What You Should Know About Alternate Therapies


Subscribe to Canada Free Press for FREE

Alternative Medicine and Health

Alternative medicine, Therapies

What You Should Know About Alternate Therapies

By Dr. W. Gifford Jones

December 14, 1996

I've often asked myself this question, "How much better could I treat patients if I had also studied forms of "alternate therapy"? After all those of us with traditional medical degrees haven't learned everything. This week, an interesting story of a Harvard physician who had a first hand experience with one form of alternate medicine.

Dr James S. Gordon is Director of the Center for Mind©Body Medicine and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School.

Dr Gordon writes in the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin about the agony of a lower back injury sustained 23 years ago. In desperation he searched for remedies, eventually turning to those totally contrary to what he had been taught at Harvard.

Dr. Gordon reports that bed rest had no effect on his pain. That he made so many visits to his orthopedic colleagues that they were becoming less friendly.

Every day his medical routine in the office became an ordeal. If he took muscle relaxants he'd become sleepy and unable to concentrate at staff meetings. Yet if he refused to take medication his pain was unrelenting.

His work suffered. His attention span was short. He failed to write the scientific papers he had promised medical editors. He was always poised to shout at anyone who crossed him. And he felt three times his age.

Dr. Gordon was advised to see an osteopath to have his back manipulated. This helped him momentarily, but minutes to hours later the pain returned.

Then a friend told him about a Chinese©trained Indian acupuncturist and naturopath named Shyam Singha.

The doctor had to swallow hard and forget everything he had been taught at Harvard. Singha told him to stop the medicine, take hot baths with Epsom salts followed by cold showers. And to eat nothing but three pineapples a day for a week!

Since Dr. Gordon was also a researcher at the prestigious National Institute of Health he obviously wanted to know how and why this would help. He must also have had moments when he said to himself, "This is absolute nonsense. And why be a damn fool to fall for this balderdash."

Singha told him that pineapples contain malic acid which affects the lung and colon. In Chinese medicine the lung and colon are the mother of the kidney and bladder, both connected to the back.

This made no medical sense to Gordon, but he did not want a myelogram or back surgery and started the pineapple diet. Three days later his mouth was full of ulcers, his temperature was 103 degrees, and his back hurt as much as the day it was injured.

To prevent the sores Singha then told him to put honey on the pineapple. He also suggested that the sores and fever were good signs. In Chinese medicine a chronic disease must become acute before it can be healed.

By the end of the first week Gordon's back pain was 80 to 90 percent better, he was 12 pounds lighter and his mind was clearer. Singha advised him to go back to the osteopath. This time the back adjustment held.

The experience changed Gordon's life. He realized there were indeed secrets in the natural world not explained in the textbooks of biochemistry and physiology at Harvard.

Gordon then did a little self©experimentation. He wondered if he could ease his allergies without antihistamines. On Singha's advice he drank herbal tea, ate garlic and onions, and chewed a cubic inch of locally produced honeycomb three times a day for three months. His allergies all but disappeared.

Needless to say Gordon wanted to learn more from Singha who prescribed six months of daily meditation along with "chaotic breathing". This is a practice in which one breaths through the nose as fast and deeply as possible while pumping the arms like bellows. Surprisingly he began to feel more at home in his body.

Dr. Gordon and other researchers at the National Institute of Health are currently evaluating alternate therapies. Ones that depend less on magic bullets to treat disease and more on what we can do for ourselves by using biofeedback, hypnosis, relaxation techniques, herbal and other forms of alternate therapy.

One word of caution. It is difficult to distinguish between honest unconventional healers and charlatans. Moreover treatments are often without scientific testing and side©effects may be harmful. Potentially fatal diseases may also be missed by circumventing a regular physician.

In the future I believe we will insist on manipulation, acupuncture, massage and baths for an injured back before resorting to drugs or surgery. For asthma we might use relaxation techniques, breathing exercises, and herbs. That doctors will incorporate alternate therapies along with traditional medicine.


W. Gifford-Jones M.D is the pen name of Dr. Ken Walker graduate of Harvard. Dr. Walker's website is: Docgiff.com

My book, Ò90 + How I Got ThereÓ can be obtained by sending $19.95 to:

Giff Holdings, 525 Balliol St, Unit # 6,Toronto, Ontario, M4S 1E1

Pre-2008 articles by Gifford Jones
Canada Free Press, CFP Editor Judi McLeod