Daniel Redwood DC – Healthy.net

Meditation, Positive Emotions and Brain Science – an Interview with Richard Davidson

Daniel Redwood DC — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 21:02:35 +0000

Richard Davidson is one of the world’s foremost brain scientists. He is the Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is Director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience and the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior. A native of Brooklyn, New York, Dr. Davidson is a graduate of New York University and received his PhD from Harvard University in 1976.

Davidson specializes in research on brain function related to emotion, both in normal individuals and those with, or at risk of, depression and anxiety. His labs are state-of-the art facilities utilizing quantitative electrophysiology, positron emission tomography (PET scan), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

He is the recipient of numerous awards for his research, including a National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Award, a MERIT Award from NIMH, an Established Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders, and the William James Fellow Award from the American Psychological Society. He was the 1997 Distinguished Scientific Lecturer for the American Psychological Association. He served as a Core Member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network in Mind-Body Interaction, is currently a Core Member of the MacArthur Foundation Mind-Brain-Body and Health Initiative and a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors, NIMH. In 2001-02 he served on the National Academy of Sciences Panel to evaluate the validity of the polygraph. He was the year 2000 recipient of the most prestigious award given by the American Psychological Association for lifetime achievement—the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. He has published more than 150 articles, many chapters and reviews and edited 12 books.

Throughout its history, psychological science has focused on mental illness
and dysfunction, in order to help people suffering from these afflictions.
Davidson has been deeply involved in such studies, but also sees the need
for a science of positive emotions, of compassion, caring and altruism.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, credits
Davidson with having pioneered a significant new field of study, in which
“the methods of science are able to get their arms around questions of the
brain and human consciousness with rigor.”

In this interview with Dr. Daniel Redwood, Davidson discusses one his most intriguing ongoing projects, in which his team is studying brain function during meditation, focusing on the short- and long-term effects on the meditators’ brains. With the encouragement and direct involvement of the Dalai Lama, his team was given access to Tibetan monks who have spent at least one three-year period in retreat, where they meditate eight hours a day for three continuous years. Davidson calls these monks “the Olympic athletes of meditation,” and sees his research on their brain function as a way to study the fullness of human potential. Davidson also co-authored a study with Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, that evaluated the effects of mindfulness meditation training, including its effects on indicators of immune system function.

Readers with a scientific bent can learn more about Davidson’s work at his University of Wisconsin web page: http://psych.wisc.edu/faculty/bio/davidson.html. There are links there to Davidson’s scientific papers, many in full-text versions.

Non-scientist readers interested in learning about Davidson’s work on
meditation and emotions will enjoy his book (with Anne Harrington), Visions
of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human
Nature (Oxford University Press, 2001), as well as Daniel Goleman’s
Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them? (Bantam, 2002), and Healing Emotions: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Mindfulness, Emotions and Health (Shambhala, 2003). These highly readable books describe meetings where the Dalai Lama met with Davidson and other Western scientists, sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute (www.mindandlife.org).

DANIEL REDWOOD: What led you to your strong interest in brain research?

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: My strong interest in brain research really
came from my interest in the mind and its potential. I had the intuition
and conviction from very early on that much of the world’s problems were
caused by limitations in our mental functioning, that those limitations can
be overcome with the appropriate intervention at the level of the mind. And
that the best way to study the mind was to study the brain, since I was
convinced by many scholars, beginning with William James, who wrote in his
preface to his Principles of Psychology, “The brain is the one immediate
bodily organ that underlies our mental operations.” So if the brain is
really the physical substrate of the mind, then understanding the mind can
be approached by studying the brain. So that’s basically what led me to the
path that I’m currently on.

DANIEL REDWOOD: Aside from helping people with structural diseases of the brain, what do you think are the most important uses of brain scans of different varieties?

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: The use of brain scans is helping to provide us with fundamental knowledge about the underlying structure and function of different kinds of mental operations. By identifying the circuits in the brain that underlie particular mental operations, we can identify the more elementary constituents of those mental operations, we can begin to parse more complex psychological processes into their more basic elements, and we can begin to understand things like the basics of temperament, personality, vulnerability to psychiatric disorders, and also the basis of characteristics like well-being and resilience, on the positive side. So this is all something that can be approached at the level of the brain. Understanding the circuits in the brain that give rise to these conditions and characteristics can help us to promote the positive characteristics in what I believe are far more effective ways.

DANIEL REDWOOD: To what extent does the way we use our minds actually change the structure of our brains?

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: It has everything to do with that. Modern knowledge in neuroscience underscores the idea of neuroplasticity, which is a word that means that the brain is an organ that changes in response to experience and in response to training. Essentially everything that we do, the totality of our experience and our behavior, is constantly shaping our brains. So whether we like it or not, whether the conditions are deleterious or salubrious, those conditions and activities are constantly shaping our brains. Our brains are intimately interwoven with our environment, both our internal and external environment, in ways that literally shape the physical structure of the brain, down to the level of gene expression.

DANIEL REDWOOD: An online search of PubMed brings up hundreds of research studies on meditation. What would you say are the major strengths and weaknesses of the current state of the research evidence on meditation? What do we know and what don’t we know?

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: When I think about meditation research, really rigorous research on meditation, hundreds is not the number that comes to mind. In terms of hard-nosed, rigorous research that is not based on self-report methods, we’re talking about fewer than 20 publications.

DANIEL REDWOOD: What would are the best ways to develop scientific understanding of meditation?

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: I think the best way to develop a scientific understanding of meditation is to apply the tools of rigorous neuroscience and psychological science. It’s fundamentally not different than understanding how other kinds of therapeutic interventions work. There is a technology for such rigorous assessment of the mediating mechanisms through which various kinds of interventions might work. We just have not yet seen the widespread application of these rigorous procedures to the study of meditation. It’s just beginning to happen now.

DANIEL REDWOOD: You’ve done research with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who founded the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. What did you find?

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: That was a study that was done with employees of a high-tech company here in Madison, Wisconsin. It was a study where we randomly assigned individuals to a meditation group or a wait-list control group. We were primarily interested in some of the biological effects of meditation. What we found is a change in brain activity over the course of eight weeks of training. The change was a shift in the pattern of prefrontal activation toward a pattern which we had previously identified as being more indicative of positive emotions.

DANIEL REDWOOD: So activation occurs in some parts of the brain with positive emotions and in other parts of the brain with negative emotions.

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: Yes, and what we saw was a shift toward the positive in the meditators. The second thing we did was to administer an influenza vaccine to the participants and we looked at antibody titers mounted in response to the vaccine. We specifically predicted that there should be an enhancement of the immune response to the vaccine if certain changes were brought about by meditation. In fact, we found that the meditation group showed significantly greater antibody response to the meditation intervention when compared to the control group.

DANIEL REDWOOD: And this would reflect a strengthening of the immune system.

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: That’s correct.

DANIEL REDWOOD: Could you describe your work with Tibetan monks who are long-term meditators?

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: This is a very unusual project that is still ongoing. It was launched with the active encouragement and facilitation by the Dalai Lama himself, and what we are doing is testing very long-term practitioners of Tibetan Buddhist meditation. These are practitioners who have devoted at least 10,000 hours to formal practice. The average number of lifetime practice hours for this is 35,000. So these are very experienced practitioners. These are, in many ways, the Olympic athletes of meditation. These are individuals who have spent at least one three-year period in retreat, where they were meditating for approximately eight hours a day for three continuous years.

In this project, what we are interested in is using these individuals as experts to help define what the farther reaches of mind training might be. So these individuals are really helping us to define these end points. We’re studying many different things with them. In our initial publication which came out in 2004, we examined patterns of brain electrical activity during certain meditation practices and found a very unusual pattern of very high amplitude, highly synchronized gamma activity. This is very high frequency activity in the electroencephalogram (EEG) which is typically found, in untrained subjects, for a much, much shorter period of time during periods of focused attention and perceptual integration.

In our more recent study, which was published in Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, we reported on changes using functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in brain circuits that are associated
with attention. What we show in that paper are robust differences between
the advanced practitioners and novices, in circuits that we know from prior
work are importantly involved in the regulation of attention. We are
continuing to study these practitioners in a variety of other paradigms.
For example, one of the things we’re studying right now is their response
to pain, to physically painful stimuli, since one of the important clinical
applications of meditation is among patients with various kinds of chronic
medical conditions where chronic pain is a pervasive accompaniment. We’re
interested in understanding how meditation may alter the brain’s response
to painful physical stimuli.

DANIEL REDWOOD: In the first chapter of Visions of Compassion, you and your co-authors described your first conversations with the Tibetan meditators, in which they wanted to be certain that your research was altruistically motivated. This is consistent with the core nature of Tibetan meditation, in which meditators focus on compassion for all beings and decreasing suffering in the world. Do you feel that the work you are currently doing marks the early stages of developing a science of attributes like compassion and caring and altruism?

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: Absolutely. There’s increasing evidence that this is becoming a real field. There are very serious scientists, some of whom are Nobel Laureates, who are now dedicating their attention to these positive qualities in an effort to give them the attention that I think they deserve.

DANIEL REDWOOD: In Daniel Goleman’s book, Destructive Emotions, one chapter included the transcript of a conversation (which you took part in) among a group of scientists and the Dalai Lama that addressed the issue of anger. The participants discussed whether there is such a thing as positive anger, how anger can be controlled or creatively channeled, and also the neurological basis of anger. What can you share with us about those questions?

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: I think it’s a very interesting and important theme. There is beginning to be a little bit of work on the neural bases of anger. The prototypical situations that engender anger are situations where we are thwarted from our goals, where there’s some obstacle to our goals. The emotion of anger may have evolved to facilitate the removal of obstacles that are in the way of our goal pursuits. So there may be some positive quality to anger that facilitates action, that facilitates the removal of obstacles to pursuing worthy goals, particularly if the anger can be divorced from the propensity to harm or destroy the person or object that is impeding our goals. So this is something that is just conjecture at this point in time, but there may be this positive quality to anger that mobilizes resources, that increases our vigilance, and in general facilitates the removal of obstacles to pursue worthy goals.

DANIEL REDWOOD: Do the brains of people with depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) function differently from those of healthy people?

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: There’s a lot of evidence now using modern neural imaging methods that quite definitively indicates that the functional status of the depressed brain, as well as the brain of a person who experiences post traumatic stress disorder, is different. There are also some data to indicate that there may be structural differences between the brains as well. Precisely what those differences are varies with the subtype of depression, and this is an area where there is a lot of active investigation. But we know that there are areas of the prefrontal cortex that function abnormally in depression, and there are adjacent areas of the anterior cingulate which have been very explicitly identified as exhibiting abnormalities in depression. In posttraumatic stress disorder, there have been findings that suggest that both the amygdala and the hippocampus—these are two subcortical structures that are very involved in emotions, and that have extensive reciprocity with these prefrontal regions—that these areas of the brain are functioning abnormally in PTSD.

DANIEL REDWOOD: How might this knowledge be applied in helping people with these problems?

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: I believe this information may be useful in a number of ways and I think we’re really still very much on first base in terms of reaping the potential benefits that this new methodology and information may yield. But let me give you several examples. One is, there is new evidence from our lab as well as from other labs, that indicates that brain scanning measures, for instance with patients with depression, can significantly predict treatment response to both antidepressant medication as well as to non-pharmacological intervention. So knowing the functional status of a depressed person’s brain before they begin an intervention, we can better select the treatment which may be more effective. So that’s one area where these methods may be particularly helpful.

Another area is that these methods are identifying the specific neural circuits that function abnormally in these conditions. This gives us very specific therapeutic targets for new interventions, both pharmacological as well as, potentially, behavioral interventions. With the pharmacological interventions, by knowing what circuits are involved, we can identify genes that may be uniquely expressed in these brain regions, and based on that information can tailor with far greater precision pharmacological treatments which operate on very specific subsystems that are locally expressed in the brain. That something that is really a promissory note, it has not yet occurred, but certainly this kind of information will be tremendously helpful in that regard.

Finally, there are now scientists who are using feedback from these brain scanning methods themselves, literally neurofeedback using functional MRI, to directly modulate local brain function in ways that may have direct therapeutic benefit. So we know, for example, that if a particular area of the brain is over-activated in a depressed patient, we may be able to train that person to reduce the activation in that area through real time fMRI feedback. Again, that is a promissory note; there’s just a tad of research that suggests that this may be a real possibility. But it’s exciting and important and, we believe, worthy of pursuit.

DANIEL REDWOOD: Is the popular use of the terms ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’—where left applies to linear or logical thinking and right applies to more intuitive, emotional or artistic processes—accurate, inaccurate, or an oversimplified version of accurate?

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: I would say it’s mostly inaccurate. It’s a hyper-simplified version and it’s just far more complicated than that. Different areas within each hemisphere do different things at the same point in time. To characterize a whole hemisphere as linear, or whatever the word is, is just a gross oversimplification.

DANIEL REDWOOD: You said at the beginning of this interview that your initial motivation for going into this whole field was about helping people. What do you foresee in your own future work, along those lines?

RICHARD DAVIDSON, PHD: I’m deeply committed to the goals that I articulated. I do very genuinely believe that we can use this work to help reduce suffering in the world and to promote well-being. I am getting increasingly involved in research that applies these methods on a wider scale in different kinds of settings, with the potential to effect change in a more significant way.
To give you a concrete example, one of the ways in which we’re doing that is by beginning to explore the application of meditation and other contemplative practices in educational settings in the K-12 years. We believe that the brain is particularly plastic in those early years of life. We have a real opportunity to effect more dramatic change at this time, change that is potentially more long-lasting. This is an especially important period in the human lifespan for these kinds of interventions, not to treat disease but as a preventative measure to cultivate resilience and to guard against the development of psychopathology. And so this is something that I think you’ll see more of in the future and represents a very promising domain in which to extend some of this work.

Chiropractic at Bethesda Naval Hospital

Daniel Redwood DC — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 21:02:35 +0000

Dr. Bill Morgan practices in the Chiropractic Department at the National Naval Medical Center (NNMC) in Bethesda, Maryland, where he works with injured service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other servicemen and women with conditions that chiropractic can help. He has served at Bethesda since 1998. As part of his official duties, he was selected to provide chiropractic care to our nation’s leaders, including Congress and the Supreme Court, in government health clinics in Washington, DC.

Dr. Morgan grew up in California and enlisted in the Navy in 1975. He attended Hospital Corps School and Field Medical Service School before being stationed at the First Marine Brigade, Third Marine Division. He served as a special operations corpsman/combat swimmer, and was deployed to the Arctic, the Pacific, and in South East Asia.

From 1982-1990, Morgan served as the primary corpsman for a reserve platoon of Navy Frogmen from in Vallejo, CA. After being discharged from active duty, he completed a Bachelor of Science Degree from The University of New York (now Excelsior College) and earned his Doctor of Chiropractic degree from Palmer College of Chiropractic-West. In 1985, he served as a healthcare worker for three months in the jungles of Liberia in West Africa with the Christian relief agency, Partners International.

Dr. Morgan began practicing as a chiropractor in 1986. He was credentialed in two civilian hospitals in central California. For the five years preceding his 1998 appointment to NNMC, Bethesda, he spent two mornings each week in a rural medical clinic working with medical doctors, physician’s assistants, and nurse practitioners. This rural health clinic provided care for poor and underprivileged people as well as residents of a local Indian reservation.

Dr. Morgan was the American Chiropractic Association’s Chiropractor of the Year in 2003.

He has remained athletically active throughout his life, competing in triathlons, weight lifting and karate tournaments, marathons, and open water swim races. He has swum from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco five times, and has also swum the seven miles from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oakland Bay Bridge. He has completed a technical climb of half-dome in Yosemite. He is a third-degree black belt in Kenpo Karate/Aki-Jujitsu and teaches martial arts at Chieftain Martial Arts Academy in Derwood, Maryland.

Dr. Morgan is married to fellow chiropractor, Dr. Clare Morgan, and they have four children.

Tell us about your experience in the military prior to practicing as a chiropractor in a military setting?

I joined the Navy at age 17 and became a hospital corpsman. During my time in the Navy I served as a corpsman for Marine Recon, where I was trained in special warfare techniques including combat diving, anti-terrorist tactics, parachuting, mountaineering, arctic survival, and underwater swimmer insertions from submarines. While I deployed overseas, our unit rescued a ship full of Vietnamese refugees who had been attacked by modern-day pirates and left sinking. I was able to provide humanitarian medical care to those who had been injured.

After my discharge from active duty, I served in a reserve Harbor Clearance Unit as a diver. I was briefly recalled to help salvage and raise the floating museum USS Potomac when it sank in San Francisco Bay. The USS Potomac was President Roosevelt’s presidential yacht during WWII. Soon I transferred to Naval Special Warfare Unit 1 to serve as the corpsman (medic) for a platoon of frogmen. I was in this reserve unit for eight years. We primarily trained for commando-type missions: parachuting into the ocean, swimming with special SCUBA equipment that left no bubbles, performing our operation and then traveling back to sea to rendezvous with a submarine.

What led to your decision to become a chiropractor?

After I was discharged from the military, I herniated my L5-S1 disc and suffered with severe back and leg pain. Frustrated with medicine’s approach to my pain, I tried chiropractic. Within a week of seeing a chiropractor, Dr. Bill Westfall, I was 90 percent better. This was a major turning point for me; I changed majors in college and sought a career in chiropractic.

When did members of the military become eligible to receive chiropractic services as part of their health care?

In 1995, the military began a chiropractic demonstration project at 10 bases. I joined the project in 1998 when the Navy implemented chiropractic at its “flagship” hospital, National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda.

Is chiropractic now available to all members of the U.S. military? Will it be available to all in the future?

Currently chiropractic is available at about 55 military training facilities. Recently a law was passed by Congress to provide chiropractic to everyone in the U.S. military.

How were you chosen to serve at Bethesda Naval Hospital and to provide chiropractic services in an official capacity for members of Congress?

I believe that I was chosen to open the chiropractic clinic at Bethesda because of my experience in military medicine as well as my experience as a hospital-based chiropractor. Prior to coming to Bethesda, I was credentialed in two civilian hospitals and had a flourishing hospital-based chiropractic practice. Back in those days there were few chiropractors with hospital credentials and fewer still that had a robust hospital-based practice.

I am not at liberty to talk about my practice in the Capitol.

Let’s talk more about your work at Bethesda in a moment, but first I’d like to ask you about your work in those other hospitals prior to coming to Bethesda. Was it difficult, as a chiropractor, to get credentialed by these hospitals?

It was the easiest thing in the world. The credentialing department does most of the work; the hard part is creating a profitable practice model so that a hospital will want you on staff.

What are the advantages that you’ve seen for patients, for chiropractors, and for the hospital itself in having a chiropractor, or more than one chiropractor, on staff?

Our presence here offers a non-medical and non-surgical treatment option. Also, the physicians become accustomed to chiropractic care with time and many actually become advocates for chiropractic.

Chiropractors on staff may benefit a hospital in several ways. Directly increasing the profitability of the hospital is one way, but another benefit is by making the hospital more attractive to potential patients. Patients who desire non-surgical, non-drug treatments would prefer a hospital with chiropractic available, making that hospital more competitive.

Are there large numbers of patients who prefer that?

Yes, more and more patients are seeking alternatives to drugs and surgery.

How is chiropractic being integrated into the military health care system?

Chiropractic integration has progressed differently with each service and with each base. I have heard of professional turf battles at certain bases and harmonious integration at others. I have certainly met individuals within military medicine who are opposed to implementing chiropractic. Most of them base their opposition on personal prejudice rather than any evidence. Usually those with unsubstantiated opposition to chiropractic can be swayed in time.

Do you work as part of a team?

Yes and no. For the most part we operate as a regular chiropractic clinic, albeit with increased communication with the patient’s other providers. In complex cases, I try to meet with the other providers to coordinate care. For inpatients the team approach is the standard.

Is collaboration with the medical doctors there going smoothly?

There are certain physicians I have formed strong alliances with: spine surgeons, PMR [physical medicine and rehabilitation] physicians, neuroradiology, internal medicine and neurologists. I try to maximize outcomes by coordinating care and seeking counsel from these various specialties. For example, when a patient is referred to chiropractic for treatment of symptoms attributed to a stroke, I usually call the patient’s neurologist and make sure that he or she is onboard with my proposed chiropractic treatment program.

Collaboration is focused, patient-centered care and for the most part it works wonderfully. When we pool our thoughts and resources we are able to get results that aren’t possible without the team.

So that our readers can get a sense of what’s it’s like for you practicing on a day-to-day basis at Bethesda Naval Hospital, can you tell us about a patient that you’ve seen recently, maybe an injured soldier, sailor or Marine, who was helped by chiropractic care?

I have a very good relationship with the doctors here and receive referrals from most of the other specialties here at the hospital. There are certain cases that are complex. We get Marines from the war, of course, and some have multiple spinal fractures and are referred down here from neurosurgery. Most chiropractors aren’t seeing patients who are healing from cervical [neck] and thoracic [upper and middle back] spinal fractures. Such complex cases require lots of communication with other members of the treatment team. It’s a trust thing, where doctors must trust me to provide appropriate care and I must trust them not to send me patients that would be inappropriate. Also, based on this trust they will listen to me if I determine that a particular patient is inappropriate for chiropractic care, if I feel it would be too dangerous or that I don’t have anything to offer them.

What has the response been from the patients you’ve seen, some of whom, I assume, had not had chiropractic care before?

The ones that get better all love it! [Laughter]

I guess no profession gets everyone well.

No.

Are there any other specific cases you’d like the mention, any interesting examples? Are most of the patients sent to you for back pain and neck pain? Are there other conditions?

Mostly, I treat neuromusculoskeletal conditions. However, I had one woman come in who had abdominal pain for years. She had been worked up and had I don’t know how many thousands of dollars worth of previous diagnosis and treatment. This is actually a case I’d like to write up. Her problem turned out a thoracic disc derangement. She responded almost immediately. Three chiropractic visits and the pain was gone and hasn’t come back. I say pain, but it was pain, dysfunction, abdominal bloating and indigestion. These were visceral [internal organ] symptoms from a vertebral lesion [imbalance].

I also see a lot of patients with extremity [arm and leg] disorders, headaches, and disc derangements as well.

In what ways do you find serving in a government-run health facility different from individual or group private practice, which is where most chiropractic is currently delivered?

The biggest difference is that in Navy healthcare you never have to worry about the cost of care the patient needs. What the patients need is what they receive — quality care. It is very freeing to treat patients without the concern of dealing with a third party payer or patient finances. You don’t have to be concerned about how sick the patient can afford to be.

A few years ago I interviewed Dr. Wayne Jonas, who served many years as a military medical physician and later was the director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health . . .

I know Wayne. In fact, I was at his office yesterday.

. . . and he said the same thing. It strikes me, in thinking about this, that very few chiropractors in the United States (and probably anywhere) have had the opportunity to practice without that concern about patient finances and insurance reimbursement.

It is very liberating. It’s wonderful for everybody.

I can certainly see how it would be. Do you foresee an expansion of opportunities for chiropractors in the coming years in large government and private sector health institutions?

I foresee the possibility of chiropractors joining the Public Health Service and other government institutions. Prior to my arrival at Bethesda, I worked in a joint government/private sector rural health venture. I envision chiropractic joining these groupings of private entrepreneurs with government incentive programs. Community health centers and rural health centers are examples of potential opportunities for chiropractors. I also envision the expansion of chiropractic into spine centers, pain clinics, major civilian hospitals, universities and other positions in institutional healthcare.

What is helping this along and what is impeding it?

Innovative chiropractors who pursue these integrative opportunities are helping this process, while chiropractors who operate in the fringe of evidence or ethical-based care impede these opportunities. It is my belief that detractors outside of our profession would have nothing ill to say about us, if we did not provide them with the material. I am a strong advocate of evidence-based and ethics-based care.

For those who aren’t familiar with these terms, what is evidence-based care? Does it mean that you can’t give any treatments without there being several large research studies proving their value?

No, no. As you know, evidence-based care involves taking the best evidence available. According to Dr. David Eddy, only 15 percent of what’s done in medicine is truly evidence-based. Evidence-based care is not a destination, it’s a journey. One of the things I tell people is, let’s start with the safest option first. We know that surgery is not that safe and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications are not that safe, so let’s try chiropractic first.

I read a comment by Dr. Joseph Keating where he said that all health professions use unproven methods, but it is never permitted to make untrue claims about those methods.

I agree with his comment.

Following up on what you said about ethics, what does ethics-based chiropractic care look like?

If somebody comes in, I would explain that I would like to try a particular approach, because I think it may be helpful. I may explain what research is or is not available to support my approach. I would not make unsubstantiated claims or predictions. The patient makes the decision as to whether to proceed. I can’t say to them, “There’s a 95 percent chance that I’ll make you better.” That’s not true. Nobody has a 95 percent success rate. I read an informed consent form to all of my patients and I don’t try to trivialize the complications that could occur. I am convinced that by doing this, it helps my patients to trust me. Ultimately, the decision to receive treatment is theirs.

Do you see a potential spillover effect in terms of ways that chiropractic participation in settings like the Veterans Administration and Department of Defense health systems may change the chiropractic profession?

The VA and the DOD hospitals provide training opportunities (clerkships, internships, residencies, fellowships and research opportunities) to much of the medical profession. Having chiropractors present in integrated hospitals during the formative years of a physician’s education will train the next generation of medical doctors to include chiropractors in their referral algorithms [flow charts that define appropriate care]. Other collateral benefits would involve inclusion in research projects, residencies and inclusion in healthcare decision making.

Do you find that there is an internal change in chiropractors (both yourself and others), who have practiced in these integrative settings?

One key change is that we are exposed to more critical appraisal. If I go sit in the orthopedics morning report observing case presentations, the orthopedists provide a strong peer review. “Why are you doing that? What’s this? What’s the benefit the patient will get from this?” I like this level of intellectual analysis. I think promotes healthy discussion and reflection. It causes me to reflect on my own treatment methods.

What we’ve always been looking for is a level playing field. And what you’re describing is a level playing field, assuming that they are only being as hard on you as they would be with their own colleagues.

I’d say that in many ways they are even harder on their own colleagues than on me . . . I had a medical student following me around this morning, and during the course of the morning it was evident that most of my patients are getting better and had positive things to say. The medical student responded to this with, “Well, I’d like to see some more clinical research.” So that opened the door and I said, “I’m with you, but fair is fair, and if NSAIDs [nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs] are killing as many people as AIDS each year, shouldn’t we look just as critically at that treatment? And we certainly don’t have enough supportive research on spinal surgery. Wouldn’t you like to see more clinical research on spinal surgery?” My point is if you are going to appraise us, we would like you to have the same critical eye upon all other care that is being provided.

How did he or she respond?

He was good with that. It’s an unthreatening environment here, but, of course, he was also a student under my tutelage and maybe you don’t want to argue too much with the person supervising your rotation. The opportunity to learn about chiropractic is good for him, it’s good for us, and he will bring up things to keep me honest.

What other kinds of outreach have you personally done? I’m assuming that in your position, you have some special opportunities to speak about chiropractic and to reach out to other professionals as well as policy makers. Aside from patient care, what else do you do as part of your work?

We have medical students rotate to our clinic, and medical residents. We have chiropractic students rotate through medical specialties. They’re here for about six months. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the days I work in the Capitol, my intern will be rotating in neurology, radiology, neurosurgery, orthopedics, an inpatient ward, general surgery, rheumatology, podiatry, and PMR. He’s basically like a medical student working under a specialist’s supervision. We are not seeking to make pseudo-medical doctors out of our chiropractic students, but it certainly adds a rich clinical environment. While on a medical rotation, if there’s a patient who can potentially benefit from chiropractic, the chiropractic student can say, “Doc, maybe this patient should come down to see us.” And the doctor would say, “Okay, what would you do for him?” And he would have to, in a clear intellectual manner, share what we have to offer. And if the specialist agrees with the student, then we’ll see that patient.

Also, I’ve given between 60 and 70 lectures in the time that I’ve been here.

What kinds of places?

Orthopedics, neurology, at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center], mainly at medical clinics. I’ve talked to a few patient groups, but almost always I’m talking to medical doctors. I have presented grand rounds at the hospital, and I’ve spoken at many of the ‘feeder’ clinics for our tertiary care hospital.

What is tertiary care?

There’s primary care, which is when you go directly to see your doctor and he’ll treat you. If he can’t help you, he might send you to a hospital, where they would take care of you for more complex conditions. That’s secondary care. If they can’t help you, they may send you to a tertiary care facility where there are advanced procedures available. For example, at our hospital, we have interventional radiologists who can treat cerebral aneurysms by a fluoroscopically guided catheterization. They are able to “coil” a cerebral aneurysm or embolize the blood supply to a brain tumor without surgery. Amazing treatments, which are not available at an average hospital; specialty care above and beyond what a normal hospital would have. Bethesda is the Navy’s tertiary care hospital. But you can’t have just the high-end treatment options. You also have to have a completely supportive infrastructure.

It sounds like a very stimulating environment, where you can help your patients and also be constantly learning.

I’ve learned a lot. I’m the type of person who learns best through interaction with others, so it’s very stimulating for me.

What would you say has given you the greatest satisfaction in your work at Bethesda Naval Hospital?

Getting to know and providing care for wounded heroes returning from the overseas conflicts.

In your work at Bethesda, what have you found most challenging?

Going home at night. The resources and collegiality at the hospital and the Capitol are so great that it can be consuming. I love my work too much. If I did not love my family even more, I would always stay late.

What are your goals for the future?

I would love to see the implementation of hospital-based rotations for all willing chiropractic students. Also, I would love to form a world class multidisciplinary spine center in which all spine related specialties are represented.

Daniel Redwood, the interviewer, teaches at Cleveland Chiropractic College in Kansas City, Missouri. Dr. Redwood is the author of the textbook, Fundamentals of Chiropractic (Mosby, 2003), and is Associate Editor of The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. A collection of his writing is available at http://www.drredwood.com. He can be reached by email at danredwood@aol.com.

Unstuck: Holistic Approaches for Depression

Daniel Redwood DC — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 21:02:35 +0000

James S. Gordon, MD, is the founder and director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine and is also one of the founders of contemporary holistic medicine. A practitioner, researcher and educator, he pioneered integrative medical education at the Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, DC, where he is Clinical Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Family Medicine. Gordon was named by President Clinton to chair the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine after earlier serving as the first Program Chair for the National Institutes of Health Office of Alternative Medicine (now the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine).

In addition to his new book, Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven Stage Journey Out of Depression (Penguin, 2008), Dr. Gordon is the author of Comprehensive Cancer Care and Manifesto for a New Medicine, and has also written or edited nine other books, including the award-winning Health for the Whole Person, and more than 120 articles in professional journals and general magazines and newspapers, among them the American Journal of Psychiatry, Psychiatry, American Family Physician, Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. His work has been featured on Good Morning America, The Today Show, CNN, CBS Sunday Morning, Fox News and National Public Radio, as well as in The Washington Post, USA Today, Newsweek, People, Town and Country, Hippocrates, Psychology Today, Vegetarian Times, Natural Health, Health and Prevention.

A graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Medical School, he was for ten years a research psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health. There he developed the first national program for runaway and homeless youth, edited the first comprehensive studies of alternative and holistic medicine, directed the Special Study on Alternative Services for President Carter’s Commission on Mental Health, and created a nationwide preceptorship program for medical students. Through the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, Dr. Gordon has created ground-breaking programs of comprehensive mind-body healing for physicians, medical students and other health professionals; for people with cancer, depression and other chronic illnesses; and for traumatized children and families, and those who serve them, in Bosnia, Kosovo, Israel, Gaza, post-9/11 New York City, and post-Katrina southern Louisiana.

Unstuck, Dr. Gordon’s newest book, focuses on his holistic, non-drug based model for helping people with depression, who Gordon believes have been ill-served by conventional medicine. He is critical of the tendency of many doctors to quickly prescribe antidepressant medications while devoting little or no time to exploring the life events that led to the depression. He feels strongly that doctors need to engender hope and empowerment in patients to help them to move through and out of depression. He offers Unstuck as a manual for implementing these goals.

In this interview with Dr. Daniel Redwood, Dr. Gordon explains the limitations of viewing depression as a disease, describes the various aspects of his program, tells the story of a patient’s dramatic positive response, explains the importance of physical exercise for depressed people, and discusses a variety of circumstances in which he has applied his methods, including his work in Kosovo during and after the 1999 war there.

The current conventional medical model asserts that depression is a disease that can be treated effectively with medications. A central theme in your book is that depression is not a disease but a call to change something in one’s life. Please begin at the beginning and explain how you reached this opinion.

The beginning for me was when I was in medical school. I was working on a psychiatric ward and it just hit me that the folks on the psychiatric ward didn’t look much like the folks on the medical ward or the surgical ward. They didn’t look sick, just more or less like me and the other people who worked on the ward. And yet they were being put in pajamas (which is what they used to do in psychiatric wards). I thought to myself, this is very strange.

The question came to me: in what way do these people have a disease? Certainly not in the way that someone going to the hospital in a diabetic coma has a disease, or someone who has cancer or who has had a heart attack. It’s just not the same kind of experience. So I began to question how this was a disease and the answers I got were not terribly satisfactory. Also, as I read about it, I didn’t see that there was any evidence of anatomical lesions. I had worked in pathology, I had done autopsies, and I knew that there were anatomical lesions for disease states. But there weren’t any for depression. I also discovered that people could move through it. They were depressed for a period of time and then they stopped being depressed, sometimes without any particular kind of treatment. And I wondered, what kind of disease exactly is that? There’s no pathogen that’s been discovered, there’s no anatomical lesion, there’s no fixed biochemical abnormality, there’s no particular downhill course for this condition. What makes it a disease?

I wanted to understand the experience of people who were diagnosed as being depressed so I began to talk with them and to hear their experiences. Some of these people had what we then called “endogenous” depressions, which at the time were considered distinct from the “reactive” depressions when you became depressed, had all the signs and symptoms, the weight loss or weight gain, lack of pleasure in life, a sense of hopelessness, fear about the future, discouragement and sometimes suicidal feelings. There were some people who experienced these things clearly as a reaction to events in their lives, but there were other people for whom these signs and symptoms just appeared, who were said to have an endogenous depression.

But when I talked with those people at length, I found that in their lives, too, things had gone on that made them significantly more depressed now than they were six weeks or six months before. And I began to read the psychological literature, Freud and Abraham, and to think about some of the theories about depression. And it just didn’t seem to be a disease. When I found myself depressed, at times it felt overwhelming in the way an illness did, but there was no illness. I realized these were ways I was looking at the world, things I was feeling. Primarily a sense of loss and a sense of confusion after losing a relationship.

In Unstuck, you quote Freud as writing that replacing neurosis with ordinary unhappiness is a worthy goal. You also point out that many psychopharmacologists praise the restoration of the “pre-morbid personality.” I was struck by how low the bar can be set. How realistic is it to set it higher?

If you think about those phrases, they’re pretty discouraging. [Laughter]. The bar is set extremely low. My own experience is that depression is the beginning. They’re talking about a state or a terrible condition. Their model is that it’s sort of like an infection, where you may have pneumonia now, and we’ll give you antibiotics for it, and your lungs will come back to what they were before. That’s the “restoring the pre-morbid personality.”

But depression is part of life. It’s not a particular disease state and there are lessons that it is bringing to us. If we can learn those lessons, then we can move ahead with our lives in ways that may be very different from the way we’ve lived before. For me, it’s entirely reasonable to set the bar far higher, to see that this is a wake-up call. Depression was a wake-up call for me and it is for the patients and people I see. If you view it as a disease state, then you’ll be perfectly happy to restore the pre-morbid personality. If you view it as a sign that something needs to change, then what you’re going to want to do is work for that change. To ask what needs to change, and what can I do as a person who is depressed. Or what can I do as a clinician to help promote that change.

In your book, you tell the stories of patients you’ve seen who worked their way through depression, some of them slowly and others surprisingly quickly. The story that moved me most was that of a man you called Milton, who came to you after two years of suffering through the breakup of his marriage and the fact that his wife moved with his son to California, 3000 miles from Washington, DC, where he lived. Please tell us that story.

Milton was an amazing story. With all the people I write about, I disguise them enough so that no one is likely to recognize them, except perhaps they will recognize themselves. Milton came into my office and he was depressed, he was angry and he was very strong. He had been a sergeant in the Air Force, kind of a ramrod straight guy. He was an airplane mechanic and one of the people whose planes he was servicing, a neurosurgeon, had seen how upset he was and had referred him to me. He was angry at his ex-wife, he was angry at his kid, he was angry at the doctors who had prescribed antidepressants, he was angry at himself, he was angry at his boss, he was angry at everybody. And he wasn’t sure what he was doing there [in a psychiatrist’s office] but nothing else had worked for him.

I took a history and found out what had happened. He and his wife had had a very nasty breakup and she moved to California. He got more and more upset about his son being so far away from him. And he found himself getting more and more angry at his son, and I think that’s really what brought him to see me ultimately, because that was so distressing to him, that this anger and this sense of hurt was so uncontrolled. Meanwhile, all of his life had lost its savor for him; there was nothing he really enjoyed any more. He was still perfectly good at his job but it didn’t give him any real pleasure.

After we talked for some time, I taught him the very simple relaxation technique that I teach in the beginning of the book, which I teach many of my patients and also in our training programs at The Center for Mind-Body Medicine. It’s called Soft Belly. And what I said to him was to just sit in your chair and let your breathing deepen. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth (which is a particularly relaxing way to breathe) and allow your belly to be soft. If you breathe this way the breath tends to go deeper into the lungs, there’s better exchange of oxygen. The vagus nerve will start working to produce relaxation to balance out the tension, the fight-or-flight response that Milton was in. I told him that if you relax your belly, all the other muscles of your body will begin to relax.

And you did this along with him. You were a participant, a partner, as well as an observer.

Yes. We did this together for some minutes. When he opened his eyes, I could see that there was some relaxation in his muscles. He felt a little bit better, a little calmer. I felt a connection with him. I always give people things that they can do for themselves—this is so crucial to working with people who are depressed, or with anybody. Because part of being depressed is not only that you feel hopeless, but you feel helpless. So if you give people techniques and approaches and ways of looking at things that are practical strategies that they can use to help themselves, you’re beginning to overcome that sense of helplessness. And if you have an experience, like Milton did, of relaxing, then you start having a little hope that things can be different. So that was a very good experience for him. And I told him I wanted him to do this Soft Belly deep breathing several times a day, for several minutes at a time. I thought it would help to relax him so that he would feel better and wouldn’t be quite so angry or quite so tense in the muscles in his jaw and his shoulders.

Then, as he was getting ready to leave, I asked him to read the Tao Te Ching [a short Taoist text, written by Lao Tzu in China in the 6th century B.C., that has achieved great popularity in the West].

You said in Unstuck that this idea just came to you, that you had never recommended that book to anyone before.

It’s the first time I ever recommended it to anyone. I’d read it myself and it’s really wonderful. Lao Tzu is telling you in these verses so many different ways that you can let go of what you’ve been holding onto and move into the flow of life. To stop trying to control things that you can’t control. You know, to let go of all those places that you’re holding onto so hard. I thought this was true of Milton, that he was holding onto everything. You could see it in his body, in the way his mind was working, in his relationships. He was just so angry, so stuck in these resentful patterns. So I said to him, “Why don’t you go and get Lao Tzu.” I recommended a translation by Stephen Mitchell and said I’d see him again in a week. I said, “Read it, and as you’re reading it, do the breathing. And do the breathing when you’re not reading it, as well.”

He looked at me like, “What is this guy talking about?” But he was a polite man, and he figured I’d spent maybe an hour and a half with him and I’d really listened to him. As he told me later, he thought, “You’re an intelligent man and maybe you know what you’re talking about.” He figured he didn’t have much to lose. So he bought his copy of Lao Tzu and I saw him about a week later.

You wrote that when he walked in that day, he seemed an altogether different person.

Yes, he was a totally different man. The way he walked, he was walking with a kind of easy glide. He was a black man, and to me he had seemed like the archetypal, ultra-disciplined master sergeant. And now he’s this relaxed, easy-moving guy. And I said, “What’s going on?” He said, basically, “I went home, I had some time off, and I started reading this book that you assigned me. And it seemed pretty strange to me, with those poems about conquering by submitting and gaining by letting go.” He said, “All those contradictions seemed pretty strange to me. But I figured I had nothing else to do, with a long three-day weekend off, so I just started reading. Then I read it again and I started to get interested in all these contradictions. And the more I read it, the more I was reminded of what it says in the New Testament, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus talks about the lilies of the field. About how they don’t toil and they don’t sow, yet they’re more beautiful than Solomon in all his glory. And where he talks about the meek inheriting the earth.” Milton said that these contradictions in the Tao Te Ching were very much like the contradictions that he had read in the Bible.

He got really interested, and he began to breathe with these verses. He said it was like “the verses were coming into my body, like some wonderful food or some precious aroma, and I could feel myself changing, I could feel myself relaxing with it. So it wasn’t like I could understand them consciously, but I could feel them working on me.” He continued, saying that, “Then I went for a long walk, and these verses kept going through my mind and I began to see some of the foolishness of my trying to make things happen that couldn’t happen, the old grudges. Whether it’s grudges against my boss, or against my wife. And I just got so angry and then I started to cry. This was on Saturday night, the second day. Because I saw how futile it was to try to change things that couldn’t be changed and how much harm I was doing by the way I was talking to my son. The way I was making fun of him and resentful of him. I was so rigid and so mean to him. I started to cry, and then after I cried I found myself laughing at myself because I just saw how ridiculous it was, what I was doing.”

It sounds like you picked the right book for him to read.

He kept reading, two or three more translations. He could feel the change working in him. And that Sunday night, he told me, he called his ex-wife’s house in California, and said,. “How’re you doing?” And his wife, who was shocked at his change in tone, said, “What have you been smoking?” And Milton said, “I haven’t been smoking anything, I’ve just been reading a book and breathing and going for walks.” And she couldn’t believe it, because he had been so mean to her. He was being like a normal person again. And then he talked to his son, and said that for the first time in a couple of years, “it wasn’t as though I said anything different, it’s just the way I was talking and the way I was listening to him. I was really hearing what he had to say, and I was interested in what he was doing in school and watching on TV, and his baseball and other sports.”

He said he got off the phone, moved to tears. We were coming to the end of our session, and he said, “Doc, thank you very much. Between you and me and Lao Tzu, I think I’m just about cured. I don’t feel depressed, I don’t feel angry, I just feel good. And if I ever need you, I’ll be in touch again.” I said, “Great! Thank you.”

It’s as though he wasn’t able to solve the contradictions at his previous level of awareness, and this experience of reading the Tao Te Ching forced him to either shut down entirely or else reach to a higher level. It’s like that old saying I’ve heard attributed to Albert Einstein, that you can’t solve a problem on the level at which it was created.

I think that’s probably what happened. I think another way to look at it is that it just broke him open, that he just “got it.” It’s like they cut through this rigid, stuck structure of behavior and movement, feeling and thought, and he just opened up.

It’s far more common in our society for doctors to take the antidepressant medication approach. You wrote that in one study it took an average of only three minutes for primary care physicians to prescribe antidepressants if they suspected that a patient was depressed. What’s wrong with this picture, from your point of view?

What isn’t wrong with this picture? First of all, how do we make a decision like that in three minutes? Hippocrates said, “First, do no harm.” So you don’t want to use drugs that have very real side effects for the majority of people who take them. That’s been documented over and over again.

What kinds of side effects?

GI [gastrointestinal] symptoms, upset stomach. Agitation. Many people who take these drugs feel agitated. At least 10, 15, 20 percent and maybe more. Sexual side effects are very prominent, with 60 to 70 percent experiencing these in most of the studies. They lose their libido and the orgasms they have are not very satisfying. There’s a lot of weight gain. The percentage varies widely, but it’s a common side effect of antidepressants.

I’ve had patients who experienced major weight gain on antidepressants and had great difficulty losing it.

That’s been my experience, too. And while it’s not talked about so much in the medical literature, patients will say, “I just didn’t care as much.” On antidepressants, the lows may not be so low, but there aren’t too many highs, either.

It’s like the old Eagles song, Desperado, about “losing all your highs and lows, ain’t it funny how the feeling goes away.”

You have all these physical side effects, which are distressing in themselves, and then you have a kind of psychological or emotional numbing, which is not exactly what I would call a wonderful result. First, I don’t think any drug should be prescribed without a very careful assessment of what the benefits and hazards are. Second, in the studies on antidepressants that have been done, when you look at all the studies, including the unpublished ones (presumably not published because the drug companies don’t want to publish those that are unfavorable) as well as the published ones, the advantages of antidepressant drugs over placebo (that is, an inert pill given to people) are very, very small.

So whatever benefit there is, is very small, and the side effects are generally quite significant. I mean, there are some people that benefit but it’s not a very significant number according to the published studies. Beyond that, the other thing is that when people are depressed, they want to talk. So if somebody is writing a prescription right away, they may be trying their best to be helpful but they’re not responding to the deep need that the confused, troubled, depressed person has, to share what’s going on with them. That’s primarily what they want from their physicians. And they’re not getting it. They’re getting a message that says, “No, we’re not going to talk about this. I’m going to give you a pill.”

What have you found to be the value of exercise for depressed people? What kinds do you recommend?

There are perhaps three crucial aspects of working with depressed people. One is being there for them, listening, being present with them. Second is giving them hope that depression is the beginning of a process of change which is, in essence, what the whole of Unstuck is about. And the third, I would say, that should be part of every depressed person’s therapy, is exercise. The evidence for its importance in treating depression is very significant. In many of the studies, it is at least as good as antidepressants and perhaps better.

Without the side effects.

Without the side effects and with many positive effects because it’s good for your general health and it makes you feel better about your body. Instead of the body being just a source of pain or discomfort, it becomes a source of pleasure and satisfaction. And because exercise also very clearly says to people who are depressed that there’s something you can do. Get up and go for a walk or a run or a swim and this will make a difference to you. There are plenty of scientific papers but you don’t have to look at the scientific papers. Those may help encourage you, but the evidence is right there in the way you feel after you exercise and the way you feel after days and weeks of exercising regularly.

Many of the exercise studies have been done on jogging but that doesn’t mean you have to jog. There are so many different forms of exercise. The crucial thing is to pick one that suits you. If you hate jogging, it’s not likely to improve your mood. And incidentally, I think that one of the reasons that the studies don’t show even better results is because they’re asking everybody to do the same kind of exercise. If you enjoy doing yoga, or you enjoy swimming, or going for a walk, or doing martial arts or Tai Chi, why not do those?

You’re a strong advocate of meditation and in your books you describe both expressive and quiet methods. Most people think of meditation as sitting still with eyes closed. Could you explain what other methods you encourage people to pursue?

It’s understandable that people see quiet meditation as meditation, because that’s mostly what we have learned in the West and most of what’s available to people. There are basically three kinds of meditation. One is concentrative meditation, focusing on a sound or image or prayer or pretty much anything else on which you can focus. Mantra meditation is focusing on a sound. You could be focusing on a candle. Or if you say “Hail Mary” or “Sh’ma Yisroel” or “La Illaha Ilallah.” Those are all technically concentrative meditations. The second type is awareness meditation, becoming aware of thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they arise. This can be called Mindfulness. Vipassana is the name of the South Asian form of meditation which we call Mindfulness. The third kind is expressive meditation, which is the oldest meditation on the planet. It’s the one that the shamans have used for tens of thousands of years. It could be chanting, dancing, shaking, whirling or jumping up and down on one foot. These are very powerful techniques for bringing us to the same state of relaxed, moment-to-moment awareness that concentrative and awareness meditations can also bring us to.

I think the great advantage of expressive meditations is that they raise the energy of those of us who have low energy when we’re feeling depressed or discouraged. They also burn off some of that agitation and anxiety, rumination and troubled mind that afflicts us when we’re anxious or depressed or confused. So they have a very direct effect and for many people they are more appropriate.

If you’re really depressed, sometimes quiet meditation can be helpful at relaxing you, but you also need something to energize you when you’re depleted. And these active meditations — which could be just putting on fast music and dancing to it, or shaking your body first for five or ten minutes, and then allowing the body to dance—this puts energy into this depleted organism and helps break up the fixed patterns, the ‘stuckness’ that characterizes depression.” And by working on the body, breaking up some of the fixed patterns of the body, it also turns out they break up some of the fixed mental patterns. As you’re shaking and dancing, some of the rumination—that solid clot of rumination that’s there in our heads—begins to break up. People feel a little freer. So I love to use these techniques. I think they’re really important for people who are depressed or anxious or just people who are kind of uptight. You can do these with others who are also doing them or by putting on some music when you’re alone at home, whatever’s most comfortable for you.

You’ve taught for many years at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. As part of your work there you founded the first medical school program in complementary and integrative medicine, including education in meditation, exercise, and whole foods nutrition. To what extent has this approach spread further through the medical profession in recent years?

That’s a great question. At The Center for Mind-Body Medicine, we trained about 20 Georgetown faculty in our integrative approach, which includes the techniques that I describe in Unstuck. Quiet meditation, shaking and dancing, guided imagery to understand yourself, biofeedback, written exercises to explore your unconscious wisdom, drawings. All of these approaches we taught to 20 Georgetown faculty, and now these full-time faculty at Georgetown are leading groups each year for medical students and also for other faculty and for the staff, the people who work at the medical center.

This model of mind-body medicine that we developed at The Center for Mind-Body Medicine is now being used in at least a dozen, maybe 15 or more, medical schools in the United States. We’ve trained faculty at different schools — a dozen or so at the University of Michigan, and the University of Washington in Seattle and others at various schools around the country. The people we’ve trained are using the same model that I teach in Unstuck at their institutions, and they’re starting to publish research on the effectiveness of this model in reducing stress, improving mood, and enhancing students’ hopefulness about becoming a doctor. One of the effects that I really love is that these groups enhance the compassion of medical students for each other.

I was a co-author on one paper about our work at Georgetown and there’s another from the University of Washington that’s come out. I keep hearing interest in this approach from other medical schools and other institutions that want to bring this work in. The interest is there, especially among the students. Every year anywhere from 50 to 70 Georgetown students take this as an elective, two hours a week for 11 weeks. They’re not required to have an elective; they do it on their own time, because they want to do it. We’re finding the same thing at other medical schools.

In North America, at this point 1500 or 1600 people have at least come through the first phase of our professional training program in mind-body medicine. Many, many of them are using this approach in hospitals, clinics and private practices. They’re using it as part of their teaching at universities and graduate schools. So I see it happening, and there’s still a challenge, too, because I think one of the major shifts that has to happen in medicine is a more even balance between treatment and teaching, between what we as professionals do to or for our patients, and what we can help our patients to do for themselves. And so my work — whether in writing a guide about how to move through the journey out of depression, or in my work in training health professionals — is ultimately to put the tools of self-awareness and self-care in the hands of all those people who want to use them. That’s the shift that has to happen in medicine.

And though this change is coming in various places — through the work that I’m doing and that people like Jon Kabat-Zinn [at the University of Massachusetts] and Herbert Benson [at Harvard] and others are doing — it still has a ways to go before it’s regarded as a kind of an equal partner in the health care that all of us need.

At the time of the Kosovo war in the 1990s, you went there to help. Did you go on your own or with institutional backing? And what did you find there and do there?

My colleague Susan Lord and I went on our own. We went to Kosovo because we had started working in Bosnia after the war. We saw that people were certainly interested in mind-body medicine, and in this kind of group model that we were developing. This was about 1996-97. But then, in 1998, we saw the war starting in Kosovo, where the Serbian army, police and paramilitaries were fighting against the Albanian rebels. The Albanians made up 90 to 95 percent of the population and they were under the thumb of the Serbian government. They wanted freedom. They didn’t want to be treated as second-class citizens. So we saw the war starting up and we wanted to be there because we wanted to do whatever we could, first of all, to be on the side of peaceful reconciliation in which the Albanians had their own territory. But secondly, we wanted to be there at the beginning to help people who were being traumatized by the war and to help train the local health, mental health and educational professionals who were working with them.

What we had seen in Bosnia is that if you wait until after the war is over, patterns of dysfunction become fixed in peoples’ bodies and minds. Their blood pressure goes up, pain syndromes are profound, large numbers of people become depressed, there is a lot of abuse of alcohol and a lot of abuse of women and children. We felt that if we could begin to help people in Kosovo deal with this stress now, during the war, rather than waiting until after the war, maybe we could make a long-term difference in the health of this population.

So we went and we spent time up in the hills with families that had been burned out or bombed out of their homes by the Serbian army and we began to teach them some of these techniques. We taught our approach to members of the Mother Theresa Society who were providing the primary health care in the countryside and we also taught them to the peacekeepers who were there from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. What we saw is that these techniques worked in these situations. People welcomed them. They might have seemed strange — nobody there in Kosovo had ever heard of Soft Belly or guided imagery or meditation, and not too many in the military had heard about these techniques either. But all of these people were willing to do the little experiments with us for a few minutes — do the Soft Belly or do some drawings, and see what came out, see how their thoughts and feelings and their problems came out on the page. And then do another drawing to see how they might find a solution to these problems that had seemed so difficult.

What happened ultimately, and it’s a longish story, is that when the NATO bombing started in 1999, we began to work in the refugee camps in Macedonia where the Kosovars had fled from the war. We began training significant numbers of health professionals. We then came back into Kosovo as soon as the NATO troops entered Kosovo in 1999 and ultimately we trained 600 people in Kosovo and developed a local faculty which continues even now to provide ongoing consultation and supervision. Our model, the same model that I use in Unstuck, is now available throughout the community mental health system in Kosovo. It’s available to two million people, and we have research on the effectiveness of our model in working with children with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Is there anything further you’d like to tell our readers?

One thing I want to add about all the techniques we use, about everything I teach in Unstuck, is that anybody can do them. This is the most important thing. Whether it’s drawings to get people in touch with what’s happening with them and to engage their capacity to use their imagination to solve the problems that they have; the expressive meditations, the quiet meditations; the written exercises that we use to help people develop their unconscious wisdom and their deep knowing about what to do about what’s most troubling to them; or the guided imagery that we use to help people get in touch with their inner knowing, their intuition. Anyone can learn and use them.

I have worked with depressed people from the age of six or seven on up to their 80s, with every conceivable kind of educational level, every kind of background and race. Everyone who is interested can use these techniques and use them in a way that they very quickly discover is helpful to them. This is important—you don’t have to have any particular background or experience to help yourself with the Unstuck approach. I’ve worked with meditation with six and seven year old kids, and gotten them to do the drawings and use guided imagery to access their inner guide—maybe a big animal that they bring with them into the situations that are most upsetting and most depressing to them — being alone or scared of challenges at school.

And this is not just for people who are depressed. These are methods that anyone can use to add fullness to their lives.

I’m glad you said that, because the book’s subtitle is “Your Guide to the Seven Stage Journey Out of Depression.” But the book is written for everyone who is troubled or confused or just going through a difficult time. And the same principles and the same techniques can apply and can be used by any of us at any point in our lives. I wrote it with a focus on people who are depressed, because I have been so troubled over the years by the way that they are treated, by the chronicity of so many people’s depression, by the easy recourse to medication, by the sense of hopelessness and helplessness so many people feel. So I wanted to say to people who are depressed that there is a way. It requires some effort and some commitment, but it’s interesting and it’s sometimes fun. And it can change your life. I wanted to say this to that group of people, whom I’ve been working with for 40 years now and who I feel such a commitment to. But I also wanted to make sure that everyone has access to this information and this perspective, because all of our lives are journeys. All of us will go through challenges. And the same principles apply and everyone can use the same practices.

What projects are you working on now?

We have two major new projects. One is working in New Orleans. We have a group of 80 people that we’ve been training and working with, mainly health and mental health professionals. We’re helping them to use this Unstuck approach with a population that’s been traumatized by Hurricane Katrina and helping them to develop a supportive network for themselves as they take this work out into their hospitals and clinics and practices.

The other project — this one is at an earlier stage but I hope it will be very significant — is working with professionals (and perhaps eventually peer counselors) who are working with members of the military coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. We have a small number of people who’ve come through our training who are doing this work at a few military hospitals and VAs [Veterans Administration facilities]. We’re hoping to significantly enlarge that. Our next training in mind-body medicine will be October 25-30, 2008 in Minneapolis. We’re hoping to have 50 to 70 military physicians, psychologists, social workers and nurses or other professionals who are working with returning vets in the VA system and community clinics. And this is just the beginning. And of course, as always, we welcome other professionals and educators to the training.

What the military is finding out, what they’re admitting in their own studies, is that they really don’t have good answers to the traumatic stress that the vets are bringing back from Iraq and Afghanistan. I think that we have an answer that will not only be useful and successful, but acceptable to the military. Because, just as in Unstuck, it’s saying to people, “You can do it.” Military people are very much can-do people. They like practical solutions and we have them. And we have a kind of small group support that people who have been in the military, or firefighters or police, appreciate because this is the way they work. And this group support is also, I believe, so important to all of us as we learn to help and heal ourselves.

Daniel Redwood, DC, is a Professor at Cleveland Chiropractic College – Kansas City. He is the editor-in-chief of Health Insights Today (www.healthinsightstoday.com) and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Chiropractic Association, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, and Topics in Integrative Healthcare. He can be reached at dan.redwood@cleveland.edu.

The Healing Power of Plants

Daniel Redwood DC — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 21:02:35 +0000

Jim Duke, America’s elder statesman of herbs and spices, is a dedicated and strong-willed scientist whose advocacy of natural healing methods has never diminished. Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1929, Duke earned his doctorate in botany from the University of North Carolina in 1961. Following military service, he undertook postdoctoral activities at Washington University and the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.

Starting in the 1960s, Duke was an ecologist with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), joining Battelle Columbus Laboratories (1965-71) for ecological and ethnobotanical studies in Panama and Colombia. During this formative period, Duke lived with various ethnic groups, pursuing what became a lifelong passion for learning from peoples whose traditions are rich with knowledge of the healing properties of plants. Eventually, Duke became chief of the USDA Medicinal Plant Resources Laboratory.

Duke’s book, The Green Pharmacy (St. Martin’s, 1997), is the standard setter in its field, having sold over one million copies in English. It is now translated into eight languages. Duke has also authored or co-authored 40 other books on herbs, spices and foods, along with 400 articles (half in peer-reviewed journals). He remains a popular lecturer on the subjects of ethnobotany, herbs, medicinal plants, and new crops and their ecology.

In 1995, Duke retired after 30 years with the USDA. Before retiring, he brought his Father Nature’s Farmacy database online at USDA. It is now one of the most frequently consulted databases with the Plant Genome Project at USDA. Duke’s database is especially useful for determining biological activities and healing potentials of food ands herbs.

For further information: www.greenpharmacy.com.

Please tell us how you first fell in love with plants.

There was an old man across the street from me in the Birmingham, Alabama suburbs that had his rabbits to talk to, and every now and then he would walk me through the nearby woods in the foothills. He taught me about chestnuts when we had chestnuts, and watercress. That was when I was about age five, and I think he was about as old and gangly as I am now. We both profited from these mutual walks through the woods. And I have been in love with botany ever since.

All of us learned in grade school that many of the first European explorers set sail across the ocean in search of spices. I personally love spices but I can’t really see risking life and limb to procure them. What’s your take on this?

I have a bad poem on that. It only takes four or five lines. I recited this in ’92 when it was the 500th anniversary of Columbus setting sail. The poem goes like this: “Columbus set sail/looking for black Indians and black pepper/and he took the wrong ocean/and he found red Indians and red pepper/and he changed the cuisine of the world.” As of today, capsicum (red pepper) is one of my ten favorite medicinal spices, and one that is recommended for certain maladies that I have.

What are some of your other favorite spices?

Two years ago, I would have said that garlic is the most important in my garden. Garlic is in more than 20 plots of the 80 plots in my garden. It’s also good for some of my ailments. It’s a constant battle in my mind over which is most important to me. But garlic is so good to eat and so easy to grow, that I can find it in one condition or another in my garden year-round.

Turmeric is another plant which I have in my garden but I’ll need to move it into my greenhouse any day now. Ginger, and cinnamon (which is a shrub), I’ll move them into the greenhouse, too. Those are good medicines. I have a database of 2500 plants, of which I would call 200 of them spices. I understand that my database is one of the most frequently visited at the USDA.

Considering the amount of data on handled by the USDA, that’s quite impressive. Prior to your developing these databases that the USDA now keeps, did such databases exist? Did they have other herb or spice databases that you built on? Or are you the one who started this project?

They had none at the USDA. This started in 1977 or 1978, when the USDA accepted my assignment to a major anticancer program of the National Cancer Institute. At that time, I was sent to lead a small group to look for plants that might have anticancer activity, funded by the National Cancer Institute. So that means that way back in 1978, I started this database. It was primitive but we’ve improved it.

When I’m long gone, that will still be there. [In my own personal database] I’ve got almost three times as much data on some of these same questions as you could ask the USDA database tonight. I can take it proprietary, but if I can’t find a buyer for it, I will dump it all into the USDA database and improve it probably five- or six-fold.

Either way, that’s a wonderful legacy to have created and to pass on to others. You mentioned that, starting in the late 1970s, you were part of a project looking for potentially anticancer herbs. Where did that take you in your travels?

My whole lab traveled a lot. I had at least three trips to China, one trip to Panama (my old stomping grounds), one to Ecuador and one to Syria. And though not all of these were necessarily due to the anticancer program, in my USDA career I’ve been to over 50 countries.

I’ve had a charmed career! My God, I feel sorry for those people who spend their 30 years studying wheat or corn. I’ve landed from helicopters in ganja fields in Jamaica, in opium fields in Laos, and driven into coca fields back in the 1970s, when it wasn’t dangerous. I was involved with the USDA alternative crops program where we would try to convince farmers that if they would phase out the narcotics, they would give them some interesting alternatives that might be remuneratively competitive.

How did that work out?

You may have noticed I used the words, “might be” … Because if we came up with a product that was more competitive, the narcs would just pay more. It was a non-winnable situation. I don’t think the USDA would say that, though. Frankly, I think ganja is a great medicinal plant, much better than the synthetic copycats, which cost much more.

You’ve authored or co-authored many books on herbs, spices and foods. Some are academic treatises and others, like the classic bestseller, The Green Pharmacy, are for general audiences. Looking back on your publishing life, what work or works do you recall as the most satisfying, either because you loved writing them or because of the influence they had on readers?

Every time someone comes to a tour of the garden here, we show them a few of the books that I have on hand. And when they ask, “Which one would you buy if you were only going to buy one?” I always say The Green Pharmacy. It sold over a million copies in English and is now translated into eight languages. It was a turning point for me and I actually retired from the USDA a year early so I could work on that. I think it was one of the best decisions I ever made. That’s why I have the Green Pharmacy Garden, with 300 species of plants, mostly built like the chapters of that book. We have a stone in the middle of a plot, say the Alzheimer’s Plot. There, we’ll see rosemary, sage, periwinkle and some of the plants that are still arguably better than the pharmaceuticals like Aricept.

Tell us more about the Green Pharmacy Garden.

It’s a south-facing slope on my home property here. It will revert, upon my death and my wife’s death, to the Tai Sophia Institute, which is an acupuncture and healing institute at the moment, but it’s liable to become part of a laureate university system all over the world.

The garden on the south slope has four long rows that are sort of like sloped terraces, and in each we have about 20 plots. In each plot, we’ve gathered the best medicinal plants for different ailments. For example, we have a Prostate Plot. We have the best sources of lycopene there – the saw palmetto (which we have to bring in before frost arrives), the stinging nettle, and the African pygeum, proven to help the prostate. That’s just one of the 80 plots in the garden. I can send to those who wish a map of the garden, listing all the species in each plot. It’s sort of like a catalog.

Science marches on and we keep learning new things that might be promising. And frankly, I’m really eager, as is my head gardener, Helen Metzman, to get the latest into them. She is being paid by Tai Sophia. She is hardworking, an artist. She builds beautiful structures out of bamboo and vines to keep the garden a place of beauty as well as a place of education.

What role do you have in the herbal masters program at Tai Sophia? Are you teaching there? Guest lecturing?

I’m glad you asked. My garden is where I teach. We like to call it “Tai South Campus.” It’s roughly one and a half miles, as the crow flies, from the Tai Sophia main campus. The students love to come down here for classes. Instead of my giving them a bunch of slides, we squeeze and tug and defoliate. We have one specimen plant, the jewel weed, that ejaculates its seed into the student’s hand. It’s a hands-on experience.

I recall going on an herb walk a long time ago in Iowa and being told that jewel weed was very helpful for poison ivy.

A long-deceased researcher friend of mine discovered that there is an antihistaminic compound in the jewel weed which explains some of the folklore. But it turns out, wildly and surprisingly to almost anyone, that the active ingredient in jewel weed is lawsone, which is also the active ingredient in the dye called henna. Just two weeks ago in class, one of the students rubbed into one side of my goatee, the reddish roots, or prop roots, of the jewel weed. We didn’t wash it for a few days, and it gave me a light yellow tint to my goatee. It doesn’t really work well on gray hair; henna and lawsone work better on darker hair.

A century or so ago, there was a massive shift in the practice of medicine from plants as the primary healing agents (which had been true since the dawn of humanity) to synthetic pharmaceuticals. What would you say was lost and gained in that shift?

Synthetic pharmaceuticals, your genes have never known. And that’s why these FDA approved synthetic chemicals kill over 100,000 people a year. People have no genetic experience with them. We’ve lost the synergies of the mixtures of the 5000 chemicals in each herb, which your genes have known for thousands of years (if you’re Biblically oriented) or millions of years (if you’re evolutionarily oriented).

Each herb, from turmeric to hot pepper, contains about 5000 biological chemicals, or phytochemicals. All are biologically active. I mean, that’s incredible! It’s chaotic. Your genes know these things that your ancestors ate, and your genes will mine them like menus of active chemicals, and pull out the ones it wants and piss out the ones it doesn’t want. [See the Multiple Activities Menu at http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/dev/all.html]. That’s what homeostasis is. You and I and most alternative practitioners know about that, but few of the allopaths think about the fact that the synthetics are unknown to your genes. When you take them, it’s going to throw you out of balance. It might help you in some ways, but it might throw you out of balance in other ways. And then you’ll return to the physician to find out what to do for the problems the synthetic caused.

In some other countries, medical physicians prescribe herbs far more than American doctors. For example, German MDs prescribe St. John’s wort for depression more often than prescription medications like Prozac and Paxil. Why is there such a difference?

America is run on a faulty premise, “Better living through chemistry.” And we have been convinced (though I’ve never been convinced) that herbs are dangerous and that synthetic chemistry is the answer to all our problems, when literally it is the genesis of most of our problems.

Tell us about your travels to the rainforests of Central and South America.

Believe it or not, although I’ve been interested in botany and edible plants since the age of five, I didn’t have a major conversion in my life until I moved to Panama in 1965 with my wife and my very young children. And while there, I worked with the Choco Indians and the Kuna Indians in the eastern part of Panama, which is very sparsely populated.

While I was living with these wonderful people, I saw that their children were just as happy and healthy as my children back in the Panama Canal Zone, with the best of American allopathic medicine. And I said to myself, “These Indians are on the right track, if not the righter track.” That was my mid-life conversion to the belief that herbal medicine is better than what we’ve been getting. I truly believe that we are being killed by our medicine. Medicine is the number four killer in the U.S. these days and none of these herbs are doing this killing.

When you take an herb, you get a menu with those 5000 chemicals, which can often help things you weren’t even seeking help for. You take the synthetic medicine and it can help, especially if the diagnosis is correct (and about 50 percent of diagnoses aren’t). But taking any pharmaceutical will upset your body more than if you took an herb. So we’ve gone the wrong direction. And I think those Europeans, who at least tolerate prescribing the herbs, are way ahead of us.

You mentioned something about people visiting your garden and spoke about the Tai Sophia students coming there to learn about the plants. Do you encourage visits by others who are interested?

I like to have groups of between 20 and 30, for a couple of hours. I show them, among my 300 plants in the garden, those that are currently of greatest interest to me. This week, cinnamon is of interest to me, because Avandia [a prescription diabetes medication] is close to being taken off the market, and cinnamon is infinitely better than Avandia. Vioxx has been taken off the market, and I would show them that capsaicin, from the hot pepper, is a better Cox-2 inhibitor than Vioxx was. Vioxx killed 90,000 people within ten years. We’ve gone in the wrong direction. I’ve even had the FDA out here four times, but they were lower echelon people who think more like I do. It’s almost as if the upper echelons are on the payroll of Big Pharma.

It’s nice to know that there is at least someone within the bowels of the bureaucracy with some creative thinking.

The upper echelons of the bureaucracy would not even let us say that prunes are a laxative because it hasn’t been proven to their satisfaction. Let them eat prunes!

That says it all, doesn’t it? Is there anything else you’d like to tell our readers?

Well, I’ve been thinking all day about lycopene, from tomato and an herb that I have in the garden which has a lot more lycopene than tomato.

Lycopene is connected with red color in plants, correct?

Yes. The best source I have here among the plants that have been analyzed is an invasive weed called Russian olive or autumn olive. It’s richer in lycopene than tomato, watermelon, guava and the flower pot marigold. Lycopene could probably help prevent every cancer that’s on the books. Turmeric is probably even better. I would recommend those to anyone with any hormone-related cancer. I would also tell them not to listen to their allopath if they tell them, “Don’t you dare take the antioxidants while we’re shooting you with chemotherapeutics.” That’s controversial, I know, but I certainly think that turmeric could be proven better than any chemotherapeutic out there.

But because the turmeric plant can’t be easily patented like a drug, there’s no financial incentive for a drug company to make the necessary investment to test that hypothesis. In theory, government could fund the studies, but they haven’t. Also, I’m guessing that a study in which a group of cancer patients does not receive chemotherapy probably could not be approved, as things stand now.

It costs $1.7 billion now to prove a single chemical according to FDA specifications. And turmeric, provably, has 5000 chemicals. How much would that cost? And what company, or what country, has that kind of money? FDA and FTC are costing many American lives, making it impossible to attain this simple check. The way they could check it out would be to set up a clinical trial. Is turmeric better? Prove us wrong. Instead, the drug companies compare their drug to another drug, or with a placebo.

Daniel Redwood, DC, the interviewer, is a Professor at Cleveland Chiropractic College-Kansas City, and Editor-in-Chief of Health Insights Today and The Daily HIT.

Telling the Environments Story

Daniel Redwood DC — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 21:02:33 +0000

Simran Sethi is an award-winning journalist and associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Journalism and Mass Communications, where she teaches courses on sustainability and environmental communications. She is currently writing a book on contemporary environmentalism to be published by Harper Collins in Summer 2010. She is the contributing author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy, winner of the bronze 2008 Axiom Award for Best Business Ethics book. Simran is the founding host/writer of Sundance Channel’s environmental programming, The Green, and the creator of the Sundance web series The Good Fight, highlighting global environmental justice efforts and grassroots activism.

Named one of the top ten eco-heroes of the planet by the UK’s Independent and lauded as the “environmental messenger” by Vanity Fair, Simran has contributed numerous segments to Nightly News with Brian Williams, CNBC, the Oprah Winfrey Show, Today Show, Ellen DeGeneres Show, Martha Stewart Show and History Channel. She is committed to a redefinition of environmentalism that includes voices from the prairie, the inner city and the global community.

Simran blogs about sustainability and life cycle analysis for The Huffington Post and Alternet. She has been a featured guest on NPR and is the host of the Emmy-award winning PBS documentary, “A School in the Woods.” She has lectured at institutions ranging from the Commonwealth Club to Cornell University; keynoted conferences including Bioneers by the Bay, the Green Business Conference and the North American Association For Environmental Education; and moderated panels for the Clinton Global Initiative University, Demos and the Climate Group.

Simran is an associate fellow at the Asia Society and serves on the Sustainability Advisory Board for the city of Lawrence, Kansas. She holds an M.B.A. in sustainable business from the Presidio School of Management and graduated cum laude with a B.A. in Sociology and Women’s Studies from Smith College. She is the 2009 recipient of the Smith College Medal, awarded to alumnae demonstrating extraordinary professional achievements and outstanding service to their communities.

What first led you to engage so fully in learning about the environment and sharing what you learned with other people?

I took a course in college called “The Environment,” which was a real galvanizing moment for me. I studied sociology and women’s studies. What I have always cared about are communities. For me, how we use and abuse our natural resources is a really clear indication of where we need to go as a global community. When I worked for MTV News in Asia, and specifically saw what was going on in India, it was that the communities that were the most vulnerable, that had the softest political voice and the least amount of expendable money, were the communities where our most toxic industries ended up. I can remember seeing bodies of water that were a completely unnatural color because of the dye that had been dumped into them. Or the displacement of communities because of a large-scale dam that had been proposed, the Narmada Dam. I recognized that, for me, getting a better understanding of our ecosystem would be way to better understand social justice.

Which environmental issues are most urgent at this time and to what extent does the public, in the United States and elsewhere, understand the urgency?

If you had asked me that question a couple of years ago, I would have said climate change and I would have paraphrased one of my bosses, Robert Redford [founder of the Sundance Channel], who has said that climate change is the umbrella under which all environmental issues fall. But since I moved from New York City to Lawrence, Kansas, three years ago, I’ve had a real education in understanding how people feel connected or disconnected from the issue of climate change.

What I talk about now is understanding our water usage and the fact that our drinkable water is currently finite, that we really need to think about ways to conserve water. Over the next couple of years, 38 out of the 50 states in the United States will be suffering from water shortages of some degree. I think that we need to really consider, for the U.S. population and global population, our consumption. What’s often talked about is population, but what’s more significant is that the United States comprises about four percent of the global population but we use upwards of 20 percent of the world’s resources. Whether we’re talking about petroleum or paper, or generating greenhouse gas emissions, these are all things that the U.S. (now with China and India not too far behind) plays a huge role in. For me, being of Indian origin and recognizing the challenges around population growth, I think the biggest challenge we face right now is people trying to emulate a Western lifestyle. So what we need to do, as Americans, is take a leadership position in redefining how we consume and what we consume. I think that’s the real opportunity to reach people.

Climate change is an urgent problem but it’s hard for a lot of people to get their heads around. The information seems abstract. Carbon dioxide emissions are invisible. The time trajectory for sea level rise seems so far away. The melting of the icecaps is still not something that people hold in their consciousness as they face the challenges in their everyday lives. So I think focusing on the resources we use is perhaps a better conversation to have right now.

Returning to your emphasis on water, this is not just about rainfall, is it? It’s also about using up the water contained in the underground aquifers.

Absolutely.

And here in Kansas, that hits very close to home because the massive Ogalala Aquifer is being drained at unsustainable rates. What have you learned, living in Kansas, that you didn’t know previously about water?

I have learned that we are using too much of it. I came from New York City, where the carbon and ecological footprints are pretty small [per person]. But here, the conventional farming techniques that are employed are very water intensive. The crops we grow, ranging from corn to soybeans to wheat, are water-intensive crops. The push for corn ethanol has been really misguided. So yes, water is not just about rainfall; drought depends on how we use water. And there are certain things that we believe we need to have – like green lawns – that don’t make a lot of sense in certain climates.

We are starting to get a better sense of that fact that water is finite. Planning policies need to reflect that. But for the most part, local governments don’t seem to have taken too strong a stance on this. This is one of things that we addressed in the climate plan for the city of Lawrence, that we really need to look at how we’re using our resources and how we’re planning our cities. The Climate and Energy Project, the nonprofit that’s an offshoot of The Land Institute, has also started to talk about water in relation to climate change, which relates to conventional agricultural measures as well. I’m learning that this hits a lot closer to home here, and we’re not just talking about drinking water. It’s industry, it’s public health, it’s a host of issues that have not been considered as fully as they need to be. Especially in an ag state! We need to be concerned with how available these resources are.

In the United States, and perhaps elsewhere as well, we currently face converging crises in the health, environmental and economic spheres. Do you see these as being interconnected?

Absolutely. Environmental issues are issues of public health, economic prosperity, patriotism and more, because we rely on our natural resources to sustain us. When we abuse our resources, we suffer the health consequences of doing so. So, for me, these issues are not separate; everything falls within our planetary ecosystem.

The biggest challenge I have as a journalist is trying to help people make these interconnections. Media is notorious for trying to squeeze a little bit of information into a little bit of space and not providing a lot of context. It’s a real hardship to try to explain climate change in a 250-word blog post or a two-and-a-half minute news story. I have tried to do both and I can tell you it is not easy. I think these stories warrant a much deeper conversation. When it comes to talking about the environment, we see the schism in the January 2009 Pew Poll saying people feel the Obama Administration should focus on jobs, the economy and terrorism, while interest in issues like environmentalism and climate change have fallen precipitously. Those things are completely interconnected. If we don’t make those connections clear, then it’s understandable that most people won’t be able to.

You teach courses at the University of Kansas on the intersections between media and the environment. You’ve partially answered this already but I’d appreciate your going a little deeper, if you would. What do you think is currently lacking in media coverage of the environment? You’ve talked about the limitations of sound bites or 250-word blog posts., For someone seeking to get the message out, someone who is a journalist or aspires to be one, how can they accomplish what needs to be done?

I think that for starters, they need to do a lot more homework. Science is not an easy thing to understand and I’ve seen many reporters ask questions that indicate that they haven’t done much homework. I emphasize to my students, many of whom are budding journalists, that it really comes down to asking good questions and knowing what to do with that information. We are further challenged by the fact that scientists are not trained to work with media. Science is a journey whereas media asserts destinations, for lack of a better analogy here. Media wants you to know this is right and this is wrong, this is black and this is white, this is the truth and this is a falsehood. Science is based on hypothesis; based on past history, this is what we think will happen in the future.

I think a lot of communicators don’t know what to do with that uncertainty. We need to do a better job of making our own concerns clear, while also being clear that some of this has not yet been figured out. It is dynamic and changing information. I worked for media outlets that would say to me, “We already did that story. Green transportation, green jobs, done.” You would never say that you’ve “already done” the Obama Administration, or healthcare. But for some reason this issue, the environment, has been siloed in such a way that people feel that it’s not well integrated into the fabric of their lives. So my goal would be that we stop having courses on media and the environment because the information will become so much a part of the public discourse that the information will no longer be decontextualized and isolated.

To what extent should journalists, environmental or otherwise, seek to maintain an objective viewpoint? Also, to what extent must there always be two sides presented, or given equal time, even if one side has essentially all of the science behind it? How do you address this with your students?

I tell students on day one that I don’t believe in objectivity. Other courses that they take may assert that objectivity is very much available and necessary. But for me, particularly in any level of advocacy journalism, it is my belief that people make assumptions about what your orientation is, if you are simply reporting on the environment and that the truth of the matter is that we all have a vested interest in the environment continuing and sustaining. So we have an agenda – we want clean air, we want clean water and we want clean soil. To me, it was a great misstep to give equal time to climate skeptics and do this 50-50 split on what the skeptics believe versus what the scientists believe. And this is really reflected to this day in the skewed kind of support that we have, or lack thereof, for responses to climate change. According to the recent Yale study, roughly half the population believes that human activity is behind climate change. The other half does not or is somewhat skeptical along the continuum.

I think most people get their information from media. That’s how they formulate their opinions about the world. I believe it is possible to assert, to make clear, your agenda and move forward. Because to me, you are showing your bias from the moment you select an interview subject, the moment you ask a question, the moment you edit a news story and determine what sound bite you’ll leave in and what you will take out. That reveals some level of subjectivity. So to assume a detached voice is an objective one, is, I think, an illusion.

Speaking of having an opinion, are you optimistic about our avoiding environmental catastrophe?

Sometimes I am not but most of the time, I am optimistic. On one of the television shows I worked for, I interviewed a woman named Sylvia Earle. She’s a marine biologist in her seventies who was the first woman to walk untethered on the ocean floor. She was named one of Time’s heroes of the planet. I leaned in to her during one of the breaks and said, “Dr. Earle, 90 percent of our fish stocks are depleted. What do we do? I mean, how do you keep going?” She’s this spry woman with bright blue eyes, and she said, “Simran, it’s the 10 percent.”

Keeping our eye on the possibility and the hope of what we can do is not always easy but I think it’s always essential. That’s where I try to come back to and it’s what I try to inspire my students to do. There’s always that moment in the semester where they realize, “Well, gee, everything I eat, the car I drive, the clothes I wear, everything has this terrible impact.” For most people, it is not a viable solution to pull yourself off the grid and go live in a yurt. But it is possible to be conscious about the decisions you make and recognize that everything does have an impact, and to look at ways that your impact can perhaps be diminished.

To what extent is food production and distribution, and the choice of which foods we eat, an environmental issue? And I would ask you to specifically address that in the context of animal agriculture, since Kansas is one of the world’s centers for animal agriculture.

Exactly. Don Stull, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Kansas describes the area of Garden City, Holcomb and Dodge City as the Golden Triangle of Meat Packing. This year in my class on media and the environment, we used food as the lens. We focused completely on food and agriculture, which I don’t think are separate. But in some people’s minds, ag is different from food.

Food is a universal. We have to eat, we can’t get away from it. And the choices we make have varying impacts. For a lot of students, it was an awakening to realize the amount of land, water and greenhouse gas emissions (particularly methane) that are generated through the raising of livestock. You can think about a meat packing plant in the abstract and think that it isn’t very pretty, but we talked to farmers. We started to get a better sense of what it means to make that choice. A couple of people in the class are vegetarians and they were able to share their insights as to why that was important for them, in terms of a personal ethic as well as an environmental responsibility.

In terms of the research that you were encouraging students to do more of, did you look into the 2006 United Nations report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow”?

Yes, we read the summary of that report. This is information that we weren’t talking about just a few years ago. Everyone was talking about carbon dioxide emissions without really looking at methane and the concentrated nature of that greenhouse gas emission. For students, it has been a real awakening to understand this. But they tend to be on budgets so they face a struggle in which they say, “I want to eat better, but my pocketbook only allows this much, so what am I going to do?” There was one student who came in saying that he ate burgers every single day. By the end of the semester, he was eating fewer burgers, but more importantly, he was really clear on what the supply chain was that brought that burger to his plate. He was recognizing not only the animal that had given up his life but the resources that had been depleted, what the farmers had been paid, and how the workers had been treated in the factory. Hopefully that information will stay in his mind and he will make better choices.

The Leopold study that was done at the University of Iowa, indicating that our food travels over 1500 miles from farm to fork, was surprising to students. We live in an ag state, yet our food is still traveling these huge distances to reach us. Why is there this disconnect? Why is our food system so out of whack? Where can we look and what can we do as citizens to start to make a difference?

You’ve often appeared on various media outlets speaking about sustainable business approaches. Corporations seeking quick profits are often seen as the enemy of sustainability. Can corporations be part of the solution?

It goes back to the idea of doing the best we can and thinking critically about our choices. Corporations are corporate citizens and I think we really need to treat them as such. And as such, some will do better than others. But for me, it’s necessary to continue to encourage companies to go further and not allow them to rest on their laurels.

I’ll give you an example. I moderated a conversation between the heads of corporate social responsibility for Whole Foods and Wal-Mart last year in Boulder, Colorado. The conversation was about sustainability and how these corporations define it. There’s a definition from the Bruntland Commission, the UN commission on sustainable development, which defines sustainability as engaging in a way that doesn’t harm future generations. Whole Foods has this American pastoral vision, that Michael Pollan talks about, in which they paint a picture that lots of the food is local and the price premium is certainly worth it. I asked, “What does this mean?” Furthermore, there is a lawsuit in California about toxins in some of the products carried in Whole Foods, so I questioned them about that, as well.

On the Wal-Mart side, I asked what they were doing in terms of labor rights. We cannot underestimate the power of the world’s largest retailer shrinking packaging, demanding that their supply chain shrink packaging by 30 percent. Trust me, when Wal-Mart says you have to do it to stay in our club [laughter], that’s it! It is unequivocal. So I can’t in good conscience say that Wal-Mart is the devil. Personally, I don’t really shop there, but I recognize the power of that institution and I recognize that there are huge numbers of people who do. So for me to dismiss them out of hand means that I am losing an opportunity to galvanize a lot of support throughout the supply chain, through a number of other companies and throughout a consumer base.

So you’re more concerned about expanding our reach than about being accused of compromising too much.

As a journalist, my goal philosophically is to bring more people into the conversation. We can’t get there if it’s just the folks on the coasts, the people who are already engaged in permaculture, the folks who are riding bikes and buying Priuses. It has to be everybody. This is too important and it involves all of us. So we need to seek out ways to get more people involved in the conversation and not make people feel alienated or shamed or stupid. All of these things have happened and have caused some people to say, “That’s not for me. That movement doesn’t belong to me.”

This one belongs to all of us. It’s about striving every day to figure out how to do that. This has to involve getting corporations on board. At one point, I was vehemently against a number of corporations, which I won’t list now. But I had a friend talk to me, and he said, “Do you go through your day and not interface with companies? You use products, right? Your coffee comes from someplace. You didn’t make your own clothes.” That helped me to realize that whether I like it or not, I engage with companies from the moment I wake up in the morning and brush my teeth, until the moment I go to sleep and put my beeswax earplugs in my ears. Somebody made those things; I bought them from somewhere. So I need to figure out how to work within that model and encourage those companies, and other companies, to do more.

Coming back to health issues, the British medical journal, The Lancet, recently ran a major article which concluded that global climate change is the greatest health threat of the 21st century. Is that your sense and, if so, why is this not more widely recognized yet?

You know, climate change has needed a much better public relations company. I’m making a joke here, but someone needs to do a lot better PR for the planet than we’ve had. Climate change has been an extraordinarily divisive issue. Media didn’t do a good job, NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] didn’t do a good job. Some people have felt like if they are to believe in climate change, the next thing you’ll want is for them to support abortions and vote for Al Gore. It’s this strange polarity that has occurred. I can’t quite understand how this happened.

While I have not read that particular issue of The Lancet, I completely believe that climate change is an extraordinary health concern. It doesn’t get talked about enough because climate change, in general, has not been spoken about in ways that resonate with enough people. We talk about the number of degrees of the planet heating up, and we talk about sea level rise, but we have not made this tangible for people. If you say the temperature will rise here in Kansas and we will see increased rates of malaria because the mosquito population will proliferate, then that’s something that people can get their heads around.

But abstractions have not worked for people. We thought that maybe – when I say we, I mean environmental storytellers – that facts would really engage people. But I don’t think that people can tell the temperature difference between [global climate change of] one degree Celsius and two degrees Celsius. I’m not convinced that telling people that swapping out light bulbs will be the equivalent of taking a million cars off the road, or two million cars off the road, actually means anything to them. It sounds like a lot, don’t get me wrong. But speaking for myself, it doesn’t stay with me. I can’t discern the difference in those orders of magnitude. I think the more we can talk about public health, the better chance we have of actually engaging people.

From your perspective, what are some of the palpable public health issues that we can hang our hats on as communicators, to connect in a visceral way with people who may just be engaged in other activities and not thinking about this? What is there with people’s health that they might connect to? Not having enough water to drink, that’s one. Not having enough water to grow food with, that’s another…

See, you’re on a great roll. Not being able to breathe the air, that’s another one. The pollution. In the 1970s, when we galvanized around the Clean Air Act, seeing smog is what galvanized people. We have to make the invisible visible for people. Also, we can’t keep talking about everything over these long time horizons. There are some great reports that have come out for the state of Kansas, and for other states, about what will happen in response to climate change by the year 2100.

When we’ll all be dead.

Exactly. I want to know, what’s going to happen in 2010? Will I still have a job, will I have food to eat? It’s important to break some of this stuff down and say listen, this puts us on a certain trajectory. Here’s what happens to our soil, here’s what happens to our food, here’s what happens to the air that we all need to breathe, here’s what happens when we site another coal plant in our community. Here are the impacts that coal plant will have on drinking water. We don’t need to actually use climate change as the conversation starter because that’s where a lot of people have been turned off.

I can argue against a coal plant on a number of grounds that have absolutely nothing to do with the planet warming. I think that’s what we need to start do more, to build bridges to constituencies that are simply turned off rather than trying to convince them that climate change is real, which I think is a very challenging thing to do because it has become so politically and culturally loaded. I would start to talk about some of those common cares. And I think that what you just cited and what I just cited are the best ways to do it. Public health is so unifying. None of us want to be sick. None of us want our kids to be sick. A lot of us don’t want the animals to be sick or the plants to be sick either. That’s something that people can really feel.

Is concern about the Midwest turning into a Dust Bowl again a useful angle?

I still consider myself a bit of a transplant. I don’t know what the historical memory is around that. I mentioned it in class but I don’t really think that a lot of my students got it; they don’t seem to have any recollection of what that meant.

Aside from food, what did they identify with most?

For the whole course we used food as a lens, so the conversation was about food. But I would say water, jobs, the economy. We have to tie it into what people assert they do care about. That, to me, is just the clearest way to do this. If Pew tells you that the top three concerns for people are jobs, the economy and terrorism, well, I can figure out ways to talk about the environment in ways that address those concerns, rather than talking about them in ways that fall to the bottom of their list of concerns.

So if we say the conversation is about climate change and sea level rise, well, that just dropped to 20 in the list of 20 concerns. But if I can tie these to all the workers that have been laid off from Boeing in Wichita, and that the skill sets they have translate really well into creating wind turbines, and that Kansas has the third highest wind capacity in the country but we’re tenth in production, there’s really a tremendous business opportunity here. That’s going to get some people listening. That’s going to bring dollars into our state. I mean, those are the kinds of connections we need to make.

If we are concerned about terrorism and this whole idea of energy independence, what are the sources of energy we can use that would be good for us? Okay, we have a lot of coal here. What can we do to clean it up, because at this point clean coal is really a fallacy. What can we do to make that real if we’re not going to get rid of it? What other sources can we move toward? How can we educate our consumers? How can we get the government on board? We have a real opportunity right now because for so many years under George Bush, it was really hard to have these conversations.

So that space has opened up now?

Absolutely, from the inside out. We are no longer fighting to get these conversations held and policy changed. These things are happening in real time, since January. We have an extraordinary opportunity. There’s momentum. So where else can we direct our efforts? In my opinion, and I’m working on a book about this very thing, we need to address the people who have felt maligned or unaddressed by this movement. I would that say that’s a lot of folks who politically have identified as Republicans and who culturally have engaged in some of the same activities that the most ardent environmentalists do, but who would absolutely refuse that label because it doesn’t feel like a good fit for them. We’re trying to find out what would make it a good fit.

I read that your forthcoming book focuses on eco-elitism, which seems to be what you were just talking about. I was going to ask you to speak about how reasonably well-off people can recognize and avoid it. But I realize that eco-elitism may not be so much about whether one is well-off, but perhaps more about a kind of cultural elitism.

It’s more of an attitude that separates us. I received an email from a woman and I was describing the book, talking about how the contemporary American environmental movement was founded by hunters and anglers and so I’m interested in talking to them. She said she was vegan and that she wouldn’t have anything to do with this book. Now, absolutely the most environmentally friendly individual change you can make around food is become vegan. There’s no question. But, if we’re only going to get vegans on board with this movement, then we’re not going to get a lot of traction.

I’m curious to understand a community that values natural resources and has been instrumental in preserving large tracts of land. And as someone who eats meat, the people who hunt and then clean those animals and put those animals in their freezers and eat them all year round, they’re far more noble than I am when I go to the grocery store and look for some free-range chicken. I have a tremendous amount of respect for people who do that. I’m not a big fan of hunting as a sport but I think that there’s something we completely miss when we say that we don’t want to engage in dialogue with them. That’s philosophically where I come from.

So we need to find the places where the circles intersect?

Absolutely. And there are a number of them when it comes to natural resources that we share and depend on for our sustenance. I think there are a lot more ways that we are connected and we need to be a lot more creative about figuring them out. That’s what I mean by eco-elitism.

Is there any other area or issue that you feel passionately about that we haven’t touched upon?

Environmental justice. I really feel that people have been left out of this conversation for a number of reasons – because they’re disenfranchised, because they’re poor, because they have no political clout, maybe because they’re people of color, or because they’re Republicans.

There are just a host of reasons that we determine that someone is not like us. What I am trying to do is to help to make it clear that we are the same, that we have shared concerns and we need to figure out shared solutions. When it comes to environmental justice, Robert Bullard, the sociologist, did a study 23 years ago, looking at where toxic industries are sited. They’re sited in low-income communities of color, disempowered communities. That hasn’t changed in 23 years, despite EPA having an environmental justice arm, despite many of the big environmental organizations having an environmental justice arm. We have not reached those constituents.

I created a series for The Sundance Channel, for their website, called “The Good Fight,” that looks at how these issues – water usage, access to food, housing – how these effect disparate communities and what we can do. I think the first step is becoming informed. In order to do that, we need to seek out really good journalists, we need to encourage them and we need to become our own storytellers. And to recognize that this is the one movement that we cannot say belongs to someone else. It belongs to all of us.

Daniel Redwood, DC, the interviewer, is an Associate Professor at Cleveland Chiropractic College – Kansas City and Editor-in-Chief of Health Insights Today (www.healthinsightstoday.com). He can be reached at dan.redwood@cleveland.edu.

FCER End Notes

Daniel Redwood DC — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 21:02:33 +0000

Chapter 8 Chiropractic and Manual Medicine

1. From internal AMA documents introduced into evidence by the chiropractic plaintiffs at the Wilk v. AMA trial. Data from the federally-mandated study study was to be used to determine whether chiropractic should be included in Medicare, the government-sponsored health insurance program for older Americans. Passage of the Corman-Stone bill in 1973 brought chiropractic services into the Medicare system.

2. Eddy, David M. Quoted in Chiropractic: A Review of Current Research. Foundation for Chiropractic Education and Research. Arlington, VA. p.1. Dr. Eddy, a medical physician, is Professor of Health Policy and Management at Duke University.

3. Eisenberg, David et. al.”Unconventional Medicine in the United States: Prevalence, Costs and Patterns of Use.” New England Journal of Medicine. January 28, 1993. 328: 246-252.

4. Leach, Robert. The Chiropractic Theories: A Synopsis of Scientific Research. p. 24. Leach cites as his source an article by Elizabeth Lomax called “Manipulative therapy: a historical perspective from ancient times to the modern era,” which appeared in The Research Status of Spinal Manipulative Therapy, published by the United States Government Printing Office (1975), pp. 11-17. This monograph contains the proceedings of a conference on spinal manipulation, convened by the National Institute for Neurological and Communicable Diseases and Stroke (NINCDS).

5. Copland-Griffiths, Michael Dynamic Chiropractic Today. pp. 119-120.

6. Ibid. pp. 121-122.

7. Leach. op. cit. p. 25

8. Gibbons, Russell. “The Evolution of Chiropractic: Medical and Social Protest in America.” in Modern Developments in the Principles and Practice of Chiropractic, edited by Scott Haldeman. p. 23.

9. Sharpless, Seth. “Susceptibility of Spinal Roots to Compression Block.” In Goldstein, Murray (editor): The Research Status of Spinal Manipulative Therapy. Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, 1975, pp. 155-161.

10. Kirkaldy-Willis, W, Cassidy, J. “Spinal Manipulation in the Treatment of Low-Back Pain.” Canadian Family Physician 31:535-540. 1985.

11. Meade, T.W., Dyer, S., et. al. “Low Back Pain of Mechanical Origin: Randomized Comparison of Chiropractic and Hospital Outpatient Treatment,” British Medical Journal, June 2, 1990. Vol. 300, pp. 1431-1437.

12. Dr. T. W. Meade, interviewed on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) program, as quoted in Chiropractic: A Review of Current Research. Foundation for Chiropractic Education and Research. 1992.

13. Koes, B.W., Bouter, L.M., et. al. “Randomised Clinical Trial of Manipulative Therapy and Physiotherapy for Persistent Back and Neck Complaints: Results of One Year Follow Up.” British Medical Journal. March 7, 1992, Volume 304, pp. 601-605.

14. Ebrall, P.S. “Mechanical Low-Back Pain: A Comparison of Medical and Chiropractic Managment Within the Victorian WorkCare Scheme,” Chiropractic Journal of Australia, June 1992, Volume 22, Number 2, pp. 47-53.

15. Jarvis, K.B., Phillips, R.B., et. al. “Cost per Case Comparison of Back Injury Claims of Chiropractic versus Medical Management for Conditions with Identical Diagnostic Codes,” Journal of Occupational Medicine, August 1991, Volume 33, Number 8, pp. 847-852.

16. Wolk, S. Chiropractic versus Medical Care: A Cost Analysis of Disability and Treatment for Back-Related Workers’ Compensation Cases. Foundation for Chiropractic Education and Research, September 1987.

17. Boline, P.D. Chiropractic Treatment and Pharmaceutical Treatment for Muscular Contraction Headaches: A Randomized Comparative Clinical Trial. Proceedings from the 1991 International Conference on Spinal Manipulation. FCER. Arlington, Virginia.

18. North American Spine Society’s Ad Hoc Committee on Diagnostic and Therapeutic Procedures. Spine. 1991. Vol. 16, No. 10.

19. Davis, H. AV MED Medical Director. Miami, Florida. 1982. The chiropractor was Mark Silverman, D.C. This evidence was presented as part of the Wilk v. AMA trial.

20. Cherkin, D., MacCornack, F. “Patient Evaluations of Low Back Pain Care from Family Physicians and Chiropractors,” Western Journal of Medicine, March 1989, Volume 150, pp. 351-355.

21. Gilbert, J.R. “Clinical Trial of Common Treatments for Low Back Pain in Family Practice.” British Medical Journal, 1985, Vol. 291, pp. 791-794.

22. Curtis P, Bove G. “Family Physicians, Chiropractors and Back Pain.” Journal of Family Practice, November 1992, Vol. 35, pp. 551-555.

23. The Gallup Organization, Demographic Characteristics of Users of Chiropractic, 1991.

Chapter 9 Foundations of the Chiropractic Model

1. Copland-Griffiths, Dynamic Chiropractic Today, p. 159

2. Bourdillion, J.F. Spinal Manipulation. pp. 205-206

3. Copland-Griffiths, op. cit. p. 162

4. Mazzarelli, Joseph, D.C. (editor). Chiropractic: Interprofessional Research. pp. 69-76.

5. Yates RG, Lamping DL, Abram NL, Wright C. “Effects of Chiropractic Treatment on Blood Pressure and Anxiety: A Randomized, Controlled Trial.” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 1988; 11: 484-488.

6. Kokjohn K, Schmid DM, Triano JJ, Brennan PC. “The Effect of Spinal Manpulation on Pain and Prostaglandin Levels in Women with Primary Dysmenorrhea.” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 1992; 15: 279-285.

7. Thomason, PR, Fisher BL, Carpenter PA, Fike GL. “Effectiveness of Spinal Manipulative Therapy in Treatment of Primary Dysmenorrhea: A Pilot Study.” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics. 1979; 2: 140-145.

8. Brennan PC, Kokjohn K, Katlinger CJ, Lohr GE, Glendening C, Hondras MA, McGregor M, Triano JJ. “Enhanced Phagocytic Cell Respiratory Burst Induced by Spinal Manipulation: Potential Role of Substance P.” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 1991; 14: 399-408.

9. Klougart N, Nillson N, Jacobsen J. “Infantile Colic Treated by Chiropractors: A Prospective Study of 316 Cases.” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 1989; 12: 281-288.

10. Falk, JW. “Bowel and Bladder Dysfunction Secondary to Lumbar Dysfunctional Syndrome.” Chiropractic Technique, 1990; 2: 45-48.

11. Borregard, PE. “Neurogenic Bladder and Spina Bifida Occulta: A Case Report.” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 1987; 10: 122-123.

12. Masarsky, CS and Weber M. “Screening Spirometry in the Chiropractic Examination.” ACA Journal of Chiropractic, February 1989; 23: 67-68.

13. Masarsky, CS and Weber M. Chiropractic and Lung Volumes A Retrospective Study. ACA Journal of Chiropractic, September 1986; 20: 65-68.

14. Hewitt, EG. “Chiropractic Treatment of a 7-Month-Old With Chronic Constipation: A Case Report. Proceedings of the National Conference on Chiropractic and Pediatrics (International Chiropractors Association), 1992; 16-23.

15. Bachman TR, Lantz, CA. “Management of Pediatric Asthma and Enuresis With Probable Traumatic Etiology.” Proceedings of the National Conference on Chiropractic and Pediatrics (International Chiropractors Association), 1991: 14-22.

16. Browning, JE. ” Mechanically Induced Pelvic Pain and Organic Dysfunction in a Patient Without Low Back Pain.” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 1990; 13: 406-411.

17. Goodman R. “Cessation of Seizure Disorder: Correction of the Atlas Subluxation Complex.” Proceedings of the National Conference on Chiropractic and Pediatrics (International Chiropractors Association), 1991: 46-56.

Ordinary Grace

Daniel Redwood DC — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 21:02:33 +0000

Kathleen Brehony is the author of the widely acclaimed book, Awakening at Midlife (Riverhead, 1996), a classic in its field that was the basis of a PBS special. Her new book, Ordinary Grace: An Examination of the Roots of Compassion, Altruism, and Empathy, and the Ordinary Individuals Who Help Others in Extraordinary Ways (Riverhead, 1999) is filled with stories of people who give of themselves asking nothing in return.

In this interview with Dr. Daniel Redwood, Dr. Brehony describes the motivation behind these extraordinary acts of compassion, discusses the role of challenge and pain in times of transition, and addresses the need to be both creative and secure.

A clinical psychologist in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Brehony is also the co-author (with Robert Gass) of the recently published book Chanting: Discovering Spirit in Sound (Broadway, 1999).

DANIEL REDWOOD: To write Ordinary Grace, you sought out people who had gone the extra mile, helping others in situations where no one would have criticized them had they not performed these acts of service. Is there something that these people have in common that sets them apart from the rest of us?

KATHLEEN BREHONY: Great question. Really, that’s the theme of the book, to explore if there is something different. I think they have something that they manifest that the rest of us also have but don’t always manifest. There are a number of characteristics, but one of the major ones is this absolute felt connection to other people. In all the people I’ve talked with, there wasn’t a single one who cited pity. It was pure compassion, a lot of, “There but for the grace of God go I.” The other characteristic that immediately comes to mind is that everyone I spoke with seemed to think that to help somebody else was a blessing to them. It wasn’t something that they did expecting a reward. They didn’t say, “Look how great I am because I got to help.” There was a sense that it felt good to them to give somebody a hand.

REDWOOD: Did they all come from families where this sort of altruism was encouraged and inculcated?

BREHONY: Absolutely not. You’d like to think so, it would make it a little more predictable in some ways. But one of the guys I interviewed, named Tony, was born to a 13-year-old mother in a state mental institution. He was shuttled from foster home to foster home and taken away from his father because his father physically abused him. He was working in the lumberyards and sawmills from the time he was 11 years old. As soon as he was old enough, he went off into the Marines and did two or three tours of duty in Vietnam. This is not somebody you would think would easily come to compassion, and yet he did. He’s this great big guy, from the Virginia Beach area. And he, his wife, and a number of his friends, all motorcyclists, on every non-rainy Sunday afternoon they do something to raise money for a trailer park, kids with muscular dystrophy, adults with multiple sclerosis. He’s known locally as “The Motorcycle Santa.”

REDWOOD: I was especially moved by the two stories you told of people who decided to donate kidneys to individuals who were neither relatives nor close friends. Could you relate a short version of those stories and share with us your own personal response when learning what these folks had done?

BREHONY: I read an article about the power of prayer, I think it was in Time or Newsweek. One of the women in it said that she had prayed for her sister, who needed a kidney. She had an unusual last name, and it said that she was from somewhere in Pennsylvania. So I called information and found her father. Because I wasn’t yet sure that he was related to her, I said I was an old friend of hers from college and asked how I could reach her. When he said he was her father, I explained who I really was and I eventually tracked her down in California. She was in her mid-30s, her kidneys were shutting down, and she was going to die in spite of dialysis. She comes from a large Chinese-American family. She has tons of relatives, it’s a close family. They all were tested to see if anyone could donate, but none was a match, not even her sisters and brothers.

She walked into the bank one day, looking sad because she had just learned this news. The bank teller, a woman named Mary, said, “Boy, you look down in the mouth today. What’s wrong?” And the woman, whose name is Mickey, said, “I just found out I don’t have anybody who can give me a kidney.” And Mary said, “What is your blood type?” Mary told me later that at that exact moment, “I knew that I would match”and that I was going to give her a kidney.” She said, “Something came over me.”

Then I meet up with these two guys in Detroit. One is an Italian guy from New York City, and the other is Larry Wynn, originally from Mississippi. They both work as executives for General Motors, but they were not close friends. They had gone with a number of other co-workers to some baseball games and things like that, but that was about it. Larry told me that on the very day that he discovered that his sister could not donate a kidney (which was only three days after his father had died), he went from Pontiac to Detroit, and for some reason he had a strong feeling that he wanted to see his old co-worker, Sal.

He went to Sal’s office, but Sal was not there. So he went and did whatever other business he was there to do. On the way out, he pushed the up button, even though he was intending to go down and leave the building. He said to me later, “I’m not quite sure why I did that.” But he went back to Sal’s office, and by this time Sal was back from lunch. Sal said the same kind of thing to Larry that Mary had said to Mickey, “You look kind of down today.” And Larry said, “I just learned that my sister doesn’t match and can’t give me a kidney.” And Sal used the exact same language as Mary had. He said, “Something came over me.” And at that moment, he said to Larry, “I’ll give you a kidney.”

REDWOOD: What is this “something” that came over them?

BREHONY: It depends on your point of view in terms of the language you might use to describe it. Larry talked about it as being the Holy Spirit. I think it can be the Self. It can be that place in each of us that is connected and knows it. Most of us can understand, as your question framed, that we would give a kidney to a beloved child, or even a very good friend, or somebody that we loved. All these people have done is expand that outward.

REDWOOD: You are a psychologist who specializes in transitional periods of life, such as midlife and death and dying. What led you to this focus? Do more people seek out therapy at these times?

BREHONY: Very often, yes. I am one of those therapists who doesn’t particularly believe in diagnoses. I think it works in many other areas of medicine and healing, but in the area of psychiatry and psychology I think it doesn’t work. I’m in private practice, and it might be different if I worked in a state hospital, where many people truly have profound psychiatric disorders that I think are probably as biological as they are anything else. But mostly, that’s not who I see. Mostly, I see normal, functional, everyday people who are going through a hard time in life, and maybe don’t have some of the resources they need in order to cope with the problem. The book I just finished, which is as yet untitled — I sent it to my publisher under the title, A Big Old Book about Suffering, by Kathleen Brehony — in a way it’s an exploration of that question, of what we need to deal with the inevitable changes and transitions and struggles in life.

REDWOOD: Aren’t we always in periods of transition?

BREHONY: If we really think about it, sure. We’re transiting as we sit here and speak. But the big ones sometimes jump up and knock the wind out of people in a way they’re unprepared for. One of my chapter titles is “Straw Houses.” I use the metaphor of the three little pigs, and ask, “What kind of house have we built for the inevitable blowing of the wolf?” Some people, many of whom come from dysfunctional families and hard backgrounds, do have houses of straw, though not all, because I’ve met lots of people who you would expect to have very little resilience, and they have plenty. Then there are other people who seem to have had a lot of things that we think go into making a person strong and able to deal with challenges in life, and they’re not as good as somebody who had a hard time.

REDWOOD: Is growth possible without pain?

BREHONY: I’d like to think so, but I’m afraid I’d be wrong. Here’s why. Most people don’t come home on a Friday night and say to their spouse, “You know what I’m going to do this weekend? I’m going to grow.” Very often it is exactly those events that knock the wind out of us that cause us to say, “Okay.” It’s an initiation. I like the alchemical metaphor of having to be broken down sometimes, to fall into the abyss. Then I think we come back differently, and that’s the hero’s journey. We can come back differently if we only allow ourselves to be open to the experience.

REDWOOD: In your own life and those of people you have worked with, do you find that the drives for security and creativity are often in conflict?

BREHONY: Quite often. It’s funny you should ask.

REDWOOD: How does one, and how do you, deal with that?

BREHONY: I think you hold the tension of the opposites. I just wrote a 4000-word letter to my 23-year-old nephew. For Christmas, I wanted to give him a couple of books that would matter to him. He’s a musician. He’s 23, and in love for the first time in his life, with a young woman who has a 14-month-old baby. The family has always been very supportive of Madison pursuing his love of music. He’s very good at it and works hard at it, too. It’s not just, “I want to be a rock and roll star.” He really writes beautiful music and lyrical words with a depth that you wouldn’t expect of a 23-year-old. But his friends — not the family, but his friends, non-artist friends — have said to him, “When are you going to grow up, man? You can’t support a family and take care of this baby if you’re going to be out until three o’clock in the morning playing music, making $100 a week.”

So I wrote him a 4000-word letter. I told him I wished I were the kind of auntie who wrote with a fountain pen on handmade paper, but it would be all smeared and I don’t think my thoughts would come out as quickly as they can on computer. I told him that I thought what had to happen was holding the tension of the opposites, which is to do both/and, as opposed to either/or. To say yes, my life is going to be creative and this is what I’m here for, this is part of the natural talent, the natural reason for why I exist. To bring that out and share it with the rest of us.

On the other hand, there are the pragmatic realities of rent to pay, food to put on the table, and particularly if you have other people riding in your boat with you, children or other people you’re responsible to. So one of the things we’re going to be doing over Christmas (he also teaches music) is that we’re going to sit down over a nice glass of Merlot, and we’re going to brainstorm all kinds of creative, good marketing ideas to making his teaching business work. And if he has to work part-time at a 7-11, that’s what he’s willing to do in order to make his music happen.

REDWOOD: I was struck when reading your biographical sheet that it contains an unusual combination of pursuits. You’re a clinical psychologist, but you have also been director of marketing and later president of an independent video and film production company. You co-wrote the recently published book Chanting: Discovering Spirit in Sound with Robert Gass, one of the great spiritual music pioneers of our time. You also seem to have a great love for animals. Is there a common thread here that helps explain how you became the person who you are?

BREHONY: Because I’m a Gemini [laughter]. I have a lot of varied interests. I think we all have certain innate directions that our personality and our type pull us in. Mine is always to not take on too many different things, but to have enough depth in the ones that matter to me. There’s just a lot of things I love. I see this whole existence as a kind of buffet. And now that I think of it, that’s kind of the way I eat at a buffet too – I take a lot of things in order to see what I like. And there is a thread, there’s certainly a thread in all my nonfiction work, and that is always consciousness. Whether it’s about midlife, or goodness, or this new one about growth through pain and suffering. They all follow a theme that says, “What can each of us individually, and all of us collectively, do to help each other to become more conscious, awake, aware, and alive?”

There is a story that I love that I included in Ordinary Grace, about St. Francis and the almond tree. According to the old legend, it’s the middle of winter and the ground is frozen. St. Francis looks out to this almond tree and says, “Speak to me of God.” And the almond tree blooms. Even when I say that now, I start to feel myself become very emotional because it’s such a powerful image of what I think is simply what we’re here to do.

REDWOOD: I’m remembering a few years ago when an intense storm came through here, with strong winds and pounding rain. There’s a tree – crabapple, not almond – just outside the office here. Shortly after the storm, half of the tree went into bloom a second time, something I’ve never seen before. Perhaps these special blossomings often come after a storm.

BREHONY: You know, they do. I don’t watch much TV, but I love documentaries on the Discovery Channel. There’s a series called “Wonders of the Weather,” and if it’s on, I’ll watch it. One was a documentary about the earth after wildfires go through. And while you can still see these burning embers of trees, there are tiny tendrils, green shoots, coming up right next to them. In nature, I think that’s one of the purposes of those kinds of clearing out, to make room for new growth. And I think we often have to do that as human beings, too. We don’t like it, particularly. We don’t have to like suffering or pain, but I think that if we make a commitment to ourselves that we’re going to use it to grow, to become more of who we can be and who we really are deep inside, then I think somehow suffering doesn’t hurt you quite the same way. Not that we don’t grieve; I think we should grieve.

REDWOOD: So that if we handle it right, what doesn’t destroy us does make us stronger.

BREHONY: That’s my first epigram in the new book! In fact, my aunt Theresa, who I adore and who died two years ago, and who the book is dedicated to, told me that so often that one of my clients did a hand calligraphy of it, and attributed it to “Aunt Theresa.” It was only years later that I read that it was from Nietzsche.

REDWOOD: He did have a few powerful things to say in his time.

BREHONY: Oh, yes. [laughter]

REDWOOD: Do you find that there are differences in how men and women experience midlife?

BREHONY: Yes. While I think that underneath it all it’s really the same thing, sometimes the expression of that transition can be different. With women, there are other very profound physiological things going on that cause people to say, “Oh, this is not about midlife, it’s about menopause.” I personally don’t believe that hormones cause feelings, I think they amplify feelings. That’s something that, as far as we know, men don’t go through in quite the same way.

But in some ways, I think men have it harder at this transition, because in our culture (though it is changing), men don’t have a language for feelings. And for many men, they haven’t known how to express feelings all their lives, and here they’re having powerful feelings and they lack the experience to express those feelings. Again, I don’t want to add to stereotypes, and I’m not saying this applies to all men or all women. But in general, it’s true. In fact, when I first came up with the idea for this book, the first agent I had said I should focus it only toward women, because women buy many more books of this type. Even as a lifelong feminist, I refused. I said, “I think this is about everybody.” I said I would certainly put in different kinds of examples because people of different genders might resonate with different stories. But do you know, I have received more letters from men than women, which shocked me and shocked my publisher. I continue to get emails and letters, and many of them are from men who say, “I’ve never even read a book like this before.”

REDWOOD: What effect are they saying it has upon them?

BREHONY: A lot of people have said it inspired them to make changes. A couple of different guys said, “After I read your book, I thought you’d been following me around for the past few years.” Some have said that they always wanted to do X and Y, and after reading the book they registered to take a class to realize that dream. I even got an email from a guy writing from a pub in Dublin, writing on his laptop. He said, “I grew up in England, and for almost all of my life I never really claimed my Irish roots, because there’s still a lot of prejudice in England. And here I am in Dublin, thinking about my beginnings.”

REDWOOD: What was it in the book that elicited this response?

BREHONY: The idea of being who you’re supposed to be, claiming the sense of self that I think we’re all endowed with. I don’t think we have to go out and look for it. It’s there! It’s a question of uncovering it. So quickly and so easily that essence can get covered up with conformity. Our mother and father, gender role and religion. Society says we’re supposed to be this, and you realize that it may not be authentic for you. But a lot of people are trapped, stuck in how to get out of that.

REDWOOD: Do we need an inspirational example in order to bring out our potential?

BREHONY: I think that’s one of the ways. I think there are lots of ways to get it. Some people, as Paul did on the road to Damascus, have an epiphany. The Buddha found it sitting under the bodhi tree. He was looking, but a lot of people find it whether they’re looking or not, if they’re open to it. I really do believe that the universe gives us every opportunity to know it, to move in the direction of the self and the soul. But we get busy, and we get stressed out, and we live in such a linear-thinking society that many people tend to think that if you can’t see it or touch it or taste it or smell it, then it doesn’t exist. I think that’s very wrong and it keeps people on a track for what oftentimes is a person’s whole life.

REDWOOD: For people who are living in such a linear-focused society, what are some tools they can use to expand their experience and perspective?

BREHONY: I think that a lot of it is taking time. Meditation, prayer, even just silence. You know, how many of us sit in silence? Even here, in your nice quiet office, if I were to sit simply I’d hear noise. That was one of the things that Robert Gass talked about in the Chanting book, that there are very few places in the world to really find that silence. And yet we can. I think the world would have less problems in it if everyone would take ten minutes a day to sit quietly. I really do. I think it could be as simple as that, because I think that’s where the Self appears. Meister Eckhart said, “There is nothing so much like God as silence.”

That’s one way. I think another way to wake up, which is a major theme in Ordinary Grace, is to get out and do something for somebody else. It expands our view of what our own life is. I make that same point in my new, as yet untitled book – that your suffering should be acknowledged, and it should be grieved and felt and experienced in the depth that it is. But even in the midst of it, to go out and give a hand to somebody else changes your point of view.

Daniel Redwood is a chiropractor, physician acupuncturist, and writer who lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He is the author of A Time to Heal: How to Reap the Benefits of Holistic Health and Contemporary Chiropractic. A collection of his writing is available at http://www.DrRedwood.com. He can be reached by e-mail at danredwood@aol.com

© 2000 by Daniel Redwood

Foundations of the Chiropractic Model

Daniel Redwood DC — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 21:02:33 +0000

We have now seen a wealth of studies demonstrating that spinal manipulation is effective, but it is quite another matter to fully understand how and why. The search for an explanation has absorbed the attention of chiropractors since D.D. Palmer founded the profession in 1895.
The history of chiropractic, like all healing arts, is largely one in which empirical process has preceded theoretical formulation. In other words, from the earliest days practitioners have applied new manual treatment methods on an intuitive, empirical basis, noted that some are more effective than others, and theorized on the basis of these findings as to the underlying mechanisms.

When certain methods have demonstrated their effectiveness over a period of time, they, along with the theories used to explain them, become part of what we might call the “chiropractic corpus,” the body of tradition, evidence, and practice which is the contribution of the chiropractic school of knowledge to the healing arts as a whole.

Not until the late Twentieth Century was this accumulated body of chiropractic knowledge sufficiently grounded in scientific research to allow wide recognition across professional boundaries. Fortunately, that point has now been reached. It therefore seems timely to review the nature of the chiropractic diagnostic and therapeutic model, so that it can be well understood by the public and other health professionals.

Part of this review is an examination of chiropractic theory past and present. It is important to sift out ideas which may have been state of the art in 1910 or 1950, but which are no longer fully tenable. Chief among these is the idea that the chiropractic adjustment works primarily by physically moving a vertebra that is out of place back into place.

The Bone-Out-of-Place Theory

The early chiropractors assumed that their adjustments worked by moving misaligned vertebrae back into line, thereby relieving pressure caused when those bones impinged directly on spinal nerves. The standard explanation given to patients was the analogy of stepping on a garden hose if you step on the hose the water canât get through, and then if you lift your foot off the hose, the free flow of water is restored. Similarly, the explanation went, the chiropractic adjustment removes the pressure of bone on nerve, thus allowing free flow of nerve impulses.

Based on the information available in the early years, such a theory was plausible. Chiropractors were able to feel interruptions in the symmetry of the spinal column with their well-trained hands, and in many cases could verify this on x-ray (discovered in 1895, the same year as chiropractic). They would then adjust the vertebra with manual pressure, attempting to move it back into line. More often than not, patients reported significant functional improvements and healing effects.

But there are problems with the theory. This can most simply and directly be illustrated by noting the fact that, after an adjustment resulting in dramatic relief from headaches or sciatica, an x-ray will rarely show any discernible change in alignment. (Such comparative x-rays are now considered inappropriate, because of the unnecessary radiation exposure). Long-term positive health changes have not been definitively shown to correlate with symmetrical alignment of spinal bones on any consistent basis.

Though much excellent work has been done by chiropractors whose understanding of their healing art was based on the bone-out-of-place theory, the theory has not stood the test of time. This does not mean that chiropractic is invalid, only that this late nineteenth century explanation has been overtaken by later developments.

While misalignments may play a role in the interpretation of spinal subluxations, they are no longer believed to play the central role. But if the old explanation of misaligned bones pressing on nerves is inadequate, what new theory has replaced it? To answer this question, we need to move beyond the essentially two-dimensional viewpoint of the misalignment theory, and include motion as an added dimension.

The Intervertebral Motion Theory

In the 1930s, Belgian chiropractor Henri Gillet developed a theory of intervertebral motion and fixation, in which he asserted that it was loss of normal spinal joint movement, rather than misalignment, that was the underlying explanation for the vertebral subluxation. He agreed with the bone-out-of-place adherents that the interplay between the skeletal system and the nervous system was crucial, but parted ways with them regarding the causal process underlying the abnormal nerve signaling. Rather than attributing the subluxationâs effects to direct pressure of misaligned bone on nerve, Gillet theorized that loss of proper joint dynamics was the underlying issue.

Later work by medical researchers Schmorl and Junghans, and many more who followed, verified the complex role of the “vertebral motor unit,” consisting of bones, muscles, ligaments, blood vessels, and nerves. This model is now widely accepted.

All of these structural components are involved in the subluxation complex. Bypassing the old argument of whether the causative factor in the vertebral subluxation is the bone or the muscle, the work of Gillet, Schmorl, Junghans, and others allowed the problem to be seen from a broader, multi-faceted perspective, in which all components of the intervertebral joint are involved in an elaborate interplay. This model first achieved profession-wide attention among chiropractors in the 1980s, and now enjoys broad acceptance in chiropractic college curricula throughout the world.[1]

Jerome McAndrews, D.C., an early advocate of motion theory and practice who later served as president of Palmer College of Chiropractic, translated this model into visual terms when I spoke with him during preparation of this book.

“View it as a mobile hanging from the ceiling,” Dr. McAndrews said. “As it hangs there, it is in a state of dynamic equilibrium. Then, if you cut one of the strings, the whole mobile starts moving, because its balance has been upset. Eventually, it slows down and reaches a new state of dynamic equilibrium.”

The bodyâs musculoskeletal system works in much the same way, Dr. McAndrews explained. If its normal balance is disrupted, it has no choice but to compensate. Structural patterns will be altered to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the nature and intensity of the forces that threw off the old pattern of balance.

If chiropractic care is sought early, relatively little treatment may be required, because these compensations will not have had time to deeply imbed themselves structurally. Thus, a child injured playing football at age ten might need just one or two adjustments, but if that child waits until age forty before seeking chiropractic care (not an uncommon occurrence), the situation may prove far more complex. Patterns of long-term muscular rigidity, calcium deposits in ligaments, and significant structural shifts of the vertebral column or ribcage, for example, may set in with relative permanence.

In some such circumstances, when much time has passed, the achievable therapeutic goal may be limited to partial restoration of mobility and function. Returning to the once-upon-a-time perfection of the ten-year oldâs pre-injury body becomes impossible somewhere along the way.
The theory of dynamic equilibrium, with its emphasis on intervertebral motion and fixation, has the great advantage of allowing, for the first time, a coherent explanation of chiropractic and the subluxation complex that can be communicated in familiar terms to medical practitioners and researchers. This has resulted in clearer lines of communication between chiropractors and medical professionals. While some hold onto the old model and terminology, the stage has been set for completion of this significant shift in perspective, as the new generation of chiropractic and medical practitioners trained after it took hold comes of age.

Wide-Ranging Effects of Spinal Manipulation

Restoring mobility to a joint by manipulation eases the stress at that joint and in the surrounding tissues. Unless complicating factors are present, muscular tension eases in the area that has been adjusted. As joint dysfunction decreases, other secondary symptoms such as pain, tingling, or numbness along the path of the nerves originating at the involved spinal level also improve.

Though the vast majority of chiropractic patients arrive seeking help for musculoskeletal problems like back pain, neck pain, and headaches, spinal adjustments can also have positive effects on other organs and systems. While chiropractic adjustments are directed to restoring motion at specific vertebral joints, the effects of these adjustments extend beyond the local area where the adjustive force is applied. Effects can extend to all structures served by the nerves originating in the spine.

Thus, neck adjustments can affect not only the neck and arms, but also the function of various organs in the head (via sympathetic pathways), and in the chest and upper abdomen (via the parasympathetic vagus nerve). Upper back adjustments can affect not only the upper back, but also the lungs, heart, and parts of the digestive tract. Adjustments of the lower back may influence not only the lower back and legs, but also the kidneys, pelvic organs and lower digestive tract.

The First Chiropractic Adjustment: A Case of Hearing Restored

The first chiropractic adjustment in 1895 was one in which the patient sought help for back pain, and got results far beyond his expectations. Harvey Lillard, a deaf janitor in the building where D.D. Palmer had an office, came to Palmer bent over with back pain. Palmer gave him a spinal adjustment, after which Mr. Lillard stood up straight, was free of back pain, and able to hear for the first time in many years.

At first, it appeared that Palmer might have discovered a cure for deafness, but similar results were not forthcoming when other deaf people heard about Harvey Lillard and sought Palmerâs help. And while there have been other instances through the years of hearing restored through spinal manipulation (including one by Canadian orthopedist J.F. Bourdillion, M.D.)[2] these have been rare, and no predictable pattern has emerged. The story of Lillardâs recovery has been used for many years to disparage chiropractic, with repeated charges by the naysayers (primarily anti-chiropractic MDs) that such an event is impossible, because no spinal nerves supply the ear. Once, when I was testifying as an expert witness in a patientâs automobile accident case, the opposing attorney, his voice dripping with sarcasm, attacked me with this very story.
It is important to refute the charge specifically. The underlying physiological mechanism is called the somato-autonomic reflex, fully recognized in all modern medical and chiropractic textbooks. Its name describes the interaction between the muscular and skeletal system (soma, or body), and the autonomic (involuntary) portion of the nervous system. Signals initiated by spinal manipulation are transmitted via autonomic pathways to internal organs.

In the case of Palmerâs first adjustment, the relevant nerve pathway starts in the upper back, coursing up the neck and into the skull along the sympathetic nerves which eventually lead to the blood vessels in the ear. Proper functioning of the hearing apparatus depends on a normal blood supply, which in turn depends on an adequate nerve supply.

While it is true that there are no spinal nerves as such directly supplying the ear, it is absolutely untrue that no nerve pathway links the two areas. The pathway exists, and any claims to the contrary betray ignorance of fully accepted modern physiology research.

Further Examples of Manipulationâs Effects on Internal Organs

Just as there are autonomic pathways supplying the ear, similar pathways lead from the spine to all parts of the body. A broad array of research has verified that these pathways exist, and that in some instances spinal manipulation can positively affect problems caused by them. The work of Czech neurologist Karel Lewit, M.D., American orthopedic surgeon John McMillan Mennell, M.D., and others has been particularly helpful in spreading these concepts beyond the chiropractic community. Dr. Lewit has for many years successfully used spinal manipulation to treat tonsillitis, breathing problems, migraine, vertigo, and much more.[3]

An example of a potential future direction for joint medical-chiropractic research is found in the book Chiropractic: Interprofessional Research, a summary of research presented at the World Chiropractic Conference, held in Venice, Italy in 1982. A series of studies by chiropractors, working in concert with Italian medical doctors, demonstrated promising effects of chiropractic treatment in cases of vertigo, tinnitus (ringing of the ears), headaches, and visual disorders.[4]
There is far less research available concerning chiropracticâs effects on visceral (internal organ) disorders than exists in relation to lower back pain and other musculoskeletal problems. This is because the chiropractic profession has had to prioritize the research it could afford to pursue in the absence of significant government funding. Proving the validity of chiropractic manipulation for those conditions most commonly treated by chiropractors (low back pain, neck pain, and headaches) has been the highest priority.

There is, nevertheless, a growing body of literature, some of it published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, on the effects of manipulation for problems related to internal organ dysfunction. Some of these are controlled clinical trials, while others are thought-provoking case studies which point to the need for more extensive future research:

A randomized, controlled clinical study demonstrated that diastolic and systolic blood pressure decreased significantly in response to chiropractic adjustments of the thoracic spine (T1-T5), while placebo and control groups showed no such change. This study demonstrated short-term effects of manipulation on blood pressure, and indicates a need for studies on long-term effects.[5]

As noted earlier in this book, there have been two controlled clinical trials which studied the effects of spinal manipulation on dysmenorrhea. The results were quite promising, and further research is in progress.[6,7]

A study at the National College of Chiropractic showed a marked increase in the activity levels of certain immune-system cells (PMNs and monocytes) after thoracic spine manipulation. These increases were significantly higher than in control groups, who were given either sham manipulation or soft-tissue manipulation.[8]

A study involving 73 Danish chiropractors in 50 clinics showed satisfactory results in 94 percent of cases of chiropractic research:infant colicinfant colic. The results occurred within two weeks, and involved an average of three treatments.[9]

Several case studies have indicated that bladder dysfunction can be responsive to lower back manipulation.[10,11]

Lung volume and forced vital capacity (a measure of lung strength), were shown in a series of cases to increase after chiropractic adjustments.[12,13]

A 7-month-old infant suffering from chronic constipation since birth (with a history of hard, pellet-like stools following hours of painful straining) was restored to normal bowel function by full-spine and cranial adjustments.[14]

A two-year-old child medically diagnosed with asthma and enuresis (bedwetting) improved dramatically as a result of spinal adjustments, after medication had proved inadequate.[15]

Pelvic pain and pelvic organ dysfunction, in which there was no accompanying lower back pain, was shown in a case study to resolve fully with chiropractic manipulation of the lumbar spine, after numerous failed attempts at treating the symptoms medically.[16]

A 5-year-old girl, who was experiencing up to 70 seizures a day, was treated with upper neck adjustments and became virtually seizure-free.[17]

Further exploration of chiropracticâs effects on internal organ problems holds great promise. Studies are underway as this book goes to press, and many more are expected. This may turn out to be the most fertile area for chiropractic research in the Twenty-First Century.

The Chiropractic Perspective

Looking back over the material weâve covered, how would we best summarize the differences between the chiropractic approach and the standard medical model?

First and foremost, the chiropractic model views symptoms in a broad context of health and body balance, not as isolated aberrations to be suppressed and then forgotten. Chiropractors recognize the need for thorough evaluation of symptoms, but do not assume that the elimination of symptoms is the ultimate goal of treatment. Just as peace is not the absence of war, health is not the absence of disease symptoms. The true goal is sustainable balance. This is recognized by chiropractors and by holistic medical physicians as well.

While chiropractors are trained in state-of-the-art diagnostic techniques, and while chiropractic examination procedures overlap significantly with those used by conventional medical physicians, chiropractors evaluate the information gleaned from these methods from a perspective that recognizes the intricate structural and functional interplay between different parts of the body.
The contrasting medical and chiropractic diagnostic approaches to pain provide a case in point. In my experience, conventional medical physicians far more frequently than chiropractors make the assumption that the location of a pain is the location of its cause. Thus, knee pain is generally assumed to be a knee problem, shoulder pain is assumed to be a shoulder problem, etc. This pain-centered diagnostic logic frequently leads to increasingly sophisticated and invasive diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. (If physical examination of the knee fails to clearly define the problem, then the knee is x-rayed. If the x-ray fails to offer adequate clarification, then an MRI of the knee is performed, etc.)

Chiropractors also utilize these diagnostic tools. I refer some patients for x-rays and MRI studies. My point is not to criticize these machines, but to present an alternative diagnostic model. I have seen more than a few cases of knee trouble where this entire high-tech diagnostic scenario was played out, and the cause of the problem turned out to be in the lower back.

If the lower back is mechanically dysfunctional, and in need of spinal manipulation, this can often place unusual stress on the knees. In cases of this sort, one can spend months or years medicating the knee symptoms with painkiller pills and/or steroid injections, or performing knee surgery, without ever addressing the real problem. This is not an isolated hypothetical instance. It happens far too often.

Whole-Body Context

The chiropractic approach to musculoskeletal pain involves evaluating the site of pain in a whole-body context. Shoulder, elbow and wrist problems can of course be caused by problems in the shoulder, elbow and wrist but pain in all of these joints frequently has its source in the neck. Similarly, pain in the hip, knee, and ankle can also have its source at the site of the pain but in many cases the source lies in the lower back. The need to consider this chain of causation is built into the core of chiropractic training.

Chiropractors from D.D. Palmer onward have purposely refrained from assuming that the site of a symptom is the site of its cause. They have assumed instead that the source of the pain should be sought somewhere along the path of the nerves leading to and from the site of the symptoms.
Thus, a pain in the knee might come from the knee itself, but if we trace the nerve pathways between the knee and the spine, we find along the way possible areas of causation in or around the hip, in the deep muscles of the buttocks or pelvis, in the sacroiliac joints, or in the lower spine.

Furthermore, if an imbalance does exist in the lower spine (at the fourth lumbar level, for example), it might have its source right there at L4, or might in turn be a compensation for another joint dysfunction elsewhere in the spine, perhaps in the middle or upper back. Thus, an integrated, whole-body approach to structure and function is of great value.

For a patient with an internal organ problem, chiropractic diagnostic logic would include evaluation of those spinal levels which are the source of the nerve supply to the involved area, as well as consideration of possible nutritional, environmental and psychological causes. Chiropractic practice standards also mandate timely referral to a medical physician for diagnosis and/or treatment, for any condition that is acute and dangerous, or when a reasonable trial of chiropractic treatment (current standards in most cases limit this to about one month) fails to bring satisfactory results.

Wellness and the Chiropractic Model

The chiropractic model pays heed to patientsâ nutritional needs, exercise habits, work conditions, and psychological health. In many cases, particularly with regard to nutrition and exercise, the chiropractor will act as a teacher, directly counseling patients on proper diet or exercise methods. In other instances, chiropractors will make referrals to other health practitioners, or to appropriate classes in the community.

The traditional chiropractic philosophy I learned during my training anticipated in many respects the concepts that comprise the modern wellness paradigm. Aside from being taught the importance of good diet, exercise, and emotional health, we also learned that it is far better to practice prevention than to engage in crisis-care, and that health is far more than the absence of symptoms. These ideas together form a respectable foundation for a profession that seeks to practice holism.

Notes

1. Copland-Griffiths, Dynamic Chiropractic Today, p. 159

2. Bourdillion, J.F. Spinal Manipulation. pp. 205-206

3. Copland-Griffiths, op. cit. p. 162

4. Mazzarelli, Joseph, D.C. (editor). Chiropractic: Interprofessional Research. pp. 69-76.

5. Yates RG, Lamping DL, Abram NL, Wright C. “Effects of Chiropractic Treatment on Blood Pressure and Anxiety: A Randomized, Controlled Trial.” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 1988; 11: 484-488.

6. Kokjohn K, Schmid DM, Triano JJ, Brennan PC. “The Effect of Spinal Manpulation on Pain and Prostaglandin Levels in Women with Primary Dysmenorrhea.” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 1992; 15: 279-285.

7. Thomason, PR, Fisher BL, Carpenter PA, Fike GL. “Effectiveness of Spinal Manipulative Therapy in Treatment of Primary Dysmenorrhea: A Pilot Study.” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics. 1979; 2: 140-145.

8. Brennan PC, Kokjohn K, Katlinger CJ, Lohr GE, Glendening C, Hondras MA, McGregor M, Triano JJ. “Enhanced Phagocytic Cell Respiratory Burst Induced by Spinal Manipulation: Potential Role of Substance P.” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 1991; 14: 399-408.

9. Klougart N, Nillson N, Jacobsen J. “Infantile Colic Treated by Chiropractors: A Prospective Study of 316 Cases.” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 1989; 12: 281-288.

10. Falk, JW. “Bowel and Bladder Dysfunction Secondary to Lumbar Dysfunctional Syndrome.” Chiropractic Technique, 1990; 2: 45-48.

11. Borregard, PE. “Neurogenic Bladder and Spina Bifida Occulta: A Case Report.” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 1987; 10: 122-123.

12. Masarsky, CS and Weber M. “Screening Spirometry in the Chiropractic Examination.” ACA Journal of Chiropractic, February 1989; 23: 67-68.

13. Masarsky, CS and Weber M. Chiropractic and Lung Volumes A Retrospective Study. ACA Journal of Chiropractic, September 1986; 20: 65-68.

14. Hewitt, EG. “Chiropractic Treatment of a 7-Month-Old With Chronic Constipation: A Case Report. Proceedings of the National Conference on Chiropractic and Pediatrics (International Chiropractors Association), 1992; 16-23.

15. Bachman TR, Lantz, CA. “Management of Pediatric Asthma and Enuresis With Probable Traumatic Etiology.” Proceedings of the National Conference on Chiropractic and Pediatrics (International Chiropractors Association), 1991: 14-22.

16. Browning, JE. ” Mechanically Induced Pelvic Pain and Organic Dysfunction in a Patient Without Low Back Pain.” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 1990; 13: 406-411.

17. Goodman R. “Cessation of Seizure Disorder: Correction of the Atlas Subluxation Complex.” Proceedings of the National Conference on Chiropractic and Pediatrics (International Chiropractors Association), 1991: 46-56.©1993, Daniel Redwood, D.C.

Forging a Vision

Daniel Redwood DC — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 21:02:33 +0000

As author of The Brain Revolution and the influential
bestseller The Aquarian Conspiracy, and publisher of Brain/Mind
Bulletin, Marilyn Ferguson has for the past two decades been one of
the foremost philosophers and chroniclers of the holistic movement, during
a period when holism has risen like a bright shining star in the early evening
sky.

In this interview with Dr. Daniel Redwood, Ferguson’s deeply-ingrained sense
of hope is tempered by great concern for the fate of our civilization. A
long-time resident of Los Angeles, she has seen the optimism of the California
Dream bend under the myriad pressures of the past two decades. A statewide
economic depression, and the Los Angeles riots which it helped to spawn,
have left their mark on her vision of the present and the future.

But the positive valence of her personality still imbues her conversation
with its charge. Her perspective on recent events, from the founding of
the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine to the aftermath of the L.A. riots,
is well worth hearing. Though a bit young for the role, she is becoming
a kind of global village elder, assimilating a wide range of knowledge on
many subjects, and then using it to help us decipher our times.

Brain/Mind Bulletin, which has for the past 18 years translated breakthroughs
on the vanguard edge of science into language the general public can understand,
is available by subscription from Brain/Mind, P.O. Box 42211, Los
Angeles CA 90042.

Marilyn Ferguson Interview

DR: The last time we spoke at length, in 1989, you said our country
“has no vision of where we want science to take us.” Do you feel
that we have more of a vision now, or are we still possessed of too much
‘know-how’ and too little ‘know-what’?

MARILYN FERGUSON: I don’t think it’s changed much. I think we’re
at the place where we’re going to have to begin to change. The Office of
Alternative Medicine was mandated by the Congress, and at first it was thought
that they could hire some fellows to go out into the field and investigate
the alternatives. But it can’t really be done in such a simple way. The
alternative therapies can’t be shoe-horned into the scientific model.

If we want to find out what the scientific evidence is for the efficacy
of these therapies, we have to look again at the questions that we ask.
You can’t, for example, take someone who’s meditating for their health,
and give them a placebo meditation. We have to be more imaginative, and
use science in a way that is broader and more original.

I think it’s still true that there is no master plan at the National Institutes
of Health in terms of what they do and what they fund. There’s no master
plan in terms of education, on we want to know and need to know. All of
this, I think, refers back to the need for people of vision at the highest
levels, and I don’t mean just the president. Everybody who is in a position
of leadership in the country should be thinking about, talking about–what
do we want to know?

DR: Joseph Jacobs, the former director of the NIH Office of Alternative
Medicine, has said that it’s important to evaluate the various alternative
therapies in a manner consistent with their own paradigms. That sounds very
good to me in theory. I am very unclear, however, as to how we begin to
actually do that. Do you have thoughts on this?

MARILYN FERGUSON: We can look at the evolution of research designs,
in a way that has more to do with subtle means. For example, they have found
that the health effects of having a “Type A” personality don’t
relate to the workaholic syndrome so much as to hostility. People who are
hostile get sick, but you can be very hard-working and not have that happen.

… You have to sometimes get a little imaginative, because we’re talking
body-mind. It may be that an herbalist is going to use a combination of
herbs, so you can’t isolate the effects of just one part of that. And that
may be okay, because it may be that the effects are synergistic. Normally
in the scientific method, they try to look at just one factor at a time.
But in alternative therapies, frequently a combination of methods are used.
When someone uses a combination of diet, acupuncture and imagery, it may
not be possible to separate out the various aspects. We’re talking about
using common sense.

DR: In your keynote address at the May 1993 alternative medicine
conference at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, you said that
the chances for integrating holistic health methods into the mainstream
are greater now than they were in the past. What leads you to this conclusion?

MARILYN FERGUSON: The need, the desperation. We can’t afford our
patterns, we can’t afford our habits. Most people who use alternative therapies
do this when all else has failed. And when budgets spin out of control,
putting some conventional therapies out of reach, then people reach for
the less invasive, less intrusive methods.

I remember, in terms of my own experience, that about 20 years ago I was
feeling a painful pressure behind one of my eyes. I was afraid I had glaucoma,
and I went to an ophthalmologist. He said it wasn’t glaucoma, but that I
had an ear infection. So I went to an internist who prescribed an antibiotic,
which didn’t work. Then I tried a second one, which also didn’t work. Then
I had to wait for an appointment … this had taken months by now … I
finally got an appointment with an ear, nose and throat doctor, who ended
up telling me that it was an ear infection, but it was an ear infection
in a place where antibiotics couldn’t go.

So I went home and I meditated (I did TM at that time), and while I was
meditating I pictured my ears draining, and when I did that they went “crack”
and started to drain. And over the next few days, whenever I thought about
it, they would go “crack” again and drain some more. That was
the last time I went to a doctor for seven years. I discovered that there
are so many things you can do for yourself, or that can be done by alternative
practitioners. It’s great to have antibiotics available for emergencies,
but I do think that the people who are involved in chiropractic, acupuncture,
herbs and other alternative methods are people who discovered it while they
were searching, and found that it was not only helpful but preventive.

DR: If you were advising the president, what would you say should
be the highest priorities on the health reform agenda?

MARILYN FERGUSON: I would advise him to strongly support the Office
of Alternative Medicine, which has a very tiny budget. This would probably
have to be done through Congress, but they’re ready. They’re doing it without
him anyway. But if he could really get behind that, health reform would
benefit greatly from the study of alternative therapies. Recently Mutual
of Omaha, among the oldest and largest health insurance companies, announced
that it is going to start reimbursing the cost of Dean Ornish’s heart program.
They’re going to pay $3500. I think the insurance companies may be among
the first to wake up, to save money.

I would advise the President to hang in there as he has been doing, in spite
of the opposition, because basically the people are behind this. The non-invasive
technology is more cost-effective. And if we institutionalize medical care
as we have it now, we will be buying into disaster. I remember in 1975,
just before I started Brain/Mind Bulletin, there was a meeting of
top medical people including the outgoing president of the AMA, along with
a lot of alternative therapists and doctors. What all the people were saying
was that if government-sponsored health care were to be instituted at that
time, they would just be locking the old system into place. Unfortunately,
that hasn’t changed much. The only thing is, people are now much more awake
to the choices.

DR: What do you think a sustainable health care system would look
like?

MARILYN FERGUSON: I think it would look more like the Canadian system,
which I don’t think we have much chance of getting. A single-payer system.
All the Canadians I know are very strongly in favor of it.

DR: How have they dealt with the issue of high-tech medicine?

MARILYN FERGUSON: I think it’s probably pretty conventional, but
you could, with a single-payer system, incorporate other methodologies.
The main thing is that you can’t have these programs dictated by the industry.

DR: My concern with single-payer is that if everything is coming
from one source, and bad decisions are made (in terms of what methods and
practitioners are included, for example), the consequences of these errors
can be immense. Whereas if it’s spread out more and there are different
choices, an across-the-board disaster is less likely. It offers the opportunity
for the creation of smaller pilot projects where alternatives are able to
demonstrate that they work.

MARILYN FERGUSON: I know what you’re saying, and that is a concern.
Anytime the government’s doing anything, you’ve got a problem. It could
go either way. It could be much more intelligent, all in one stroke. It’s
like Gorbachev was able, when he was in a more dictatorial position in the
government his country then had, to make sweeping changes. We can see how
gridlocked our president is. But you have a good point, Daniel. I guess
we have to say, how can that be countered? Maybe you can have a single-payer
system, but with decisions made more democratically. With a rotating body
of decision makers, and with some kind of recourse, some kind of checks
and balances.

DR: I heard Ramsey Clark say a long time ago that he was less concerned
with the actual structure of organizations or governments than he was with
the way people behaved within whatever structure they had. And I guess that
anytime I start thinking about which policy to endorse or not endorse, I
come back to that. It comes down to how people are going to behave within
it.

MARILYN FERGUSON: We’re not going to get the single-payer system
anyway. So we need to look at what we’re likely to get, and try to figure
out how to keep it creative.

DR: Do you feel encouraged by the public debate on health care?

MARILYN FERGUSON: I think that Mrs. Clinton has done a good job of
exposing the issue to a wide range of people. She has let people speak for
themselves about their pain, in a way that’s gotten a lot of publicity.
I think that’s the only way to counter the forces that are trying to throw
a monkey wrench into it.

DR: Do you feel an increased or decreased sense of urgency about
the need for social change as you get older?

MARILYN FERGUSON: My sense that change has to happen is more urgent,
because we’re facing more and more dire problems. On the one hand homelessness,
on the other the hole in the ozone layer. As you look about, you can see
the system falling apart. On the other hand, it’s falling apart so rapidly
that there’s a good possibility for major change. You know, out of this
chaos comes a window.

DR: As a resident of Los Angeles, what lessons do you feel the LA
riots have for the nation as a whole. Has any healing taken place?

MARILYN FERGUSON: I written a book about it, actually, a photo-essay
which I’ve just completed. It’s called The Fire and the Rose: Los Angeles
in Parable and Prophecy.I think that on a mythic level what’s happened
in Los Angeles is immensely exciting. I think that in a way it was prophesied
by the poem “The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats. It was prophesied
by a lot of people–it was painted on the walls, it was written in songs,
people were having dreams and visions–it had to happen.

You know, it happened on the Feast of Beltane, the Celtic fire festival,
which is also Walpurgis Night. There were a lot of interesting coincidences.
There were earthquakes that led up to it, one on April 22, which was Earth
Day. I believe that if you look at things in a mythic way, it gives you
something more interesting to interpret and remember it by. That
is what we have to do with our own lives, make it a creative interpretation.
You can look at your life in so many ways. It’s important to look at it
in the way that is most creative and helpful to you.

DR: Seeing day-to-day actions in mythic terms seems to me to be an
inspiring way to live.

MARILYN FERGUSON: The intersection where the riots started (in South
Central they call it “the uprising”) was Florence and Normandy.
If you look at the symbolic significance, Florence is the cradle of the
Renaissance, and Normandy is the site of the great D-Day invasion in World
War II. It’s as if our civilization itself is standing at the corner of
Florence and Normandy. L.A. is the most international city–it’s a world
city. People all over the world–Tokyo, London– look to L.A. to be the
vision maker, but also because it is so international. The neighborhood
that I live in, the mountain that I live on, is in the middle of L.A. It’s
called Mt. Washington, and in the Fifties it was the most ethnically representative
community in the United States. In Highland Park and Mt. Washington, when
you go into a store, you never know what the nationality of the storeowner
will be, and typically the staff is racially mixed.

L.A. was founded by eleven families, and it was multiracial. It was founded
to serve the Mission San Gabriel–its mission was to serve the Mission.
There’s always been a very intense spiritual vision, and particularly after
the Americans took over, a lot of violence. There was the massacre of Chinese
people in 1871, riots in the Forties, the Watts riots in the Sixties. At
the same time, the city is named after a religious holiday. It’s Florence
and Normandy all the way.

I think one of the lessons of the riots is that the business people can’t
go in alone and solve the problems. The politicians are not great at it
either. People are looking to people like Edward James Olmos, the actor,
and Arsenio Hall, and mainly to the church leaders. So one of the positive
results is that the spiritual leaders, the church leaders, have gotten very
active, very ecumenical. They’ve sponsored and organized most of the social
repair.

One of the lessons is that you cannot count on the government to solve any
problems. Because of bureaucratic entanglements, the people who need the
help most never got any of it. Storeowners who got burned out. [Recovery
is] a long, slow process. It’s work at the grassroots. Right now, there’s
no support from the federal government, and the state is too broke to help
out. So things have to be done by people working creatively in cross-cultural
groups.

To me one of the most inspiring things is that the graffiti art, with its
social and religious themes, has the recipe for recovery. Which is creativity,
art, writing, communications. The lion lying down with the lamb. This was
true even before the riots. It’s really important for people to watch what
happens in L.A., because it’s a model for all the other cities. As one person
who lives 90 miles away said, “Everyone who lives in Southern California
is an Angeleno.” You can’t run away from the cities, because the health
of a region depends on the health of its cities.

DR: Sometimes it seems to us in the rest of the country, from the
media reports we hear, that much of California is in an economic depression.

MARILYN FERGUSON: Oh, it’s in a severe economic depression, especially
L.A. They’ve estimated that the impact of the defense cuts is six times
as severe here as elsewhere…plus we were hit very hard by the impact of
the savings and loan debacle on real estate…I think there are going to
be a lot of people leaving, because they can’t get work. People who were
working at defense. But in a way, Los Angeles could use the breathing space,
in terms of population. Anyway, I have this fantasy that we just grow fruits
and vegetables on the vacant lots, and go back to being a farming community.

DR: I guess that’s one possible future, if the economy as we knew
it doesn’t recover.

MARILYN FERGUSON: Yes. And there are no quick turnarounds.

Daniel Redwood is a chiropractor and writer who lives in Virginia Beach,
Virginia. He is the author of A Time to Heal:
How to Reap the Benefits of Holistic Health, and is a member of
the editorial board of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.
He can be reached by e-mail at Redwoods@infi.net.
A collection of his writing is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.doubleclickd.com,
and also on the New Age Forum of the Microsoft Network.

©1995 Daniel Redwood, D.C.

Making Kind Choices

Daniel Redwood DC — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 21:02:33 +0000

Ingrid Newkirk is the cofounder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the world’s largest animal rights organization. Newkirk began PETA in 1980 to provide information on vegetarianism and consumer products produced without harm to animals and has remained committed to its work.

PETA’s campaigns to save animals are legendary and in some cases quite controversial. Aside from ongoing activities like providing vegetarian starter kits, producing programs that give students alternatives to animal dissection, and lobbying government agencies in support of animal-friendly policies, PETA has also run dramatic advertising campaigns including one in which famous actresses appeared clad only in vegetables as part of the “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” campaign, and another in an anti-dairy campaign where former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had prostate cancer, was pictured on a billboard with a milk moustache, under the headline, “Got Prostate Cancer?”

Newkirk is someone with revolutionary ideas who recognizes that small changes are better than none, and that these small changes gradually accumulate. Her new book, Making Kind Choices: Everyday Ways to Enhance Your Life Through Earth- and Animal-Friendly Living, consists of several dozen short chapters, each of which highlights a particular animal-related issue (such as how to recognize animal ingredients in packaged foods, how to find cosmetics not tested on animals, how to travel safely with animals, how to bake a vegan cake, and why some people choose not to wear wool or silk). Each chapter offers resources (books, websites, and more) for those who wish to further educate themselves.

In this interview with Daniel Redwood, Newkirk tells how she went from being a meat eater to a vegan who neither eats nor wears any animal products. It’s a fascinating story of a woman with a mission, one who does not shy away from controversy or confrontation and who has been able to reach millions with her message. The number of animals whose lives have been saved or improved through her efforts is incalculable.

For further information:
Website: http://www.peta.org
Phone: 757-622-PETA

DANIEL REDWOOD: Your new book, Making Kind Choices, is at its heart a book about consciousness, about being aware of what we are doing rather than living unconsciously. It’s clear that the awareness of how our actions affect animals is of the utmost importance to you. What core beliefs led you to dedicate your life to protecting animals?

INGRID NEWKIRK: I was always drawn to animals in trouble, partially because I grew up in India where the suffering of animals is very apparent. There are starving dogs on the street, and there are overloaded beasts of burden everywhere you look. And there are animals being pulled out of baskets who are emaciated and who are made to perform so that people can earn a few rupees. So it was in front of me. A second part is probably because my mother had always worked for human charities as a volunteer, and so our home was always full of people in need and she always opened our house, too, to animals in need. She used to say it doesn’t matter who suffers, but how. So I grew up in that kind of atmosphere, of worrying about those who had little or nothing. It was just part of her world. So we were always packing pills for the lepers and rolling bandages for them, stuffing toys for orphans, and feeding strays.

REDWOOD: When and why did you decide to become a vegan?

NEWKIRK: It was a very slow process. I was a slow learner. I grew up eating meat, had my first fur coat when I was 19. I’m 56 now, and there were no animal rights activists then to hand me a card, admonish me in some way, and say, “What are you thinking? If you care about animals, why are you wearing them and eating them?” But I had a few events in my life which opened my eyes gradually to the difference you can make if you think of all animals, not just dogs and cats and horses and certain birds, as being important. But [to think of] all of them as having feelings.

I was a law enforcement officer in Maryland and I went on a case of abandonment of animals on a farm. The people had moved away and left all the animals. And they had all starved to death except one little pig. And I found this little pig in very bad shape, pulled him out of the barn, and took him outside. He was so weak that I actually had to hold his head up and help him drink some water. My job was to prosecute those people for leaving the animals to starve, and I was to find them. Driving home that evening, I was wondering what I could have for dinner, and I remembered that I had defrosted some pork chops. And suddenly, I realized that even though I had never been inside a slaughterhouse (I can’t say that now), that of course they are not very pleasant places and must be very frightening for the animals. And I realized I was prosecuting somebody for being cruel to one pig while I was paying someone I didn’t know to be cruel to another pig. There were lots of little incidents like that where I thought, “Oh dear, I shouldn’t do that. I need to find something different to eat or wear.”

REDWOOD: Could you tell us about the beginnings of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals?

NEWKIRK: I worked for the Department of Human Resources in Washington, and one of my jobs was oversight of the animal shelter and inspection of all animal facilities in the District of Columbia. One day, this young man walked into my office to volunteer for the city and he told me about certain things I had no idea about. I knew about laboratories because I had inspected them, but he knew about dairy farming, and he made fun of me for caring about animals and still using milk in my tea. I had never thought about it before.

REDWOOD: What did he tell you about dairy farms? And what do you know now about them?

NEWKIRK: I had stopped eating veal when I was seven because my mother refused to serve it in the house when she found out how veal calves are kept, in these little crates. He said to me, “Well, you realize that the reason the veal calves are taken away from the mother is so that the milk can be marketed for us. And there’s no reason that, as a grown adult, you should be drinking milk anyway. And there’s no reason you should drink the milk meant for a baby calf. So why support the veal industry?” And I thought, well, I’ve never connected those dots before. He also taught me about whaling. He had come off a whaling ship in the Atlantic, and he told me the horrors of whaling and what is done to dolphins caught in tuna nets.

REDWOOD: What is done to them?

NEWKIRK: They drown because they can’t back up, so they get tangled in these massive, football-field sized nets that are cast for tuna. The dolphins follow the tuna fishes. And then they are ground up on board or they just drown and die in the nets. So he was filling in some gaps for me. I thought, it’s funny, I’ve cared about animals my whole life and I didn’t know that. So I thought maybe I could start a little group, and if people who care about animals want to know where they could get an alternative to a shampoo tested in rabbits’ eyes, I could say, here are the (at that point) three companies you can buy from. And maybe I could open their eyes to some things, too. But it hit a nerve and it grew very quickly.

REDWOOD: What do you think have been PETA’s greatest successes?

NEWKIRK: Changing hearts and minds, truly. Not very tangible or sexy. Well, it is tangible in that you can see how many people order the vegetarian starter kits from us, how many call and ask if there is an alternative to this, because I don’t want to hurt the animals. For example, pests in the home or dissection in the school. But tangible victories? Of course, one of my favorites is that we got all the car companies (the last one being General Motors) to stop using pigs and baboons in crash tests; they now all use mannequins.

REDWOOD: How did you go about organizing that?

NEWKIRK: We always start the same way. We write politely, we research the alternatives, we showed that Mercedes and some foreign car companies were no longer using animals in these tests, that there were superior methods at their disposal. We try to meet with the executives of the company that we wish to reform. And when the door is slammed, and sometimes it is slammed (often it works that way, especially if the company is big), then we start enlisting public support, asking consumers to write in, and it escalates from there. In the end, when GM acquiesced, we had reached a stage where we were protesting every auto show, and people had donated old GM cars to us, which we were breaking up in front of the auto shows to make a point about crash tests on animals. And they finally agreed to stop. And now no car company uses animals in crash tests.

REDWOOD: PETA is widely known for some of its most dramatic tactics, particularly on advertising campaigns. Could you mention a couple of the more controversial tactics that PETA has used and also mention some of the more quiet, ongoing approaches pursued by the organization?

NEWKIRK: Most of our work is work you won’t read about in the press because it’s not flamboyant or provocative, it’s just solid work, a lot of it behind the scenes with corporations, seeking reforms step-by-step. But we have such a serious message, and society these days makes you jump through a lot of hoops to get attention for a serious issue. You can’t blame people, in a way, or the press, because there’s the war, there was the tsunami, there’s violence in the streets, and there are all sorts of extraordinary things happening every day. And people are busy, so competing for their attention is a little difficult. So one of the ways that we get people’s attention, even if it means that they’re going to argue with us or dislike us for it, is to be provocative.

One of the most provocative billboards we ever ran was a picture of Rudolph Giuliani with a milk moustache, that said, “Got prostate cancer?” and gave a website, because he had come out to say that he had prostate cancer, he was battling it. We had written to him because he was constantly drinking milk at his news conferences—there was some promotion he was involved in—and explaining to him that milk is actually linked to prostate cancer. I had just lost my father to a number of things, one of which was prostate cancer. His heart and his prostate were battling as to who was going to take him first, and I initially thought I would run a picture of my father. But I thought no, nobody will know who that is or care, so I had written to Rudy Giuliani and said that we’re thinking of running a billboard with your image on it, and please will you think about this issue and stop promoting milk. He didn’t respond, so we ran it. And immediately we got tons of press, most people shouting at us, but thousands upon thousands of people actually going to the website and learning of the link between prostate cancer and dairy, which was our goal.

REDWOOD: So from your point of view, the goal was not to attack Giuliani but to help those who, by being informed, might not get the disease?

NEWKIRK: Exactly. If I had found some clever way to reach my father about his diet years earlier, I would have been grateful.

REDWOOD: What else can you say about the health aspects of a vegetarian or vegan diet?

NEWKIRK: I have a cold now, because I travel so much and the air circulation on the plane was appalling, but I used to have chronic bronchitis and haven’t had bronchitis in 30 years, which is when I gave up drinking milk. I drink soy and other nog now, like Silk. But it clearly was messing up my bronchial tubes. And for babies, for kids, their own mother’s milk is clearly what nature intended for them. Putting them on cow’s milk when they’re young can lead to juvenile onset diabetes. It can give them gastrointestinal problems because many kids’ digestive systems are just not geared to digest cow’s milk.

REDWOOD: I was one of those kids myself, quite allergic to milk. However, this is a controversial point of view. Where would you encourage people to go to inform themselves more fully about whatever research exists on this topic.

NEWKIRK: It’s becoming a lot less controversial because the dairy industry is coming under a lot of fire for its claims over the years. One site is Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine at pcrm.org. They have a lot about milk. John MacDougall, the physician, has a website with a lot about the deleterious effects of milk. And of course, unless you’ve lived in a cave, everyone knows about hardening of the arteries, with both meat and dairy. So I don’t think it’s hard to find information about the good health effects of a vegan diet or the deleterious effects of meat and dairy, unless you’re just on the industry websites for those products.

REDWOOD: Why aren’t more people aware of where their food comes from, and how it’s grown or manufactured?

NEWKIRK: Because you have to stop and think, and we’re busy. I believe that everything is geared to stop you from thinking. It’s all about pretty recipes. There’s a tremendous amount of money from all these industries that goes into making meat and dairy look attractive, easy to cook and good for you. And the meat and dairy industries sponsor so much on television that you cannot run opposing ads. For example, at Thanksgiving, we have wonderful ads with celebrities, that are very positive, upbeat ads suggesting Tofurkey or Unturkey instead of the bird. We can’t run them for any amount of money on any network, because the networks receive so much money from Butterball [a brand of turkey], and they’ll admit it. And all the other purveyors of flesh foods. It’s simply politics. It’s not good for their business, and they know that we can’t compete in the end.

REDWOOD: So you’ve literally attempted to buy ads, put up the money, and been refused?

NEWKIRK: Oh, yes. Over and over again. And I used to think that there must be something you could do with the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] about this, and there isn’t. Our lawyers have looked at it very carefully. You cannot. It’s up to them.

REDWOOD: Why do you think compassion is not more widespread in our culture?

NEWKIRK: We say the right things, we say that kindness is a virtue. We say apply the Golden Rule. We say that we’re kind to animals. But I think what you just said, too, is telling. Most people have never been inside a factory farm. And if they had, and they saw pigs castrated without anesthesia, chickens living in such filth that you have to actually wear a facemask to enter the barn because the stench will overpower you, animals dehorned and debeaked, having their legs and their wings crushed when they’re shackled on the slaughter lines. People would lose their lunch!

But it’s not in front of them. What is in front of them is a pretty ad. And it’s very, very hard to break through the veneer of advertising for bad products—especially if you have acquired the taste for them over many years—and say, hang on a minute, I need to take you behind the scenes and now show you a more compassionate way to behave. So, it’s like with any cause, you have to jar people’s idea of reality and show them that it’s a façade, that they’re not being kind when they buy these products, to themselves or to the Earth either.

REDWOOD: What are your thoughts on animal research?

NEWKIRK: I think it’s a hideous business. Every day without fail, we have complaints from laboratories here. Every single day. Sometimes we deal with veterinarians, technicians, janitors, guards, that indicate that the animals are treated like widgets. They are not even counting the kind of experiments they’re used for, which is another matter. That they are left in metal cages as if they have no behavioral or social needs, as if they’re not intelligent, and yet studies come out all the time showing that even the little rat in the laboratory, his heart rate soars, his adrenalin level goes up, his pulse rate increases when someone simply opens the lab door. They don’t even have to put a hand on him. So these animals, before they’re even touched, are living in fear and in completely unnatural and uncomfortable conditions. As for the science, I think we’ve learned by now that sometimes old habits die hard and that when there isn’t enough oversight of what is done for animals in labs, that someone can actually continue to use animals in a particular experiment, say executive stress experiments, where they actually swim animals to their deaths. There was a case in which this experiment was done every year for 14 years, by one experimenter alone. And no one says, “Hey, John, this really needs to stop,” or “You’re not doing this in the most intelligent way, there are other ways to study executive stress.”

REDWOOD: Are you convinced that eliminating all animal research would have no adverse effect on finding cures for human illnesses? For many people, that’s a key issue.

NEWKIRK: I think most people just believe that blindly, just as when you get into the elevator, you don’t believe it’s going to crash. I mean, you just trust that it must be the case or they wouldn’t use them. But when you show most people, look at AIDS or cancer, for example, and animal experiments haven’t done anything for us. In fact, all they’ve done is waste money and waste time. In fact, the state of cancer research is so much more sophisticated than it ever was. Because of microscopy, we are able to see precancerous tumors. Not because of animal experiments. And the way we test drugs these days. While the law still says that we have to go through these batteries and batteries of animal tests, from mice to monkeys, wasting time, we have high-speed computers now that we can program with human data. We can break down the properties of chemical components, see how they interact with each other. You know, we’ve got cloned human skin now. We’ve got whole human DNA on the web. Everything we’ve learned about AIDS has come from human epidemiology and studying the mutation of the virus in human blood and human beings. But we’ve still got chimpanzees infected with HIV banging their heads against the side of their steel cages and being there for two decades now.

REDWOOD: Could you share your thoughts about the euthanasia of animals in pet shelters? I was surprised by the complexity of this issue when there was a recent controversy here in Virginia, where PETA is headquartered, about shelters that “put animals to sleep” and those that do not.

NEWKIRK: Yes. I think it’s unfair to blame the shelters, because we see this ourselves. I mean, we will take in and euthanize animals that have no other chance. We won’t take in so-called “adoptable,” fluffy animals, we’ll only take in the dregs, which means those that aren’t housebroken, who’ve been on a chain their whole lives, who are diseased, pregnant, elderly, sick. There are so many people who take in animals frivolously and then throw them away. I mean, tens of thousands of dogs and cats, all wonderful, are thrown away in Hampton Roads every year. There simply aren’t enough good homes to put them in. It would be marvelous if there were. It would be marvelous if you could save a quarter of that number, but you cannot. People are not spaying and neutering, so there’s this constant flow of new animals coming into the population. People move away and abandon their animals. They dump them on the shelters as if they are turning them in to a recycling plant.

People should not buy from pet stores. That would help. If they’re going to take an animal, only take them from a shelter, because the shelters are desperate to find good homes. And people should not breed their animals as long as there are so many dogs and cats that are already born, waiting for homes, and have no homes to go to. And we really need higher license fees so people have to think twice before they casually acquire an animal, because that may stop many people from getting one and then tossing them out later. But I can’t condemn anyone who loves animals, cares for them, and performs the heartbreaking job of euthanasia, because it’s simply saying that, “There isn’t a place for you, my love, you need to go to sleep forever.”

REDWOOD: What about circuses?

NEWKIRK: [Laughter]. It’s all so cheery, isn’t it? Well, the animal circuses’ days are numbered. The Detroit Zoo, for example, just closed its elephant exhibit, for ethical reasons. The director of the Detroit Zoo made the decision that elephants do not belong on exhibit. And we now are seeing more non-animal circuses, like the magnificent Cirque d’Soleil, cropping up, where all the performers are paid, all the performers are there willingly, and all of the performers get to go home at night. Ringling, unfortunately, has a massive advertising budget but a terrible reputation, and three baby elephants have died of negligence in the past several years. One drowned, one fell off a training pedestal, and one was ill yet forced to go back three times into the ring and died without veterinary care. They’ve been fined by the government, they’ve been in terrible trouble over the deaths of lions, of horses, the shooting death of two tigers, you name it. The manner in which the animals are trained is by brute force. You cannot make an elephant perform what to them is a repetitious, unnatural trick, for a cookie. And chaining them up, separating the babies from the mothers when they would live their whole lives together in nature, is just plain barbaric. I am hopeful that more people will turn their backs on the circus.

REDWOOD: If a person is considering giving up some animal-based product like meat, dairy, leather or wool, where would you advise them to start? What are some resources that a person thinking about this could consult?

NEWKIRK: It’s a very exciting world. It doesn’t restrict you, really, it just opens up a new world of options. We have a website called petaeats.com, which is chock full of recipes which are all downloadable. And on peta.org there is a free vegetarian starter kit that you can have, or you can just call us up (757-622-PETA), and we’ll send you one. It has tips, resources and recipes. Questions about what to do if you’re pregnant, what your nutritional needs are if you’re an athlete, all written by people with expertise in those fields, and references to other books, pamphlets, and websites. I hope my book is a good resource. It should be in the library, too.

For anything that you’re worried about, there is invariably a compassionate alternative. So if there are children in school who don’t want to take a scalpel to that frog or that cat, we have resources on our educational website, teachkind.com, for example, of fabulous, modern, sophisticated alternatives, like computer program software.

REDWOOD: My daughter used one of those when she was in high school.

NEWKIRK: Oh, good.

REDWOOD: Is there anything else that you would want our readers to know?

NEWKIRK: This may be too general, but I always think people shouldn’t be overwhelmed. They don’t have to agree with everything initially, or ever, to know that no act of kindness, no matter how small, is wasted. That if they really believe that kindness is important, it’s simply a matter of learning as much as you can and then trying to use your consumer power. Because we really are important as consumers, we really do move the marketplace, and our voices do count. And what we buy, and how we entertain ourselves, really counts for something. And not to think that we have to be robotic consumers, but to seize control and to live our lives according to our principles. If enough people do that, it makes a huge difference. But if one person does it, it’s still terrific.

Daniel Redwood, a writer for the past 25 years, practices chiropractic and acupuncture in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Dr. Redwood is the author of the textbook, Fundamentals of Chiropractic (Mosby, 2003), and Associate Editor of The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. A collection of his writing is available at http://www.drredwood.com. He can be reached by email at danredwood@aol.com.

©2005 Daniel Redwood