Eastern Healing Arts and Western Medicine

Health and illness, the nature of the bodies integrity and our understanding of relative wellness is thought of and treated differently in Eastern and Western health care practices. The philosophies, spiritual disciplines and healing arts that emerge out of the Eastern cornucopia of holism contrast with the more atomized approach of Western Medicine. I have studied, in depth, the healing traditions that have emerged out of the Yogic, Ayurvedic and Traditional Thai paradigms. Upon my induction into this world of understanding, I have discovered an incredible depth of wisdom that perceives of the physical body as a holistic organism intrinsically woven into a multi-layered system containing subtler forms of energy, emotion, psychology and spiritual force. This has been complemented by my informal education in other Oriental traditions such as QiGong, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Reiki, as well as the spiritual healing practices found within Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism. In my search, I have been astonished by the profound depth of Eastern therapies, that conceive of and care for the inter-related complexities of the body, mind and soul as one. While I have a great amount of respect and reverence for the Western Medical paradigm and the tremendously beneficial advances in it's technological, pharmacological, and surgical means to treating illness and disease, I believe that the full understanding and treatment of any individuals ails is incomplete without looking through a complimentary Eastern lens.

Eastern healing practices are fundamentally holistic, and any individuals ails can never be fully comprehended or addressed without taking into account the entirety of the individual in question. In the East, your Life-force Energy is the Queen that rules over your health and wellness, and Consciousness itself is the King or counterpart. Which is to say that there is an elaborate lattice of energy, interfacing with your sentience, that influences the substructure of everything occurring in your body, mind and soul. Without diagnosing and treating a person based on this intricate framework, there are missing elements in the assessment of the individual requiring aide, as well as within our approach to health care and illness prevention. The holistic framework provided by Eastern therapies sees the correlative elements of health and harmony that span across the intimate connections of our physical body, energy-field, sub-conscious, conscious and super-conscious mind.

To elaborate, I will briefly explain how holism is understood and practiced in Eastern therapies in general, and particularly in the Yogic, Ayurvedic and Traditional Thai paradigms of bodywork with which I am most familiar. The physical body is the densest form of energy, perceivable by the naked eye, and the only form studied and treated in the West. Which is to say that the body is merely the sensorily observable portion of an energy field. The energy field is a subtle body of universal forces that contains and penetrates the physical body--while influencing our emotions and mentality--a field of fluidity and flux that can be metaphorically likened to the sea. That sea of energy is our autonomous being, which is a part of the greater ocean of energy that is our environment. Within this sea are currents and vortices, tendencies of movement, obstructions, stagnation and excessive flow. It is also characterized by certain elements that produce it's nature. Both the movement and nature of this energy dramatically effects and is affected by the state of our physical body, emotional body, mental body and spiritual body, and can be thought of as an interpenetrative body of its own. Therefor, the movement and nature of this energetic sea operates on five different levels simultaneously, in different ways. It gets quite complex the deeper you look into it, but for the sake of the brevity of this article, let's just say that all of this is taken into consideration in the diagnosis and treatment of the individual being cared for by Eastern healing practitioners.

To concretize this concept, let's explore a couple of examples of it's application. Someone may come to an Ayurvedic doctor complaining of low back pain. In addition to assessing and treating the sore muscles of the low back and connective tissues throughout the posterior, the streams and vortices of energy related to low back pain are also treated. Because energy permeates fives bodies of being, what is being assessed and healed is not only the physical pain, but elements of subtle, emotional, mental and spiritual pain that may be tied up in that physical pain. The Ayurvedic doctor also seeks to understand the constitution of the individuals energy body and from there conceive of the individuals unique signature of healing, mitigating the manifestation of energetic imbalances that can occur through the healing process, thus curbing any possible negative side-effects. Perhaps someone comes to a Traditional Thai practitioner expressing that they have been experiencing a tightness in their chest and difficulty breathing. In addition to treating the the chest, ribs, back, diaphragm, as well as the other muscles and tissues related to breathing, the energetic lines and points related to the lungs will also be worked. This could manifest in the spontaneous release of deep grief, sadness, or woe contained in those energetic lines and points. Chest opening stretches and movements may also be performed with directed healing intention, potentially inspiring the client to contact a lost portion of their soul, or facilitating the realization that their preoccupation with some mental drama is consistently preventing them from taking in life giving breathes of fresh air. These deeper connected issues to the physical pain are accessed both because of the practitioners awareness of holism as well as the techniques employed, with the intent to heal all levels of imbalance. Case and point, Eastern health professionals are trained to recognize and treat the multi-faceted nature of our health concerns.

Western Medicine, albeit brilliant in it's scientific rigour and scrupulous analysis of the physical body, falls short of a complete understanding of how and why complexes of dis-ease manifest--especially the more difficult to assess and treat mind-body issues--and it certainly does not consider it's inter-related energetic and spiritual concerns. More so then ever before, in the West, is the conventional paradigm being challenged and making way for more holistic approaches to wellness, but there is still a long way to go in our contemporary view of health. Before further acknowledging the alternative and complimentary solutions offered by Eastern healing, let us take a moment to acknowledge and honour the breadth of Western medicines contribution. Vaccinations, pharmaceutical medicines, antibiotics, anti-viral medications, advanced surgery, organ transplants, ultrasonography, x-rays, magnetic resonance imaging, prostheses, and a litany of advances in biochemistry, microbiology, etcetera--to name just a few of the greater contributions of it's scope--have literally changed the world of medicine. Western medicine has saved many lives, increased our life expectancy, halted the spread of various diseases and has generally reduced suffering on the whole. This being said, there are aspects of health care that this paradigm falls short of recognizing, fails to adequately respond to, and at times, gets caught in treating a variety of side-effects while being eluded by deeper root causes.

I like to think of Eastern and Western medicine as complimentary opposites. Like the different hemispheres of the brain, they function differently, yet they need each other for a full and comprehensive view of reality. Western medicine has made great strides in utilizing the scientific method to develop what is now known about the human body, through dissection, analysis, experimentation and observations in the field of biological and medical research. It is a very left brained discipline: logical, mathematical, calculative, scrutinizing and perceptive of the individual parts affecting the whole. On the other hand, Eastern disciplines tend to use metaphorical and symbolic wisdom, understanding systemic and holistic order within the body-mind, perceiving an eco-system of being, containing gross to subtle energies that comprise the individual. In such a way, Eastern therapies might be considered a more right-brained style of understanding health and illness. This generalizing analogy I make only to point to the fact that their integration could offer us a more complete view, a "whole-brained" approach, something that is both scientifically satisfying and holistically fulfilling.

Which isn't to say that Eastern medicine is unscientific; I am sure many Eastern practitioners would resent such a sentiment. Ayurveda literally translates as life-knowledge, and is considered the great ancient science of healing in India. Many ancient healing practices like Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine have a very in depth herbal pharmacopeia as the result of hundreds of years of intensive experimentation with plant substances. These traditions, along with Yoga, QiGong, Traditional Thai healing and others, also have detailed maps of energy lines and vortices that have been tested through various methods to develop an understanding of the different practices and techniques employed to affect our greater health and wellness. Buddhists and other contemplative disciplines, have undergone deep observations of the sub-structure of internal phenomena through their practices of meditation, to engender maps of bio-psycho-spiritual organization. In theory and in practice, Eastern therapies have thousands of years of healing knowledge that have been proven through intensive studies that predate Western medicine.

The key difference lies more in how Eastern practitioners view and speak of health and illness. In the East, the body reads more like a poem of elemental energies and movements of subtle force--the inter-related holism is described as a beautiful and dynamic garden--delicately tended towards harmonious integrity and flourishing empowerment. Because all Eastern traditions have their roots in the ancient world, prior to modern medicine or the scientific paradigm, they may sound flowery and illogical on the surface. They had not had the benefit of the linguistic enterprise of medical and biological terminology that all Western traditions are built upon. The magical language of energy and the poetic wisdom that is woven into Eastern healing practices is often cast off as unscientific and therefor unreliable by the Western oriented. The reliability of these disciplines however, has been a tried and true hallmark of healing in the East since the dawn of the oldest Eastern civilizations. We must not get hung up on the semantics and style of traditional healing practices, when peoples experiences of working with these traditions make it utterly clear how beneficial they are.

For all their differences, Western medicine could greatly benefit from integrating more of the wisdom contained in Eastern healing traditions, but the difference in how health is conceptualized often stands in the way of that integration. By and large, many Western doctors and medical practitioners are dismissive of the Eastern paradigm because of the vast linguistic chasm of difference between the practices. Even still, modern scientific validation continually comes forward to provide proof for age-old Eastern healing practices. However, this is only happening as quickly as Eastern practices are translated into a language that holds up to scientific scrutiny. Slowly but surely, meditation, yoga and acupuncture--to name some of the more popularly studied practices--are being brought into the "lab of reason". Once they are found to be beneficial beyond a doubt, and have scientific papers published to espouse their many benefits, then Western medical professionals feel more comfortable accepting them as complimentary health practices. There are many facets to Eastern healing that have yet to be explored by Western science however, and until they are, they are unfortunately brushed aside, seen as superstitious, non-sensible, "new-agey woo-woo" and/or archaic or underdeveloped in their conception and methodology. While it may be unfortunate that there is so much untapped potential in the Eastern disciplines of health care, given the nature of Western culture and the how Western medicine operates, it is easy to understand why this is so and accept it as such. The world is drastically changing though, whilst more and more, people are becoming unsatisfied and feeling unfulfilled by the partial treatment they receive through conventional health care.

Whether or not Eastern healing is sanctioned by Western medicine or not, there are many people who turn to Eastern therapies for support. This is often out of a dissatisfaction with the treatment they've been given by Western doctors, a frustration with the medical establishment, or a general curiosity and open mindedness towards other methods of achieving health and wellness. This has been especially the case since the 1960's, when turning to the East was more of a counter-cultural phenomenon ushered in by the hippie movement. Since then, there have been many developments in the "human potential movement", an increasing interest in spiritual/self-development, and a growing number of people craving the fulfilling sense of whole-being wellness that they experience through holistic practices. The number of books sold, authors/speakers attended, programs certifying practitioners of, schools dedicated to the education of, holistic venues, retreat centres, yoga studios, meditation halls, healing arts centres, as well as spas and clinics integrating Eastern therapies and therapists is growing at an incredible rate.

My hope is that even more people will find themselves open to exploring Eastern therapies, and that Western medicine will take an even closer look at what they have to offer. I can imagine a day when Eastern therapies are prescribed by Western doctors, incorporated into treatment and covered by peoples medical plans. For the time being, they are still considered fringe, but they hold the power to alter whole-being wellness in ways that are yet to be integrated by the majority of people seeking care, or the medical profession itself. What is clear in looking at these holistic practices, and even more clear in experiencing them, is that they are a deep reservoir healing wealth that Western Medicine, and people of the West, could greatly benefit from.

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