Medicine taken with a dose of the spiritual
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When David Crow talks to students of medicine and healing, he offers them two widely divergent histories.
One history grew out of a pharmacy of toxic mercury compounds, a faith in bloodletting and a need to stitch up the wounds of war, he says. The other is the result of ancient scientific trial and error, of people using the plants that grew in the forests around them to attain balance of the "humors, tissues and wastes" of the body.
The first history is medicine as practiced in the West. The second is the mind-body healing tradition of the East, where doctor-sages still prescribe according to the teachings of the Medicine Buddha.
Embracing the entire person
"What we're doing now is the result of chemistry, modern science and scientific research," said Crow, an acupuncturist, medical herbalist and author who visited Seattle this week to speak to naturopathic-medicine students at Bastyr University, which has a program in spirituality and medicine.
"But the entire focus of the Eastern medical system isn't treatment of disease. It's the embracing of the entire person, and the ultimate goal is awakening, seeing reality and union with God. The healing arts are used in the East for spiritual accomplishment."
Crow, who operates a clinic in Venice, Calif., has written a book, "In Search of the Medicine Buddha" (Tarcher/Putnam, $25), about his studies in Nepal of ayurvedic and Tibetan Buddhist medical practices. The Medicine Buddha he speaks of is a way of looking at Buddhist healing practices - an iconographic vision of Buddha similar to Catholic ways of seeing the Virgin Mary, Crow said.
The Buddhist "vision of humanity living in harmony with the natural world" can be adapted to the Bastyr students' own future practices, Crow said. Naturopathic physicians should be thought of as spiritual guides, nutrition educators and, because the roots and cures of disease lie in the environment, "environmental activists."
A feeling of toxicity
Crow first went to Kathmandu, Nepal, in 1987, seeking herbal remedies and medicines for his patients and "out of a sense of uncertainty about medicine." The feeling that modern medicine is more toxic than healing "still hasn't left me," he told the Bastyr students, and after spending a total of two years studying the Eastern practices during several trips to Kathmandu, he is still seeking medicines for his patients.
Crow was influenced particularly by Dr. Ngawang Chopel, an elderly lama who had escaped to Nepal after years of imprisonment and torture by Chinese communists.
"There was something about his presence that was very profound," Crow said. "He embodied what these practices teach about the integration of spirit and medicine."
Prayer was as much a part of Chopel's healing art as the herbs he used, Crow said.
"He saw medicine as a path to spiritual development," Crow said.
The techniques and remedies Chopel taught him, Crow said, are for "the diseases people really suffer, for the enhancement of immunity, for vitality, for cleansing the organs of toxicity."
Crow was struck by the people of Kathmandu because they live in conditions Westerners would consider primitive. There are no sewers, no garbage pickup.
"The air is unbreathable, and everyone who goes there gets sick," he said. "Sooner or later, one drop of water from a shower with some parasite in it will find its way into your system and become bilious."
Crow began to understand that illness in the United States likewise stemmed from the environment. Traffic, for instance - "horrific, the depression of seeing it, the anxiety of being stuck in it, is stressful."
He also began to see people in the Eastern way. Ayurvedic, or Hindu, medicine recognizes five "elements": earth, air, fire, water and space.
"I began to appreciate that the body is made up of all those," Crow said. "We are completely interwoven with nature. ... Most of what we believe are medical problems are not medical problems. If you look deeply enough, illness comes from society and spirit and environment."
Remembrance of herbs past
Crow illustrated his ideas with a painting of the Medicine Buddha, an illustration showing Buddha meditating, surrounded by the great ayurvedic physicians of the past and illustrations of the healing herbs they used. Many of the plants are extinct, Crow said, although some could be restored through the growth of natural medicine and organic farming in the West.
Acceptance of the Eastern ways in the West has been slow, Crow said, and not always pure.
"Look how huge yoga is becoming," he said. "Much of it is superficial, but gradually it's influencing society to learn to relax and meditate. Eastern practices and therapies are being used for patients with cancer and degenerative diseases, and the patient is getting more than just biochemistry. We must have the rational side of medicine, the reproducible and scientific. But the human being is also irrational.
"You can't just treat the body. You must also treat the spirit."