes, and hence cellular function, offers great potential for medical breakthroughs. It allows us to seek therapies that intervene at the level of consciousness by changing beliefs and behaviors that interfere with health. Changing energy patterns before they manifest as disease works at a level of cause that is of a higher order than matter. While metaphysicans have advocated such a focus for millennia, modern research is now giving us an understanding of the genetic changes that occur in response to changes in energy and consciousness. This opens up the prospect of using consciousness deliberately, as a planned medical intervention.
Like the toddler who has discovered that the two parts of the train snap together, science has taken the first tiny steps in charting the mechanisms of epigenetic control. Now, a huge new panorama of research presents itself. Undoubtedly, there are widespread positive effects that come from belief change and meditation. Yet researchers cannot be content with understanding only that there is a generalized benefit to these practices. They must begin to chart the precise pathways by which such therapies have their effects, so that the power of consciousness can be harnessed with precision.
Epigenetic medicine seeks these precise pathways. It’s not enough to prescribe meditation for depressed patients, even though we know that meditation can be useful in alleviating depression. We need to develop a battery of interventions that we are reasonably certain can be effective, and that are reasonable for the patient to perform. Though they can affect all body systems simultaneously, consciousness-based epigenetic shifts aren’t as mechanistic as taking a drug; they require a degree of self-awareness that is not required of the patient popping a pill along with the morning’s tooth-brushing routine.
Epigenetic medicine based on consciousness works seamlessly with conventional medicine, alternative medicine, and integrative medicine (medicine that combines the best of conventional and alternative approaches). For instance, molecular biomarkers, “signatures of genes or proteins that are specific to a disease,”1 allow diagnosis of many conditions long before they might show up on an X-ray or manifest as symptoms. Testing for biomarkers is also noninvasive and safe. Biomarkers have the potential to allow early detection of cancer and other diseases, and biomarker-based tests are expected to become widespread in the coming decades. Dr. Leroy Hood, cofounder of Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology company, and in whose laboratory the DNA sequencer originated, forsees a day when “with just a single pinprick, a nanotechnology device will quickly measure and analyze one thousand proteins in a droplet of your blood.”2
DNA screening is now widely used. There are “more than two dozen online genetic testing services springing up to take advantage of advances in genomics.… Tests for nearly 1,300 ailments have been developed so far.”3 Newer tests are being developed that use techniques even more sophisticated than gene chips. DNA testing is joining hands with nanotechnology to produce tests that can determine the expression not just of a gene, a sequence of DNA, but also of individual molecules, the “building blocks of gene expression.”4
One of the most exciting new contributions of technological medicine is natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (NOTES). Surgical instruments have been developed that allow surgeons to pass their instruments through the mouth and other body cavities through a tube, and perform surgery without breaking the skin. Many of these procedures require only a local anesthetic, rather than riskier general anesthesia. Patient recovery time can be greatly shortened.
Tiny robots have been developed to work inside the body. The Pillcam, introduced in 2001, is a camera the size and shape of a pill. It is swallowed, and takes photographs as it moves through the digestive tract, giving physicians valuable diagnostic information. Other robots being developed for surgery are controlled by electromagnetic fields from outside the body. The surgeon moves the robot by altering the charge of the externally generated field. This avoids the need for miniature internal devices to be equipped with batteries, which would add weight. Scientists from the Swiss Federation of Technology are developing these devices to perform microsurgery inside the eye.5
Pillcam
An abundant source of information is already being generated by MRI scans—and ignored. Every clinician is familiar with the images from inside the body generated by MRIs. But there is a wealth of information in the electromagnetic fields outside the body as well, as is apparent from the accompanying illustration of an MRI scan. Currently, this information is discarded, since medicine is so geared to the physical body. Future science may look at the information-rich area outside the body, too. It could develop electromagnetic profiles of energy disturbances and blocks in these fields outside as a diagnostic tool.
Internal and external fields of a patient in an MRI scanner
As these new technologies become more sophisticated, consciousness-based epigenetic interventions could be developed to target conditions that they uncover. Used in conjunction with epigenetic visualizations and energy therapies that have proven effective, gene, MRI, nanotechnology, and biomarker tests could go hand in hand with integrative medicine in a comprehensive treatment plan.
Imagine if each of us constructed a set of visualizations that was uniquely geared to our psychological structure. Imagine going to your preventive medicine physician or psychiatrist and having a caring expert help you identify your unique psychological triggers, levers that can aid you in maintaining health. You walk out of the office visit with a prescription pad of beliefs, concepts, prayers, and visualizations that have been scientifically verified to boost your immune system. You then spend ten minutes a day on this routine. In this way, epigenetic medicine has the potential both to treat disease and to help keep you healthy.
We already have an outline of the potential effectiveness of epigenetic medicine in our studies of nurturing in animals and adults, from researching the brains of both happy and unhappy people, by examining the beliefs of sick patients, and all the other ways in which we humans can use our consciousness to affect our well-being. Recognizing that we are conscious energy systems giving rise to matter results in an approach to medicine that is completely different from one that treats the material substance of our bodies as though it were the only reality. The following list of principles provides guidelines for treatment that spring from the primacy of consciousness. They are the foundation for a new medicine that detaches from an obsession with making matter look a certain way, and instead supports the expression of health through consciousness. Some of the interweaving and mutually reinforcing principles of epigenetic mecidine are these:
1. Intentions First, Outcomes Second
The literature of medicine is littered with the word “outcomes.” The eventual material result, the “outcome,” is the end point that studies use to determine the efficacy of a particular treatment. A good outcome means that the symptom has disappeared. The medicine of consciousness, on the other hand, focuses first on the well-being of the soul, and then on the epigenetic effects of that well-being on the cells of our bodies. Symptoms are perceived as guides to understanding the needs of body and soul, not as nuisances that must be made to disappear.
“Cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me” is a paradoxical refrain that echoes through the annals of survivors’ stories. The “outcome” for such a patient may still be cancer, but the inner experience may be healing. Illness can be full of gifts, if we shift our perspective to the present moment and detach from an obsession that our bodies be in a certain state.
The quantum soup has an infinite number of possibilities. Rather than get too attached to any one outcome and cling neurotically to our preferred result, we can instead state our intentions clearly, then let go. Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer used by AA and other twelve-step programs is a powerful mantra of non-attachment: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.” It isn’t whether you live or die in the end that counts, it’s how healed your life is at any moment. Western medicine, with its focus on outcomes, must shift to realize the truth of the Zen dictum: “The journey is the destination.”
In another paradox, it is often by letting go that we gain something. Setting a clear intention in our consciousness is often a better way to get what we want than manipulating the events around us to attempt to produce it. Clear intentions open us up to streams of quantum possibility that our ego-bound imaginations cannot grasp.
2. Healing Is a Process, Not an Event
Modern medicine has an underlying structure that perceives illness as an event. The event starts with “symptoms,” and ends with a “cure.” Center stage in the event is the prescribing of a drug or performing of surgery. But health is not an event. It is a process. It is not a rock, but rather a river. Lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise can address systemic problems, but involve a change in life-process day after day after day. Weight loss isn’t going on a diet (an event), or being twenty pounds lighter (an event). Weight loss is what I eat and how I exercise today and always (a process).
Joining a gym is an event, and an event-centered perception of health encourages people to do this. Many people join gyms every year. But “up to 65% of new gym members drop out in the first six months,”6 and more thereafter, as a result of seeing health as an event rather than a process. A process is something we incorporate into our lifestyle, like having a habit of going to the gym every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and completing a set routine.
The same applies to spirituality. At last Easter’s sermon, attendance at my church was dramatically greater than usual, as is typical for holidays. Starting his sermon, the minister laughed and said, “Now I’m going to talk to all of you that I last talked to last Easter, and won’t see again till next year.” Old Catholic joke: “A Catholic goes to church three times in his life, and two of those times he’s carried.” The three events are the sacraments of baptism, marriage, and the funeral.
Going to church on holidays is a symptom of seeing worship as an event. A daily prayer practice is a process that enfolds every event of the day. It is in these regular daily choices that the possibility wave of quantum potentials is consistently collapsed down into the probability of health.
Researcher William Collinge has a useful visual aid to conceptualize the healing process. He represents it as wavy line with a series of ups and downs. There is a turning point, imperceptible at the time, that marks a shift to higher highs and an upward trend.
The healing pattern7
The giant U.S. Kaiser Permanente hospital system now offers its nine million members a variety of lifestyle classes to help them lose weight, kick cigarette, drug, and alcohol addictions, and acquire beliefs and energy techniques that improve their happiness and health. Retraining patients lowers Kaiser’s medical costs. Shifting to a process view of healing, in which patients make a daily flow of healthy choices, lowers the probability of catastrophic medical events.
Are you in love with your doctor? Is your doctor in love with you? Do you feel a warm glow whenever you think of your doctor? Do you believe that your doctor feels kind and warm feelings toward you? A heart-centered connection (though not a romantic one) is an essential aspect of the healing encounter.
The quality of interaction can be as important, or more important, than the content of interaction. Simply being met by another human being, heart to heart, at the level of soul and emotion, can be a profoundly healing experience. This is the state that people in love find themselves in, and it triggers a cascade of powerful hormonal responses. No matter how smart your doctor’s head is, her or his heart comes first. In fact, in the ancient Hindu creation myth told in the Upanishads, the heart appeared first, and “from the heart came the mind.”8 A sound heart was seen by these ancients as the source of a sound mind. Modern medicine could take a leaf from their book.
If every medical encounter began with a heart connection, and did not proceed until that connection had been established, the content of those encounters might be much more powerful. In a landmark paper by Andrew Weil, MD, and Ralph Snyderman, MD, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2002, the authors conclude with a list of six reforms that build on the platform of sound science, yet also focus broadly on the well-being of patients. They urge “far more meaningful patient-physician relationships…[that]…provide compassion, [and] provide close attention to our patient’s spiritual and emotional needs…”9
People’s state of being might have as much to do with their health as the puncture wound in their arm. Larry Dossey, MD, recounts the story of doing his rounds in a coronary care unit and asking patients (all men) why they were there. They had seemingly succumbed to sudden and unforeseen heart attacks. But the majority of answers they gave were based in their life situations, not their medical histories. Typical responses were “I couldn’t stand to see my boss’s face one more day” or “I feel trapped in my marriage. I can’t abide being with my wife” or “My kids fight constantly. I would do anything to get away from their constant bickering.” Their heart attacks had resulted in them getting away from the conditions that were intolerable to them—at the cost of their health. Ongoing focus on the quality of a person’s being might prevent them having to produce extreme symptoms to catalyze a change in their lives.
Our presenting symptoms may have a great deal more to do with our state of being than with our medical histories. They may hold keys to our wellness that can make or break our medical histories. To fix the medical problem, while leaving the soul unaddressed, at best defers the consequence.
Some practices—a rich social network, consistent spiritual practice, an authentic vocation, the ability to speak one’s feelings, meditation—have been shown by research to build a more powerful sense of personal well-being. The physician of the future might first look for the practices that can most bolster the patient’s soul, like James Dillard writing on his prescription pad, “Long talks with your rabbi,” in order to banish the shadow of death from the consulting room and generate a healthy, creative, peaceful state of being.
Energy therapies typically treat the whole human being, reducing stress generally, and having a positive effect throughout the body. They are generalist. By contrast, conventional therapies are reductionist, attempting to reduce the problem to the smallest possible target.
The reductionistic approach has its apex in the drug industry. Big Pharma looks for magic bullets. These are molecules that affect other molecules in predictable ways. Such molecules are valuable because they can be patented and sold. America’s War on Cancer, which began in the early 1970s and has consumed billions of dollars in a search for the magic bullet that will kill cancer cells but leave healthy cells intact, has tested hundreds of potential magic bullets on long-suffering human beings.
By contrast, a holistic approach looks at ways to affect trillions of cells and thousands of protein molecules simultaneously. The methods described in this book are holistic methods, affecting all the body’s organ systems at the same time. These stress-reduction methods are the opposite of a magic bullet. They are a magic wand capable of creating head-to-toe physical transformation in moments. Reversing the fight-or-flight response causes the blood to flow back out of the peripheral muscles and into the digestive tract, improving digestion. Blood is available to the reproductive organs, enhancing sexual function. Breathing deepens and muscle activity slows, providing all the tissues of the body with more oxygen. Blood flows back into the frontal lobes of the brain, enhancing cognition. Blood pressure and blood sugar both drop.
Let’s see now: We’ve just improved digestion, sexual function, mental acuity, circulation, and cell rejuvenation, and all at the same time. That’s the magic of stress reduction, as it affects all the body’s systems simultaneously. If there were a drug that did this, it would truly be a miracle drug. Yet every human being has the ability to summon up such healing magic by de-stressing themselves using any one of a dozen proven effective methods. By shifting our emotional balance toward happiness, we initiate the epigenetic signals that shift our gene expression toward health.
One of the problems resulting from scientists identifying a particular gene or neurochemical associated with an emotion is that there will be a “gold rush” to turn it into a patentable drug, and the holistic implications of epigenetic research will be lost in the commercial stampede.
Serotonin suffered this fate. When the role of this molecule in regulating mood was discovered, Big Pharma began work on magic bullets that block the natural breakdown of serotonin. This class of drugs is called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Now prescribed to millions of people to combat anxiety and depression, the drugs do indeed produce greater quantities of free serotonin in the brain. But SSRIs have some negative side effects, and only after two decades of widespread use have the data become available to link them to increased risk of suicide and other troubling symptoms.
By contrast, natural methods of raising serotonin, such as meditation, yoga, energy medicine, and optimism, can be neglected in favor of a pill. Research into Energy Psychology, meditation, and other free techniques is not going to bring great commercial rewards to anyone. It draws no drug company sponsors with deep pockets. Holism is rarely the road to riches. Yet of all the patients showing up at doctor’s offices not feeling well, only 10% have an identifiable organic disease. The other 90% feel sick or believe they’re sick, but in ways that defy simple reductionist definitions.10 Their bodies are often demonstrating symptoms of the system-wide degradation that comes from long-term stress, and the holistic approach, by working as globally and nonspecifically as their complaints, has a reasonable chance of making them feel better.
The reductionist approach, seeking a molecular target among the body’s one hundred thousand proteins, sees your body as a complex machine like your car. If your car isn’t running well, you find the source of the problem and insert a fix. Perhaps one of the springs is soft, and isn’t holding up that corner of the car properly as you drive. Reductionist biotechnology would isolate the required compound and synthesize a pill that’s analogous to the car’s spring. Since you can’t synthesize the protein as precisely as the body’s formulation, you design an analog.
For a car, that might be a huge and powerful new spring. Suddenly, that one corner of the car is higher and harder than the others. The biotechnologists then design another fix to take care of the problematic side effects of the first fix. They invent big, rigid tires and install them. Now you can no longer feel the nonstandard spring as you drive. But you can’t feel the road, either, because of the new tires. The engine starts to work much too hard, and a “service engine” light pops up on the dashboard. Unfortunate side effect. So another fix is found, a panel to fit over the annoying light. And so on, till patients are taking a multitude of drugs to mask the side effects of drugs previously prescribed, and the real initial problem has not been solved at all.
This approach shows up all over medical research. In a comprehensive study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, 1,915 subjects receiving an SSRI antidepressant drug were examined for frequency of suicidal thoughts. A correlation was found between two genes and suicidal thoughts. The study concluded by suggesting that gene testing be done to determine which patients had these two genes, so that they could be more closely monitored by their clinicians after being prescribed SSRIs.11 That’s a logical reductionist conclusion: Prescribe a second procedure to limit the negative side effects of the first drug.
A holistic perspective might draw different conclusions. The study found that patients with these genes were no more likely to have attempted suicide than other patients prior to treatment with SSRIs. In other words, SSRIs appeared to trigger suicidal thoughts in people with one or both of these genes. So a holistic approach might be to teach these same patients ways to raise their serotonin naturally and reduce their stress levels, in addition to the prescription drug remedies available. This possibility was never suggested by the prestigious panel that authored the study.
As we learn about the molecules that regulate gene expression, the temptation to turn these into pills is hard for reductionist medicine to resist. A gene called CRHR1 codes for a stress hormone called CRH. A researcher found that by breeding mutant mice that lacked the gene, he reduced CRH levels, and the stress and anxiety levels of the mice went down. So he proposed removing CRH from anxious human beings, assuring readers that this would be “unharmful.”12 But legions of pharmaceutical scandals have shown us that tinkering with the body’s biochemistry usually has unintended consequences. Only after millions of people have taken a drug for years do the side effects begin to show up. And drug solutions often lead us to neglect the many safe, free, non-pharmaceutical alternatives available. Our limited new knowledge of genetics risks leading us down the same long and expensive blind alley as the search for the magic bullet to cure cancer did forty years ago.
Which would you rather see our children do: learn stress-reduction techniques, which they can use any time to epigenetically activate their happy genes, or have them turn to the medicine cabinet for happy pills? And then another pill to regulate the unhappy side effects of the happy pill? Drug research will continue, and can bring great benefits. But drugs and other forms of reductionist medicine can never substitute for the behavioral and lifestyle skills that improve our health and well-being by reducing stress generally.
Holistic medicine approaches every symptom as an expression occurring within an integrated energy system, and finds the leverage points that bring that whole energy system back into balance.
Energy medicine is not only the place to start treatment of a problem; it is the place to start before there is a problem. A person whose energy systems have been optimized and are functioning well has established a baseline that makes it much harder for disease to take root. Whatever the conditions of our lives, no matter what difficulties we are experiencing in our health, our relationships, our work, the techniques found in energy medicine can optimize entire systems in our bodies, minds, and emotional realms. Because it breaks from a mechanistic model of cause and effect, energy medicine opens our minds, hearts, and bodies to the possibility of radical, discontinuous change. Experiments tell us that healing is not localized in time or space; so we can pray for our own childhoods, we can pray for distant people, and we can pray for the wellness of our planet. A morning prayer creates a healing context for the day to come.
Once we get in the habit of attuning to our inner state of health, we may notice energy disturbances before they manifest as disease. A daily energy self-scan can give us valuable information about areas that are out of balance. Our focus eventually shifts from looking for disease to raising our threshold of wellness.
7. Magnify the Body’s Inherent Self-Healing Powers
Sometimes a person needs only a nudge in the right direction to get unstuck from a recurrent pattern and initiate the process of the body’s restoration of homeostasis. The first thing a wellness counselor can do is look for those leverage points that might help the process get going. So rather than first looking for outside interventions, the guide of the future will look for the interventions inherent in the patient that the patient might not have seen or might not be utilizing. One of the reforms advocated by Weil and Snyderman is: “Involve the patient as an active partner in his or her care, with an emphasis on teaching each patient the best way to improve his or her health.”13
A doctor is often with the patient one or two hours a year. The patient is with the patient the other 8,758 hours. Who do you suppose has the most influence on the patient’s wellness on a daily basis? Recognizing the enormous healing powers of the body—and finding ways to engage them—presupposes an entirely different model from the classic image of the patient being fixed by a doctor or hospital. A patient accustomed to allopathic medicine might be baffled by an acupuncturist who inserts a needle far from the site of the symptom. Many alternative therapies look for the one log that is producing the logjam, and shift just that one. Once it is shifted, the rest of the jam takes care of itself and the body’s full power comes to bear on recreating homeostasis.
8. Stream to Appropriate Treatment Paths
Some conditions are obvious candidates for conventional medical treatment. Others are unlikely to respond to this approach. Trying to treat chronic fatigue syndrome with allopathic medicine is misguided; trying to treat a gunshot wound with alternative medicine is foolhardy. In Spontaneous Healing, Andrew Weil offers this simple advice: “Do not seek help from a conventional doctor for a condition that conventional medicine cannot treat, and do not rely on an alternative provider for a condition that conventional medicine can manage well.”14 He makes the following distinctions in “what allopathic medicine can and cannot do for you:
CAN:
Manage trauma better than any other system of medicine.
Diagnose and treat many medical and surgical emergencies.
Treat acute bacterial infections with antibiotics.
Treat some parasitic and fungal infections.
Prevent many infectious diseases by immunization.
Diagnose complex medical problems.
Replace damaged hips and knees.
Get good results with cosmetic and reconstructive surgery.
Diagnose and correct hormonal deficiencies.
CANNOT:
Treat viral infections.
Cure most chronic degenerative diseases.
Effectively manage most kinds of mental illness.
Cure most forms of allergy or autoimmune disease.
Effectively manage psychosomatic illness.
Cure most forms of cancer.”15
This list needs updating, as more and more conditions are being moved from the allopathic column to the complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) column as better research is published. For instance, conventional hormone replacement therapies have been shown to have negative side effects in the fifteen years since Weil penned this list (the National Women’s Health Network calls hormone replacement “a triumph of marketing over science”16), whereas alternative medicine, through exercise and diet-based approaches, plus supplementation if necessary, has been shown to stimulate the body’s hormonal production and balance. Electromagnetic stimulation, for instance, has been shown by Norman Shealy to boost the production of DHEA, the most common hormone in the body, vital for cell regeneration.17 Shealy also draws attention to a category that he calls “semi-orphan diseases,” those for which conventional medicine is only partially effective. Among the conditions he lists are rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, and chronic hepatitis.18
If a provider and patient have these kinds of clear distinctions in mind, it becomes possible to seek appropriate treatment and avoid wasting time, money, and effort on inappropriate treatment. The new category of specialist, like the “Navigator” at the Integrative Medical Clinic, is trained in helping patients (and practitioners) understand these distinctions. Such navigators could become a routine part of the beginning of any treatment plan.
Many holistic practitioners get patients who have not been helped by conventional medicine. Many have been chopped by surgery and debilitated by prolonged prescription drug use. Most of the chronic pain patients who show up at Dr. Dillard’s practice or Dr. Dozor’s integrative clinic have already gone through the medical mill. By the time they give up on conventional medicine and decide to see an integrative practitioner, they may be suffering the consequences of needless surgeries or have immune systems depleted by inappropriate drugs. The alternative physician then has to deal, not just with the original problem, but with the side effects of conventional treatment. I can see this changing in a few years, as patients become more aware of the benefits of alternative medicine. Holistic treatment might be the first option they choose, not the last.
“Doc, I’ve tried everything! Acupuncture, herbs, EFT, Reiki, prayer, yoga…Now I’m ready for drugs and surgery!”
One of the great services that authors like Bernie Siegel, MD, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, MD, and Stephen Levine have done is to shake up the idea, so prevalent in our medical institutions, that death equals failure. I remember talking to a grief counselor many years ago about the exciting ideas in Bernie Siegel’s book Love, Medicine & Miracles.19 He was skeptical. “It is terrible for a client,” he objected, “if they try all that touchy-feely stuff and it doesn’t work.”
Underlying his objection was the assumption that living meant that the “touchy-feely stuff” worked and dying meant that it did not. Siegel and others have reintroduced into public consciousness the idea of a healed death.
My mother showed me this firsthand. She developed cancer in her left eye and her liver. She had some conventional medical treatments such as radiation (chemotherapy was not indicated for her particular condition) and also tried alternative therapies such as shark cartilage. She fit the profile of a person whose life was usually in turmoil, often self-created. That chaos regularly spilled over to affect the lives of the people around her.
In the two years before she died, she sought to make amends for the anguish she’d caused others. She traveled to visit many of the people she had grown up with, and, in person, asked for forgiveness. Her father was still living, and she traveled halfway across the world to see him. She visited her sisters and her childhood friends. Layer by layer, all the heavy weights of a lifetime of resentment and anger dropped off her shoulders. In one of the last conversations I had with her, she agonized over a person she could not locate. She said, “There was a girl in my high school whose name was Helen Freund. I hated her, and she hated me. I’ve tried to track her down so I can say I’m sorry, but I can’t find out where she lives now.” She started to cry. I sat her on my knee, and said gently to her, “Mom, I think it’s okay if you can’t find Helen Freund. I’m sure she’s forgiven you for whatever happened, and I know you’ve forgiven her.”
My mother’s heart and soul recovered, but her body did not. She eventually died. But she died at peace and, in every way that mattered, she died healed. She and my father lived in my sister’s spacious home for those last two years, surrounded by friends and family, and she died in the bed where she had slept. It was very early morning when she died, before dawn, but she started up just before the end. Her last words were, “I see the light. Do you see the light?”
When she died, she was honored by hundreds of people. The atmosphere leading up to her funeral was filled with grief, and the rest of the family had decided on an open casket affair, which hardly added to the sense of cheer. So to emphasize the joy she’d come to find in life, I had a large-screen TV set up next to the casket. On it, I played a continuous loop of video of her I’d taken a couple of years earlier. In the video, she was telling jokes, laughing uproariously, and waving her hands around to illustrate her points. It presented the vital spirit of a life fully lived.
The doctor of the future may not say, in hushed tones, “I lost a patient.” The patient’s ego and body might have died, and a medical ego that sees death as the enemy might indeed see a reflection of its own death in the death of another. But when we understand the survival of consciousness beyond death, and that death does not mean failure, we can celebrate the continuation of spirit even as we mourn the loss of a body. Everyone dies; our challenge is to live a life of passion, creativity, joy, inspiration, and healing in however many years we have. Death is a change of state, and not the enemy of healing.
10. Understand the Global Context of Healing
Fantastically healthy people cannot thrive on a dying planet. As a society, we have to wake up to the ways in which our personal health fits into the picture of global healing, and vice versa. This will lead to sustainable, rational approaches to health care, rather than medical systems that pay no attention to the waste and cost they incur.
In addition to the financial waste, burgeoning bureaucracies, and unneeded medical tests, procedures, and prescriptions, our landfills are overflowing in part due to the huge volumes of medical waste generated by the large number of disposable objects (and their sterile packaging) used in treatment and diagnosis. Their biotoxicity is also an added hazard to our water supplies and to those who handle this waste. Cod caught by fishermen in the North Sea, off the coast of Scandinavia, have been found to contain traces of the SSRI drugs used to treat depression. The fishermen did not report if the fish were happier; they certainly dramatized the problem of overprescribing medications.
A field called ecologically sustainable medicine (ESM) has developed, complete with a journal.20 ESM advances medicine with environmental integrity by offering affordable and renewable medical choices, saving resources and money, while preserving the health of the environment.
Among its goals, ESM advocates the emphasis of wellness in medical practice, the choice of ESM treatments as a first resort, awareness of the environmental impact of medicine, recognition of the importance of ecological health in medical ethics, and awareness of the psychological and cultural benefits of sustainable medicine.
The practice of sustainable medical care necessitates fundamental changes in the delivery of medicine. Whether practicing family medicine, oncology, chiropractic, acupuncture, massage, psychotherapy, or any other medical technique, providers can emphasize prevention, precaution, efficacy, and wellness. As a result, the healing professions become more sustainable.
