Golden Jubilee Medical Center

Me with nurse at Golden Jubilee (note the shoes!
I totally wore similar ones when I was a candy-striper back in the day).

At Bangkok's Golden Jubilee Medical Center, we were treated to a stimulating lecture on Eastern versus Western modalities of medicine, as well as a tour of the hospital's newly-opened integrative and alternative medicine facilities.

Golden Jubilee prides itself on providing "holistic care" for the "whole person," including physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects. Rather than serving as a facility providing primarily alternative medical treatment, the hospital offers standard "Western" medical treatment supplemented by complementary and alternative therapies like mind-body interventions such as meditation, hypnosis, and music therapy; bioelectromagnetic therapy; manual healing methods such as acupuncture, cupping, massage, and moxibustion; energy therapy, such as qi gong, reiki, johrei, or intercessory prayer; and pharmacologic and biological treatments, including herbal medicine and other nutritional and dietary interventions.

What I found most fascinating was (naturally) our discussion of the different philosophical approaches to human life which underlie the traditional Eastern versus traditional Western healing modalities. Whereas conventional Western medicine tends to view the mind and body as essentially separate systems, with mind as only a secondary factor in organic illness, Eastern therapy conceives of mind, body, and spirit as fully integrated, with mind as a primary or coequal factor in all illness. Western treatments are often pharmacological or surgical, focused on treating symptoms of a disease which is typically characterized either as a malfunction in the otherwise functional machine of the human body, or as some invading foreign pathogen. By contrast, Eastern medicine views disease as a source of information about some imbalance in the body-mind complex which can often be addressed by less invasive means than surgery or drugs intended to kill off invading organisms (e.g. psychotherapy, diet, exercise, etc.). Eastern healing traditions often focus on the importance of balancing energies or energy flow within the body, and view the patient herself as the direct target of treatment rather than the disease or symptoms from which she is suffering. It was easy to spot the connections between the Platonic and Cartesian mind-body dualism that have probably informed Western philosophical debate, and the more fluid understanding of consciousness and personal identity at the heart of Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Daoism, and I personally would have liked to talk more about these connections.

However, I was also fascinated by the description of the actual complementary and alternative medical practices (CAM) performed at Golden Jubilee. Combining insights from Indian Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the therapies most commonly on offer at the hospital seemed to be based on the meridian system of energy flow within the body. Six yin (cold) and six yang (hot) meridian lines are traced throughout the body, and therapies intended to unblock the flow of energy along these lines involve stimulating the body in various ways: whether by penetration (acupuncture), burning herbs (moxibustion), reverse pressure (cupping), or manual stimulation (tui na, or traditional massage). We got to view (and in some cases experience!) these treatments first-hand when we toured the new CAM facilities at Golden Jubilee. Several of our members -- including Dr. Loike! -- were treated to cupping, acupuncture, and massage as the rest of us watched, trying not to choke on the smoke from burning herbs that filled the ward.

I really enjoyed the brief discussion we had after the talk over snacks (including super-sweet drinks and a dessert I had never tried before: yellow beans wrapped in a mochi-like sticky rice dumpling rolled in coconut flakes and sprinkled with a salt+sugar+sesame seed combination -- yum!) about the potential for integration and increased understanding between the two healing modalities. While providing CAM as an alternative or complement to the more standardly-prescribed Western treatments is a good policy, surely there is much each can stand to learn from the other. Clinical trials demonstrating the efficacy of certain alternative treatments are few but growing in number, and explanations based in one paradigm to explain successes of the other (such as the so-called "gate theory" explanation for the efficacy of acupuncture in alleviating pain, or the studies on immune response after human touch) might help lead us forward to a point in time where these healing practices do not so much coexist but actually integrate.