East Meets West in ‘Energy Medicine’
By Margaret Mason
Special to The Washington Post
ore than a dozen years
ago David Eisenberg's
Chinese
calligraphy
teacher presented him
.with
one
bold
brush
stroke.
"It was the most ancient charac-
ter for a bird,” says Eisenberg. “He
gave it to me as a symbol, encourag-
ing me to fly and to be free and to try
and
let my mind and my sense of
wonder explore like a bird.”
Fortunately for the rest of us, Ei-
senberg never has forgotten that gift,
nor the
giver, Wang Jinhuai, under
whom Eisenberg studied calligraphy
in 1979-80 as the first American med-
ical
student
sent
by
the
National
Academy of Sciences to the People s
Republic of China. They continue to
be very close friends.
“ ‘A teacher for one day,' ” Eisen-
berg quotes a proverb,
“
‘is
like a
parent for a lifetime.’
“He’s a great mentor of mine, about
:hi [from the word, Qi, for vital ener-
jy, pronounced ‘chee’], and about bal-
ance and
about
yin and yang and
Tiinese
medicine,”
says
Eisenberg.
“He’s an example of a man who really
tries
to
understand
the
best from
ancient and modem culture.”
As does Eisenberg. “I am breathing
life into a bridge that has been there a
long time,” he says.
An internist at Beth Israel Hospital
in Boston, Eisenberg
is
director
of
exchange activities between Harvard
Medical School (where he is on staff),
the Peking Union Medical College and
the Chinese Academy of Medical Sci-
ences. He also is a member of the ad
hex: advisory panel for NIH’s Office of
Alternative Medicine.
You’ll meet him in “The Mystery of
Chi,” Monday night’s first segment of
mg aiiu uiv, mutt*
— v —
met Eisenberg in his book, “Encoun-
ters With Chi,” and in several tele-
phone conversations, which helped me
grasp some of the profound, yet sub-
tie, differences in Chinese and West-
ern medicine.
In the exchange on film between
Eisenberg and his calligraphy teacher,
for example, I understood for a mo-
ment
the
Chinese
culture
premise
that healing is not separate from the
rest of life, that mind, body and spirit
are linked in everything, including art
Tai chi ch’uan teacher Master Shir with a class in Beijing.
Thus, the line, “the brush stroke is the
man.
But the more
I learn, the more I
realize
that Chinese
medicine
goes
way
beyond
acupuncture,
however
dramatic
that
is. The
internal
dra-
ma—the
stuff of “energy medicine
and other ways of tapping into and
using our own
“chi” for health and
healing—is even more compelling.
No wonder
Eisenberg keeps
re-
turning to China, at once “humbled,” a
word he
uses
often, and
skeptical.
He’d like nothing better than to see
more
research on the
principles of
Chinese medicine using Western sci-
entific methodologies.
“The art of healing is thousands of
years old,” he writes in his book. “The
science of healing is still in the process
of being bom.”
But now to get to the part of the
for me. “In
Om^m^cmersays
Eisenberg,
“there’s the idea that the body has to
move, and that movement is as impor-
tant as eating or sleeping or drinking.
The Chinese believe, he says, that
if you don’t move the body every day,
it becomes stagnant. Thus, hundreds
of millions of people in China come out
every morning at dawn—as they rave
for 24
centuries—to perform then
daily
exercises, known
as
“t’ai
chi
ch’uan” and “chi gong.” Unlike West-
ern aerobics, the movements are slow
and
careful, combined
with medita-
tion.
In northern
China, they come
at
dawn even when there
is snow rad
ice. “In Chinese medicine,” says
Ei-
senberg, “the body is a microcosmi of
the universe, a part of nature, so that
as
the
seasons
and
temperatures
change, people also experience these
changes.”
And as I think about the serenity on
the faces of those old men rad wom-
en, I learn from the Center for Inter-
national Research that 15 percent of
the world’s population of people 80
and over
is in China, rad from the
looks of the PBS film rad from what
I’ve read,
all of them must be out
there moving about at dawn. And then
I think about the second highest per-
centage of 80-and-uppers, the 13 per-
cent from this country. I don’t picture
most of them moving about
in the
fresh
air
at dawn.
I
picture them
banging their canes in a nursing home.
We have a lot to learn from each
other.
But to keep things in perspective,
consider that 3,000 years before the
birth
of
psychoneuroimmunology—
the new interdisciplinary field that is
refining the links between brain rad
body—Chinese doctors were
strug-
gling with the same mind-body rela-
tions.
After reading that
in Eisenberg’s
book,
I tacked up on my wall
still
another Chinese proverb:
“Make small progress day by day.
Everyone who
watches
the
Bill
Moyers series will come away with a
different opinion, depending on their
own health, state of mind rad expo-
sure
to
mind/body
concepts.
But
chances are, particularly
if the ideas
are new,
you’ll want
to
talk about
them.
Here’s a time rad
place: 7
p.m.
March 7, Washington Ethical Society,
7750 16th St. NW.
Elliott S. Dacher, a Reston physi-
cian with a long-time
personal and
professional interest in holistic medi-
cine
rad
author
of
a
book
on
mind/body
healing,
will
speak. The
title
of his
talk, “The Mind
Is the
Body; The Body
Is
the
Mind,
is
borrowed from the Moyers senes.
T
he line—which does
get
your attention—belongs to
molecular
biologist
Can-
dace Pert, in a segment on
chemical
communicators.
(Pert discovered the opiate receptor
and other peptide
receptors
in the
brain rad body, which led to an under-
standing of the chemicals that travel
between the mind and body.)
The
session,
says
Dacher,
“is a
celebration of the series rad a chance
to explore rad discuss how our own
experiences relate to this infonnation,
and the implications of this informa-
tion in our fives.” After Dacher s talk,
participants will break into small dis-
cussion groups, each with a trained
leader.
The event, sponsored by the Shen-
andoah Institute, a
nonprofit educa-
tional organization, is free. To regis-
ter,
which
is
required,
call
703-558-0833.
the earlier photo. “I want a job, any job,”
^
ward that hoHi stories involved some of
week by Roll Call, th
_
P
If
: CIA-R