DIALOGUE WITH THE EXPERTS
by Peter Barry Chowka
© 1996 by Peter Barry Chowka
Note: This is part one of a two-part interview. It was originally published in the September 1996 issue of Nutrition Science News. To read Part Two, scroll to the end of this page, where you will find the URL for Part Two.
James Gordon, M.D., is one of the leaders of alternative, complementary and mind-body medicine. In the early 1960s, while still a student at Harvard Medical School, his career came into synchronicity with the country's growing interest in healing alternatives.
Gordon's venture into complementary medicine began while training as a psychiatrist, when he became disenchanted with his specialty's reliance on drugs that mask symptoms and alter behavior. At this time, he sought out and started using a wide range of less toxic, natural alternatives. His experience with and advocacy of the emerging field of mind-body medicine helped to influence the development of similar holistic treatments that were beginning to transform American medicine as a whole.
Constantly exploring new therapeutic options including nutrition, homeopathy, herbal medicine, relaxation, physical medicine, acupuncture and meditation, Gordon became a popular author and co-edited one of the seminal books in the field, Health for the Whole Person: The Complete Guide to Holistic Medicine (Westview Press, 1980).
In 1992 Gordon became involved with NIH's new Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM). In 1994 he was appointed as chair of the alternative medicine program advisory council for OAM.
In May of this year, he published Manifesto for a New Medicine: Your Guide to Healing Partnerships and the Wise Use of Alternative Therapies (Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996).
CHOWKA: When did you first realize that there was a kind of medicine--a holistic, alternative--different from what you had been trained in?
GORDON: It was 1965. I was in the Lower East Side of New York at the Paradox, the first macrobiotic restaurant in the country, and saw a book there by George Oshawa, who was the creator of macrobiotics. He described a system of healing based on Chinese medicine and gave case histories of people who had been helped by diets. I'd just eaten some very good macrobiotic food. At that point my mind opened up a bit, and I started looking into macrobiotics. It occurred to me that there was another way from what I was being taught in medical school. So that was the beginning.
When Oshawa came to Cambridge a year later, I had a talk with him. He looked at me, he took my 12 pulses and poked my kidneys and said, "Watch out. You have kidney problem if you don't take care." Years later, when I learned Chinese medicine, I found out that he was right: There was a weakness--my kidney energy was a bit low. Anyway, I was interested in and open to what macrobiotics was about. It was so extraordinary to think that there might be a whole other system of medicine operating under completely different laws and also a system that might be effective just through diet, which was something that was completely ignored in the medical school curriculum.
CHOWKA: Can it be said that, at the time, you couldn't have imagined that you would eventually become a leader in the field of what's known as alternative medicine?
GORDON: I would say that's an entirely fair statement [laughs]. I didn't have a clue. I didn't think too much about "alternative medicine" then. What I thought about was that I was troubled by conventional medicine, by the way patients were treated and by the reduction of people to diagnostic categories. And I was troubled in psychiatry, which was the field I wanted to go into, by the way people were being given drugs for conditions that did not seem like diseases to me, that seemed instead like different ways of being. I was working with schizophrenic people, and I was seeing that I could more or less understand them. It seemed that understanding them could be helpful. It looked to me like most of the drugs they were being given were shutting them down, depressing them and giving them terrible side effects, even if the drugs were relieving symptoms. I became interested in trying to find alternatives to conventional psychiatric treatment. That was a major focus of mine through the 1960s and '70s.
CHOWKA: You are trained as a psychiatrist. Is that how you still describe what you do today?
GORDON: I say I'm a psychiatrist because I still think that the most important thing any of us does with other people is to sit with them and really try to be with them and help them understand themselves. There is now a whole variety of things that I can teach people to do to help them help themselves. And there are some things that I can do with them or to them, like acupuncture, Chinese herbal prescription or use of osteopathic manipulation, that help that process along.
CHOWKA: Who are some of the other early influences in your work?
GORDON: The most important person in my life has nothing to do with medicine. He was my tutor in college, a professor of English, William Alfred, who was a great spiritual teacher for me. He taught me how to be loving and selfless with other people.
Another influence was Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist, whom I met after he had just come back from the South working with kids who were integrating the schools in 1965. I was going through a terrible time in medical school. When I really felt the need for some counsel, I went to see him. He was tremendous in helping me to see some of the insanity in medical education and medical practice and helping to confirm me in a direction I wanted to go, which was really trying to understand individual people and how the lives of individual people are connected to larger political and social movements.
R.D. Laing was another very important influence. In the winter of 1969-70 I spent time with him in London. He was working with psychotic people without using medication. He created communities where people could go through their psychosis and see it as a voyage of discovery. I took back the example that I had learned from him, and when I was chief resident at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, I created a ward where people could do the same thing. They could come and go through their psychosis.
Around that time I got very interested in what was happening in China--the way that the Chinese were trying to democratize medical care; for example, the way that patients would go on rounds with doctors in the hospital. They would be there, not only to ask questions of other patients, but also to make sure that doctors treated patients fairly.
CHOWKA: How did you find out about what was happening in China at the time? Contact with China was very rare then.
GORDON: I read a great book by Joshua Horn called Away With All Pests. Horn was an English surgeon who went to China and spent at least 15 years there. In that same book I read for the first time about acupuncture. Again, I had the same amplified sense of recognition that I'd had with Oshawa and macrobiotics. I thought, "My God, here is a whole other system!"
CHOWKA: Since the 1970s a number of different words have been used to describe the field: holistic, unconventional, alternative and complementary. "Alternative" is now very popular. But it's troubling because, in many cases, the approaches described as "alternative" are really traditional and represent the oldest models of healing. It's really conventional medicine that in many ways is the alternative.
GORDON: I've just published a new book, Manifesto for a New Medicine. I'm not interested in alternative or conventional; I'm interested in what medicine should be. What we often call alternative or complementary medicine to me should be the dominant medicine. It is the essence of what medicine is about.
If you're talking integrative, that's like saying "Let's go to your medical schools because they look like they're good." But those schools are no good right now. What's needed is an entirely new kind of medical school and an entirely new kind of medicine in which the conventional is used only in extremis.
First of all, basic care should be self care. People should learn how to become more self aware, learn how to relax, to meditate, to eat right, to exercise, to touch their bodies, to get help and support from other people. That's the heart of medicine. The second piece of it should be to use therapies that you need a professional for in a way that really promotes your own capacity for healing. And only when all of that doesn't work should you use drugs and surgery. I therefore think the priorities of the present system have to be completely reversed.
CHOWKA: It's almost four years since the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) started at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). How do you feel about what OAM is doing, what it has accomplished and where it might be going?
GORDON: The very existence of OAM is extraordinarily important. It has helped people to--I don't know if "come out of the closet" is the right way to say it--but surely it says "It's OK to be interested in this field. Alternative medicine is OK at NIH." I was at NIH not long ago giving a talk, and afterward eight or 10 research scientists came up and said "We'd really like to work with you." These are people who are doing conventional research at NIH who now want to work in this area.
CHOWKA: And that would have been unusual a short time ago, such as before OAM.
GORDON: Very unusual. OAM has made legitimate in academic medicine, and in other fields like nursing and psychology, an interest in alternative medicine. It has given energy to grassroots movements and especially to people who may be losing heart at times about whether or not anything is going to come of their efforts to find new therapies. The very existence of the OAM is extremely important. Nothing ever goes as fast or as perfectly as one hopes. The Office, I think, has done some very good things considering they only have $30,000 for each project and they are sponsoring 42.
Fortunately, these projects are turning up some very interesting results. Incidentally, the people who have done these projects have probably expended anywhere from five to 20 times as much in sweat equity as the $30,000 that they've received to produce the results. There's a project on the use of kundalini yoga to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example, which is showing some interesting results. There are going to be projects on the use of massage to treat people with cancer pain. That's going to be useful. The setting up now of the 10 academic centers of complementary/alternative medicine programs around the country is very important and should produce a lot of good research.
I think that the creation of OAM's database and making it available to researchers, practitioners and people who want to find answers to questions like--"I've got cancer. What do we know about shark cartilage or what do we know about some herbal therapy?"--is important.
CHOWKA: Finally we'll have a place to go for the information.
GORDON: Yes. Also, the training of people in research methodology who are committed to doing research in this area--that's also going to be of great significance. The Office has been slow in a way, but it's still very new. I think that there are some wonderful things that will come out of it.
CHOWKA: Soon after OAM was started in 1992, a dramatic shift seemed to occur in the media. Suddenly, leading mainstream media--the New York Times, the networks, Newsweek--were taking alternative medicine much more seriously because there was a home for it in the U.S. government.
GORDON: I think you're right.
CHOWKA: Is it fair to say that science is finally interested in and is at the stage of finding the kinds of mechanisms, tools and language to better understand and describe holistic alternative medicine? And do you think that alternative healing will ever be totally explainable according to Western science?
GORDON: What's happening is that some of the brightest young investigators are getting interested in alternative medicine because they see that however powerful randomized controlled trials are, they don't always answer the appropriate questions. And that's heartening. It's a real area of challenge for the most imaginative minds in research to look for different methodologies. And because researchers are interested, their students are going to be interested, too. I don't know how much is going to be explicable, however. Sometimes telling a story will explain what's going on. And that's perfectly acceptable. Psychiatry was built on half a dozen stories; that's how modern psychiatry came to be. So at least in the early stages of alternative medicine, or maybe always, stories are going to be vitally important.
For example, we're just beginning to think about how to apply some of the ways of looking at things that come out of the new physics, such as understanding the influence of the observer on the observed. How do we translate that into a methodology to evaluate some of these approaches and techniques? It's a real challenge. And it's certainly interesting.
[End of Part One.]
© 1996 by Peter Barry Chowka
Peter Barry Chowka is a journalist, medical-political analyst, lecturer and consultant. For more than two decades, his work has documented the promise of nontoxic, innovative and traditional approaches to healing. Chowka has been a consultant to network television and the U.S. Congress and was appointed to the first advisory panels of the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine.
Select this URL to read Part Two of Peter Barry Chowka's Interview with James Gordon, M.D.
To correspond with the author of the interview, Peter Barry Chowka, send email to: pbc@usa.net