Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (33 page)

Awkwardly and by fits and starts, Sanjiv and I did what brothers must do as we passed thirty and then forty. We faced the fact that our childhood bond wasn’t enough. A new relationship had to be forged. At times this was like being teammates in a relay race, trying to pass the baton with the risk of dropping it in the attempt. Two factors were always a given: We were brothers, and our families loved each
other. I still keep a photograph taken of us for an article in
Harvard Magazine,
where we are sitting side by side, half embracing. Our beaming smiles could be taken as pure affection, self-satisfaction at having arrived, or rekindled nostalgia.

We made the most of not seeing the fork in the road that was separating us. There were still islands of joy and companionship even as we drifted apart. Sanjiv’s close ties with Harvard Medical School, first forged soon after he arrived in this country, were a testimony to his abilities and drive to succeed. It felt strange to see him climb a ladder that I was kicking away. Whether Maharishi Ayurveda became the second TM or fell on its face, I wasn’t welcome back in the medical establishment to the same extent as before. If anyone found it inexcusable that a real doctor, a chief of staff at that, would shift allegiance to such quackery, I intended to head them off.

My timing was fortunate. The prestige of scientific medicine wasn’t waning, but for millions of people something crucial had shifted. They were seeking alternatives to the drugs and surgery that are the mainstay of mainstream medicine. In part this shift gained official approval. It was being widely recognized that all kinds of lifestyle disorders were preventable. Thirty years later it’s common knowledge that exercise, diet, and stress management can make major inroads in preventing heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes; in the latest advance for prevention, it is estimated that up to 90 percent of cancers may be preventable with the right lifestyle changes.

At the time, however, there was a trickle of approval compared to a flood of disapproval. “Alternative” was a dirty word to every doctor I knew, and their complaints ranged from irrational outrage to disdainful ignorance. Prevention didn’t figure into a physician’s everyday practice. He hadn’t studied it in medical school; the very thought of teaching a med student about diet and exercise was considered laughable. Equating herbal remedies and natural cures with pharmaceuticals was considered everything from absurd to flagrantly illegal. Traditional medicine from around the world was bizarre and alien.

The only crack in the facade, so far as the medical establishment was concerned, was acupuncture. The West had seen propaganda
footage from China where smiling patients waved at the camera while undergoing surgery without anesthesia. They were totally conscious and free of pain. Debunkers quickly came forward with explanations about brainwashed people putting on a show as good Communists, but these arguments were singularly unconvincing. Nothing quite erases the sight of a patient smiling and awake while a scalpel is cutting into his thorax. The clincher came from James Reston, one of the most respected reporters and columnists at the
New York Times.
In the summer of 1971 Reston’s appendix became inflamed; he was rushed to the hospital in Beijing where it was removed using conventional surgical methods. But in his recovery period he agreed to let his postoperative pain be treated with acupuncture. The endorsement Reston gave in a dispatch sent home made a big impression.

So it was naïve of me to think that I could stave off censure. At first there was no such threat. Then I wrote a book,
Creating Health,
which predated my decision to jump ship. In 1985 Ayurveda was far from my mind, but a host of anomalies grabbed my attention. Outside the mainstream journals were all kinds of strange medical events that were impossible to explain, such as the spontaneous remission of cancer. The placebo effect hadn’t been explained satisfactorily, yet on average 30 percent of patients felt relief from it. This totally contradicted the accepted notion that the body cannot duplicate what pharmaceutical drugs can do. The more I delved into it, the more I saw problems with medicine as I had learned it. I was taught that each disease has a standard history, a course of progression that goes through roughly the same stages and timing for each patient. So why did some patients die so much faster than others, or survive so much longer? Just shrugging it off as “dying from their diagnosis” wasn’t good enough.

Creating Health
gathered evidence from many areas that seemed unrelated at the time. Within a few years, however, alternative medicine was talking about a mind-body connection, which if examined closely explained almost every strange anomaly. The proposition that the mind could influence the body was greeted harshly by mainstream medicine (at a conference another doctor told me how
ridiculous the concept was, and I said, “If there’s no mind-body connection, how do you wiggle your toes?”).

For me the real breakthrough wasn’t Ayurveda but a pioneering book,
Space, Time & Medicine,
that I pored over like a seeker hungry for a revelation. The author was Larry Dossey, a Texas physician (and later a good friend) who was intent on going far beyond the mind-body connection into such foreign realms as quantum physics and the healing power of prayer. His open-mindedness was remarkable, with no sense that medicine should obey strictures and boundaries just because some authority said so. Writing in 1982, Dossey poured the thrill of discovery into his book. His references to quantum physics made most doctors look hopelessly parochial, and the challenges he laid down couldn’t be ignored.

The main challenge was a demand that the human body move out of the Newtonian universe that Einstein and the other quantum pioneers had exploded once and for all. If atoms were no longer tiny bits of matter but ghosts of swirling energy, if the universe operated as a whole rather than as a machine with countless separate parts, if time can bend and two particles separated by billions of light years can communicate instantly, disregarding the speed of light, our understanding of the human body needs to be totally reframed. For what is the human body but a construct of matter and energy that must obey the new quantum rules? Dossey’s passion and insight floored me. I wanted to answer his challenge, and what I saw as a farseeing vision fueled everything that was to come. If Larry Dossey was right, the next age of medicine wouldn’t resemble the age of Pasteur and Salk at all.

I set out on the quixotic quest of reinventing the human body.

At first, practicing Ayurveda was like going through the looking glass, to a place where ancient is better than modern and intuition more reliable than science. I had no desire to go there, and fortunately Maharishi gave me great leeway. When the time came to write a handbook for the general public, eventually published as
Perfect Health,
he cautioned me, “Don’t turn this into a kitchen pharmacy.”
This came as a great relief, because as eye-opening as Triguna and the other vaidyas were, it would be a sham for me just to perform a pulse diagnosis and prescribe traditional herbal remedies. The challenge was to turn Ayurveda into something useful and reliable for the West. In the Eighties alternative medicine implied a rejection of mainstream medicine, largely as a reaction to the American Medical Association’s overt hostility to anything not taught in medical school. It would take time for an uneasy truce to be declared, and even more time for “complementary medicine” to evolve, which eased the standoff between two opposing camps.

I was at the center of a clash of world views. In India, if you seriously followed an Ayurvedic regimen, you began as a young child and kept it up for a lifetime. A vaidya would examine you to determine your basic
Prakriti,
the general nature of your constitution. It’s highly significant that this same word is used for nature as a whole, because in Ayurveda, the elements of life are universal. A person’s constitution was said to be composed of
Vata
(air),
Pitta
(fire), and
Kapha
(water). One or more of these dominated, and once you knew if you were Vata-Kapha, for example, certain predispositions for disease could be taken into account. Ayurveda essentially comes down to imbalances of Vata, Pitta, and Kapha, and yet as simple as that may sound, the Ayurvedic system gets incredibly intricate.

Not that a Western doctor would care. The whole system sounds like a retreat into the medieval system of the four humors, when patients were diagnosed by imbalances in phlegm, black bile, yellow bile, and blood. The prescribed medicines of Ayurveda presented their own problems, since they were untested in laboratories, poorly controlled at the manufacturing end, and at times contained toxic substances, the most notorious being mercury, that supposedly had been purified of poison through intricate procedures of burning and refining that amounted to alchemy.

Despite these obstacles, Maharishi Ayurveda caught on. Its core audience consisted of the thousands of meditators who trusted Maharishi implicitly. They flocked to the center in Lancaster for panchakarma, and my mind was easy on that score. The purification
treatments involved no medicines, and when these were needed, ours were made under the best conditions in India and passed inspection at U.S. Customs.

People were astonished by how accurate the prakriti system is, even on casual acquaintance. I remember a movie star who came to me for an evaluation—TM had made considerable inroads in the Hollywood community. When I took her pulse and considered other telltale signs about her body type, it was clear that she had a strongly Pitta nature.

“You are organized and like to be in control,” I told her. “You have lots of energy but wind up exhausting yourself because you don’t know your limits. You used to be able to eat anything without gaining weight, but as you’ve gotten older, that’s changing, much to your surprise. You are attracted to hot, spicy food. You don’t do well in warm, humid climates.” She sat back, incredulous and impressed.

“Do you read minds?” she asked.

I could have told her much more about herself, and did. The prakriti system, which goes beyond body types, can reveal many things about a person. Pitta types, for instance, are good with money but tend to spend on extravagances. Their discomfort with heat can be eased by drinking something that is bitter and sweet, like tonic water. When
Perfect Health
was published, the associated doctors and I did our best to compile the most reliable list of body type characteristics and the diets and health suggestions that went along with them. But it wasn’t credible for this to pass itself off as “real” medicine by Western standards—or my own. Patients tended to make a fetish of eating the foods that were suitable for a Vata or Kapha, if that happened to be their Prakriti, and at its most superficial, cocktail party chat went from “I’m an Aquarius” to “I’m a Vata-Pitta.”

The challenge for me, as set by Maharishi, was to reframe Ayurveda for the West. No one in America outside a few Indian immigrants lived an Ayurvedic lifestyle beginning in childhood, but the vaidyas who had signed on with Maharishi could dispense traditional Ayurveda to anyone who was interested. I became the public face of Ayurveda (arousing more than a little annoyance among the small
cadre of traditional vaidyas who had immigrated to America and established small local practices, since they felt that they owned the knowledge), but I wasn’t an Ayurvedic doctor. My assignment was to merge “modern science with ancient wisdom,” a catchphrase that the media latched on to. It also happened to be the real challenge.

Ayurveda makes no sense as viewed from a scientific model if you already assume that you know what the human body is. Medical science certainly does. The body is a biological machine with thousands of intricate moving parts. At the finest level cells operate through chemical signals and processes dictated by DNA, whose active twin, messenger RNA, controls the switches for making enzymes and proteins. All of these facts lead directly to medical treatments. A doctor tinkers with the machine when it’s broken, either by offering chemical help (drugs) or by repairing the larger moving parts (surgery). I’m describing this simply here but I’m not being simplistic. Modern medicine is a sophisticated outgrowth of the common-sense premise that our bodies are free-standing objects in space, far more complex than a rock or a tree but no different in their physicality.

Dossey’s book introduced a quantum-based objection to this basic assumption, and I enthusiastically pursued that line with my own book,
Quantum Healing.
It specifically addressed a prevailing medical mystery, the rare occasions when cancer spontaneously goes away. Spontaneous remissions fascinated me; I felt that I had witnessed one in a patient I called Chitra. She was Indian, a flight attendant who lived in Washington, D.C., and like many young Indian wives, she was dominated by her mother-in-law. There’s a certain “What can you do?” resignation among daughters-in-law who live in a matriarchal society, but Chitra was unusually intimidated. When she detected a lump in her breast that was diagnosed as breast cancer, she couldn’t bear to let her mother-in-law, who lived with Chitra and her husband, know that she was sick. So she took the irrational step of keeping her condition a secret and pursuing no treatments.

Some months passed, and when her doctor saw her next, he examined her and sent her for tests. The astonishing finding came back that there was no sign of malignancy. Chitra was overjoyed at first,
but then she succumbed to anxiety. What if she wasn’t really cured? What if the cancer returned? She fell into a state of desperation, which is how I met her. She wanted me to use Ayurveda or something else—anything—to keep her disease away and give her peace of mind.
Quantum Healing
was written on her behalf, taking me on a journey into the healing response.

I discovered immediately that healing is a thicket of confused findings and beliefs. The body’s ability to heal can be observed under a microscope by a pathologist discerning cellular changes, and of course we’ve all experienced what it’s like to get well. But these visible signs are like watching iron filings dance on a piece of paper without seeing the magnet that is moving them from below. Healing is a process so complex that it is the essence of what “bodily intelligence” means.