Alternative Medicine Foundation

How I Came to Do This

My background is not the usual one for a physician. I was not a constrained and narrowly focused 21 year-old pre-medical student, but at that age was working at building and mechanical trades while formally studying philosophy and comparative religion. Such studies continued throughout my 20's before taking up medical training. I had met and worked with many alternative practitioners of various stripes, and was encouraged to enter the daunting field of standard medicine-which seemed increasingly to be going out of balance. My hope was to make a difference, to help with rebalancing.

Little did I understand then how big a creature I was dealing with, and how it would change me before I could even think about the other way around. Medical training is a very powerful form of conditioning, geared to make certain ways of thinking ironclad, and to keep those within medicine speaking the same esoteric language. I entered family medicine with much of that training deeply ingrained. The whole system of hospitals, review boards, and other physicians worked to keep all of us together and "on track."

This was a necessary experience-a kind of boot camp for entering into the language and customs of the field, while encountering many types of patients. I delivered 200 babies, spent years taking care of elderly patients, and a whole range between. Elective time was spent in England working with neurodegenerative disease and the care of the elderly. In the meantime, I have become involved with the review of both standard and alternative medical studies and proposals (as chair of a review board, and as member of the editorial board of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine), while working with a number of alternatives in my own practice. Gradually the realization came that many of the same problems harming standard medicine were entering into the alternatives-driven by the desire for power, money, and prestige.

Encounters with other cultures during medical projects overseas made the "driven-ness" of modern practices seem increasingly absurd. In some societies where many medicines were not available due to isolation and poverty, a mysterious calm and peace was available in abundance. These societies were rich in Time. I came to realize that the poverty of modern medicine and the cause of its imbalance is very simple on one level.

A long-time doctor for handicapped children recently retired in San Francisco. Her departure was made premature by excessive burdens in relation to her decreasing compensations. Her most powerful comment as to the reasons for her departure was that "the usual amount of time a doctor spends with a patient is 8 1/2 minutes. I can't even say hello in 8 1/2 minutes." For patients with complicated problems, clearly more time is needed.

More and more people began coming to me with increasingly complex stories, made even more confusing by encounters with multiple specialists, alternative healers, and articles in books and the media. So several years ago in response to this I began offering to take whatever time with them was necessary to sort things out. This almost always produced better results than the usual attempt to funnel large numbers of people through the office. It was better for the patients, and better for me. This was true for them even though they were paying extra for the time, because it ultimately saved them money, time, resources and aggravation by helping them to focus clearly, and with increased understanding, on the direction they wanted to take.

It was not long before my practice grew to include phone and email consultations with people, greatly assisted by the increasing power of internet research. By now I have communicated with people from China, India, Turkey, Europe, and Central and South America, as well as from the United States. Even doctors have inquired on behalf of patients or friends. While a face-to-face meeting is always preferable, this type of encounter does much to fill a growing need, as our diagnoses and options become more numerous, tangled, confused...and nevertheless hopeful. Doctors with a wide enough set of experiences-- in and out of standard medicine-- to be useful in such an advisory role are not so easy to find.

Making time available in this way is important. More than this, it is necessary to have a broad enough background--practice and contacts with all sorts of methods, traditions, cultures, personal worldviews and languages-to be able to aid with a useful perspective in each case rather than always applying blanket recommendations for everyone. It is also important to be able to be "inside the system" and also outside of it, to be able to communicate and yet also not be beholden to the habitual customs of the medical fields, or to any particular institution or professional group. No one can be perfect at this sort of role. Even so, I am committed to bringing as much to it as I am able.