Health and Tibetan Medicine

Health

Well, I guess age is catching up with us.

Fran injured her shoulder in a fall in late May (she slipped on loose shale walking on the Great Wall) and it never did heal properly. She ignored it, giving it time to heal, but keeps having little incidents that re-injure it. She has been staying very low-key physically since then, so we haven't done as much hiking as usual. Even so, on safari in the Serengeti, she took a couple of good bumps in the jeep that made it flare up again. Once we landed in India, we made getting her back in shape our top priority.

In Delhi, we visited a good doctor, took X-rays and an MRI, and ruled out anything serious. Looks like tendonitis of the bicep, and a very stiff rotator cup that likely developed to protect the tendon. With a physical therapy prescribed as the remedy, we headed off to Dharamsala, where there is a hospital with a physical therapist.

Here in Dharamsala, we have stayed put until her shoulder improves. Fran got a couple of physical therapy treatments (including acupuncture) from a visiting Western therapist at the hospital. The physical therapy didn't really give much improvement, and even left it hurting more. With the blessing of the therapist, we went off to a ten day meditation retreat, hoping the healing would continue. It really didn't, so upon return Fran visited a renowned Tibetan doctor, Yeshi Dhonden.

Yeshi Dhonden, perhaps the leading traditional Tibetan doctor in the world, was the doctor for the Dalai Lama and has a practice here in Dharamsala. Starting in the late 1970's he has also occasionally visited the West, and joined a group of Western doctors who are evaluating the efficacy of Tibetan medicine. Anecdotally, he has amazed Western doctors. He has joined them on their rounds through the hospital wards, and just by taking the six pulses of the patients was able to diagnose the various problems that had taken the Western doctors a battery of lab tests, MRIs, and other procedures to identify. With just two or three minutes for each patient, he was able to assess what it took consider time and money for the Western doctors to diagnose. To read a bit more about him, http://www.tibetanmedical.com/new_page_48.htm.

It is quite an experience to see him. First there are no appointments. Instead, at 3 AM a set of one hundred numbered slips of paper are affixed to a nail on the wall outside the clinic, which is just a tiny waiting room and examining room down a dark, dirt alley. The doctor sees the one hundred patients from 9 AM until 1 PM. Generally, the numbers are all taken by 6 AM. The waiting room and alley outside his office are crammed full of monks, Tibetan refuges, and a few Westerners, some of whom have traveled to India to see him. Rod also got a number, to see what the doctor might be able to do for his back pain (an old automobile whiplash injury), since that had flared up during the meditation retreat.

Yeshi Dhonden speaks no English, so as he calls out the numbers, the other people in the waiting room motion the Westerners to go in when their number is called. The examination room is very sparse --just one chair for Yeshi facing another chair for the patient, and nearby Yeshi's protégé seated at a small table. He first takes your right hand, placing three fingers on the wrist and then your left hand. He may not even ask the patient what the problem is. His protégé does speak English, and he asked both Fran and Rod to describe their problems. With no more than a brief answer "pain in the back" or "pain in the shoulder", the doctors quickly surmised the problem from the pulse. In Rod's case, the protégé quickly reported "spondylosis", which is the same diagnosis determined after a series of doctors over several years of tests in the US.

All treatments in this clinic are with herbs. Rod and Fran both left with little envelopes of herb pills to take three times a day for fifteen days, and then return if there are still problems. There is no charge for the doctor, and the herbs cost us each about a dollar. Rod's back problems were already subsiding when he saw the doctor, and they continued to decline, so it is not possible to say if the herbs helped. The nature of that problem is that it comes and goes anyway. Fran's progress for the first week was very slow (if any), so at Rod's urging she also visited a Tibetan acupuncturist. After checking with him that the two different treatments would complement each other, not interfere, she started a seven day treatment with him.

The acupuncturist is a Buddhist monk, who takes no payment for services. Unlike acupuncture Fran has had previously, this treatment did not just relax all of the muscles. Instead, it created a strange feeling that she describes as similar to that dry, tight feeling in your throat when you eat peanut butter, except that it is in the back. As the monk moved or heated needles, the sensation would come and go, or shift to other locations. Like with the physical therapy treatments, the first couple of sessions did not magically make the pain go away, in fact Fran thought it was getting worse. By the third day, he was doing quite a bit of manipulation, moving the arm to loosen the rotator cuff. It was quite painful and draining. After each session, Fran went back to the guest house and slept.

At the meditation retreat, a key aspect of Vipassana meditation was learning to feel the sensations of your body without reacting either positively or negatively. If you feel a pleasant tingle, you just observe that it is a tingle and do not react. Likewise if you feel a pain, you just observe it along with all of the other sensations of the body. The essence of the technique is to be very alert and aware of the sensations, but also to remain completely detached from them, and dispassionately observe them just as if they were sensations on some other object. Since we both were having a fair amount of pain during the retreat, we were able to work on this technique quite a bit!

As Fran continued with the herbs and acupuncturist, she also reflected on the experience of the meditation retreat. Concluding that part of the problem was that she was giving too much attention to the pain, she resolved to also just let the pain be, observe it, and not worry about or react to it. Perhaps by focusing so much on it, she was reinforcing it in the mind. So, she began working to remain aware of the pain, but become much more detached and dispassionate.

By the fourth day, there was finally progress! The arm could move quite a bit without pain. The monk also added some more techniques, applying suction cups over pressure points. These were also intense, even causing bruising. But the arm continued to get less painful and more relaxed. After a week of acupuncture, it isn't healed, but is better than it has been for months. The combination of the Tibetan herbs, acupuncture, and meditation is gradually giving some relief. Fran stocked up on another 30 days of Tibetan herbs and we are off!