naturopathydigest.com -- Remembering

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Remembering

By Ron Mariotti, ND

Now that the dust has settled from naturopathic medical school, the whirl of frenzied learning, and the conceptualization and actualization of clinical practice, it's time to remember the roots from which we as a profession have sprouted.

Honoring and remembering the lineage of this great philosophy are critical to the survival of this extraordinary profession. In the wake of a storm of randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind studies and the literature-supported medicine we all strive to practice in this demanding environment within which we must exist, a deceptively subtle and enticing lie can arise that allows our philosophy to suffer. And because entropy is the natural expression of the very essence of existence, it remains critical to always remember from where we have come and the essential facets that make us unique. As we strive to communicate with our conventional colleagues, we run the risk of venturing precariously close to that shifting edge of mediocrity. And unless we are careful, that mediocrity will be our undoing.
Developing the "naturopathic perspective" or the naturopathic "view" is like a Buddhist yogi who, through practice and refining, condenses his or her view down to the very essence of experience. When we first spring from our medical education, we are, for the most part, indistinguishable from our conventional counterparts. If you are anything like me, you have kept the notes from all those wonderfully ethereal "naturopathic" classes and lectures tucked neatly in a filing cabinet that has, from time and dust, become a little more difficult to open. You have become expert at relying heavily on labs, scans and gross symptoms, and yet you struggle to see the subtle, mist-like indications of imbalance and disharmony. And due to the overly harsh and imbalanced scrutiny of your conventional compatriots, you have become acutely keen in scanning the research, the double-blind, placebo-controlled studies; and like so many others who have poured from the world's medical schools, you have come to regard the placebo itself to be like that piece of junk mail we all quickly toss in the garbage.
But as we go through one experience after another, one precious patient after another, our "view" begins to clarify, and with that clarification, a luminous memory begins to rise to the surface. We begin the true and ancient process of what it means to become a physician. And this starts with remembering. That professor we once considered strange and eccentric, the one whose notes we have kept beyond all others, whose jargon at the time seemed cloaked and archaic, starts to haunt our dreams; those special and unique notes we somehow knew, in some deep and hidden internal place, would someday become "revealed" to us. We kept those notes because of that open and expansive part of ourselves that chose naturopathic medical school over other conventional options.
We started out wanting to offer something different and, from our initially idealistic perspective, something capable of profoundly enhancing the human experience, to embellish it with something primordially pure, to assist those we connect with to return to their true potential, their true selves. In the beginning, we start to see the subtle occurrences, a veiled vision of the true cause and effect of the person's situation. From that place of partial clarity, we can truly start to work. Labs, pathology reports, scans and X-rays can help point us in the right direction, but they fail to hit the mark completely. These are like a finger pointing to the moon; they are not the moon themselves. And if we allow ourselves to get so caught up in the various methods of pointing, we completely miss seeing that moon.
From time to time, it's helpful to simply stop and look at the person in front of us in all of their complexity: their habits and patterns, the joy and meaning derived from those habits and patterns, the things they cannot tell us, the things no amount of technology can tell us. This is where our philosophy as naturopathic physicians serves us. Like that Buddhist yogi, we must let go of all the things we think we know about our patients and see them in their individuality, understand their suffering, and allow the heart of our medicine, which is an expression of love and compassion, to flourish. We have to dismiss our judgments, our critical fundamentalist "shouldisms" and help our patients find the path that is uniquely theirs.
Our scientifically trained mind is helpful, but in our patient's lives we can so often miss the mark. How many times have we seen that patient so many other doctors of various traditions have seen and we, from our scientific training, make the same mistakes all other physicians before us have made? We view them through the same pair of glasses that has proven to be of no use. And our treatments, though different, become a mirror reflection of all other treatments that came before.
These patients who seek us out are not looking for a recapitulation of what they already have received from previous medical interactions. They are looking for something different: something more brilliant, and if you please, more to the point. They are looking for someone to finally see and provide relief for that root cause of their suffering. We have to be able to see; and in order to see clearly, we must be able to relax in the tradition and lineage that has come before us. We must have complete confidence in the collective wisdom of those masters upon whose shoulders we stand. It's an interesting inconsistency, this lack of confidence we so often express in regards to the methods and treatments of "our medicine." The great master herbalists of the past hundred years, the eclectic physicians, the nature-cure doctors, the great homeopaths of the past two hundred years; how many of us are practicing like these icons?
Keeping with the Buddhist analogy, how many of us, like the yogi, are taking what these great teachers before us have taught and are applying it in practice? Now that we have received these precepts, the onus lies on our shoulders to test them, to challenge these methods against experience. Instead of expending the effort to reinvent ourselves in what we think of as a "new era," why not trust what others already have found to be true - essentially, that the human body is fully equipped and brilliantly wise beyond our ability to comprehend? Each person, if given the right environment, will, more often than not, settle into the optimum state of balance unique to that person. And sometimes it's the simplest of things that bring about balance and harmony in our patients: clean air, fresh water, adequate and quality sleep, simple food and a low level of unnecessary stress. We can encourage them to slow down and to rest in the experience of what it means to be human.
We can, if we lose sight of the person before us, get lost in the labs and the "evidence-based" medicine we pride ourselves in practicing. It's useful to stop and ask ourselves, what does it mean, in actuality, to be "evidence-based?" Simply sitting with our patients and listening to their stories, or having them lie still and quiet in a comfortable reclining position, or practicing some of that "manual medicine" (touch) we learned in school, can bring blood pressure down to a normal, healthy range. That would seem to be "evidence-based." But too often we rush to find some physical substance, something we can place our hands on, write a prescription for, and in which our patients can place their faith.
Today we strive for "integration." As naturopathic physicians, we desperately want to be seen as working closely with conventional physicians. But in this struggle for integration, we can lose ourselves and against that we must, with all our efforts, strive. Chilton Pierce said, "Integration is truly the goal. Separation, distinction and dualistic predominance has done nothing for the world but create havoc and suffering. For us to truly integrate, we need to know who we are. We must define ourselves and come into our potential, our truly magnificent power as healers. The world needs us - not only needs us but desires us - and is seeking the answers we have to give. Integration is not dissolution; it's not the dissolving of one thing into another. It's the web, the interconnections, the fibers that allow us to touch and communicate with one another. Wholeness is what we desire to achieve."
And toward this end we must remember from where we have come in order to know where we are going.

About the Author: Dr. Ronald Mariotti graduated from Bastyr University's naturopathic medical program after receiving undergraduate degrees from the University of Washington. His desire for the past 15 years has been to assist those living with HIV to attain greater degrees of health. Currently, he is working on a book designed to inspire, educate, encourage and give hope that naturopathic medicine indeed offers real and significant answers to those living with HIV/AIDS.