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When I was in grad school for Chinese Medicine, I’d often see students hanging around campus engaged in related ancient Chinese arts, such as tai chi, qi gong, calligraphy, studying Chinese astrology or feng shui. It was also common to see a group of students hitting themselves and each other.
They were training in the toughening exercises of martial arts, which I had never witnessed before. This entailed repeatedly knocking the edges of their shins or forearms against each other, or whacking their bodies with a thick bundle of metal wires (called an “iron bundle” or tetsutaba). As I tentatively tried hitting myself with this implement, one of them told me, “You really want to feel your bones rattle when you do it.” Needless to say, they had lots of bruises.
They finished every session by taking out a jug of some pungent brown liquid and rubbing it all over the impacted parts of their bodies. As an herbalist, this was the most interesting part for me. Each guy actually had his own jug of brown stuff, and they often argued about whose was the best.
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Over years of begging and pleading with my fighter friends and hunting down obscure texts, I managed to procure about a dozen different recipes, then proceeded to spend more years studying them. I had hundreds of jars of my own “brown liquids,” made out of countless combinations and permutations of these formulas. Since most of my patients weren’t fighters I expanded the application to include the various ways we’re battered by modern life – athletics, poor posture, sitting for way too long at a desk, carrying kids around, using backpacks, sleeping on a crappy bed, standing on hard floors, wearing heels, etc.
By tracking people’s responses, I gradually moved toward what would eventually be our Muscle Melt liniment. It features a gigantic number of ingredients, but every one is in there for a reason. My high-performance athlete patients regularly tell me that it makes it possible for them to do a super intense workout and be back in action the next day with minimal downtime. If you’re feeling beat up by life, give it a try and tell me what you think.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => Dit Da Jow: Healing Elixir or Ancient Myth?
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Unbeknownst to most Americans, the world is full of animists. According to Professor Stephen Asma of Columbia College Chicago, “Pretty much everywhere except Western Europe, the Middle East, and North America” is dominated by animistic cultures. Animism is the belief that everything has a soul or spiritual essence; not just living things, but also mountains, fire, the sky, the sea, and sometimes even words and human-made objects.
In practice, though, it’s more than just a belief. It’s a sensibility, a way of experiencing and interacting with the world. Animists relate to their surroundings with a certain intentionality, as if constantly among old friends.
To people in the developed world, such beliefs might seem primitive and superstitious. After all, who needs a world full of spirits when we have science? Science has given us explanations and inventions that have alleviated many hardships and dispelled so much fear.
But it hasn’t made us invincible or immune to fear. We’re still afraid of death, suffering, being alone, poverty, public humiliation, paper cuts, and so on. There’s little solace in science from these bugaboos.
Its other major shortcoming is that science has sucked the spirituality out of life. By reducing everything to cells and atoms, electromagnetic waves and neurotransmitters, it puts the whole phenomenal world beneath us. This promotes a certain feeling of ownership over the world – rather than a sense of belonging to it. If we put all our eggs into the science basket, life can seem random, lacking meaning and soul.
Science and Spirit aren’t mutually exclusive. But ever since early anthropologists looked down their noses at animistic cultures – seeing them as too dumb to know the difference between living and nonliving things, and giving their leaders justification to colonize and oppress them – the developed world has favored science as the ultimate authority. As we seek to right such wrongs, perhaps it’s worth considering not just what indigenous cultures lost, but what the oppressors also lost.
To an animist, the scientist is missing out on an entire plane of reality that’s beneath the surface and accessible only through an expansion of consciousness. To a scientist, the subjective reality of the animist’s consciousness is unmeasurable, untestable, unprovable, and therefore unscientific and even unreal.
What would be possible if we stopped using science to dominate or invalidate what we don’t understand? Can we concede – scientists included – that not everything is a scientific matter? This applies foremost to consciousness itself, which is entirely beyond the grasp of science, and arguably the only thing we know for certain to be real. We also know that humans yearn for a connection that’s beyond the ability of science to explain or provide.
You don’t need to be anti-science to be open to a spiritual reality. I say this as a scientist and animist.
If you’re open to it, I have a simple assignment for you to try this week. Consider this: how might your life be different if you treated your surroundings as if you were in relationship with them? Make it a lighthearted game.
What happens when you express gratitude to your bed, sheets, and pillow upon waking? What happens when you allow yourself to be in awe of the shimmering water that flows, as if by magic, from your showerhead? How does it feel to thank it for invigorating and purifying you? Does it feel any different to bless your food before eating it and thank it for giving itself to nourish you?
What is it like to thank your home for keeping you safe and comfortable? When you step outside, what happens when you experience the earth as the ever-present stability beneath your feet, supporting you and nurturing everything that grows upon it? What do you notice when you give names to the familiar trees or rocks in your neighborhood? How does it feel different to think of the sky as a beautiful, conscious dome over you versus your usual way? What changes when you think of all the animals you encounter as non-human people, each with an equally valid reason to be here as the human people you see?
And what happens when you listen and feel as if all these aspects of the world have something to communicate back to you?
When I say, “What happens?” I’m not (necessarily) asking, “Does your pillow respond, ‘Thanks for finally saying something! It was a pleasure to cradle your head all night!’?” More importantly, I’m asking, how does it make you feel to relate to the world in this way in comparison to your usual way? And if the answer is, “good” or “better” or “playful,” then keep going with it.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => What if You Were Always Surrounded by Friends?
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Last week I wrote about the theory of homeopathy. Homeopathy is the practice of prescribing specially prepared homeopathic remedies made from extremely dilute natural substances. In many cases, a remedy is used to treat the symptoms that a larger dose of the same substance would cause. For instance, chopping onions may cause redness, burning and tearing of the eyes, and a runny nose. A homeopathic preparation of onion (Allium cepa) is used to treat these conditions, such as when they occur due to a cold or allergies.
Today I want to clarify some points and explore homeopathy’s conundrum. First, since people sometimes confuse the terms, homeopathic is different than holistic, which refers to any treatment that aims to consider and support the whole individual. Acupuncture and naturopathic medicine are examples of holistic systems, though most acupuncturists don’t practice homeopathy, and homeopathy is usually a relatively small fraction of what most naturopathic physicians do.
Second, most of the scientific community believes homeopathy is pseudoscience and no more effective than a placebo. Indeed, there are numerous studies that invalidate homeopathy. Advocates of homeopathy point out that the unfavorable studies involve giving subjects a homeopathic remedy matched to a particular symptom or medical condition without utilizing the specificity that’s essential in effective homeopathic diagnosis. Homeopaths contend that when a remedy is matched not only to the dominant symptoms, but the whole picture of the individual, the rate of success is much higher.
As I said in the last article, I’ve witnessed many cases in which homeopathy did nothing useful – though at least it was entirely harmless and without side effects – and I have also witnessed cases in which it was remarkably effective. Could it have been a placebo effect? Sure. But if it was “merely” a placebo effect, it was a profound placebo effect: a perfect medicine that was entirely beneficial, painless to administer, palatable, with zero downside. One should be asking, “How can we reproduce this?”
Homeopathy is vastly popular around the world. Its use is especially prevalent in France, Italy, India, Switzerland, Mexico, Germany, England, and the U.S. 29% of the EU population uses homeopathy on a daily basis. About half of Germans have used homeopathic medicines and about 70% say they are satisfied with its effects.1 History shows us that sheer number of adherents doesn’t make something correct or morally right, but we’re smarter than ever and have more options.
So, what’s going on here? Why do so many people use it if it’s a sham? Well, there are two possibilities. 1) The thousands of practitioners and roughly 200 million people who use homeopathy on a regular basis are fooling themselves. They think homeopathy is useful but it’s just a placebo and/or wishful thinking. Or 2) There is actual benefit to homeopathy which can’t be substantiated by current science and is not accurately reflected by the research.
Trust me, as a scientist, it’s hard to understand its validity, but I also know what I’ve seen. Are there other systems of medicine with higher rates of success? Probably. To be frank, it is not my go-to modality except for a small number of conditions for which I consistently get good results with homeopathic remedies. However, I’m a mediocre homeopath and I have more training and skill in other forms of medicine.
But when it works, it works. And I have seen cases where several medicines were tried but only the homeopathic one succeeded, including numerous instances in which the patient was highly skeptical of homeopathy. If it were a placebo effect, why would the other medicines not have produced a benefit equal to that of homeopathy? Why would a skeptical patient have a placebo effect when the basis for a placebo response is an expectation of benefit? Should science have the ability to invalidate someone’s subjective experience of benefit?
I don’t have the answers to these questions. I know some incredibly intelligent doctors who practice homeopathy, and I have seen it and them derided by the medical mainstream. Skeptics’ concern, they say, is that people might not get effective medical help because they’re using homeopathics instead. I agree that if someone isn’t getting a benefit from a chosen medical modality, it might be useful to consider other options. I also believe it’s everyone’s right to manage their health in whatever way they wish – even if it hastens their demise. For perspective, it’s important to note that, according to a recent Johns Hopkins study, 250,000 Americans die each year due to medical errors, making mainstream medicine the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. I have seen people killed by mainstream medical treatments. A modality’s safety is no small thing.
While there are plenty of people who are averse to biomedicine, we tend to treat the mainstream with a greater degree of respect than is extended to alternative fields. For instance, when we hear that a particular drug or procedure doesn’t work, most people conclude that this particular intervention wasn’t effective. We don’t say, “Well, biomedicine doesn’t work.” In contrast, when an alternative medicine fails to benefit a certain condition, a common conclusion is that the entire modality is worthless. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an author cite a single failed acupuncture study as proof that acupuncture is bunk. It’s an unfortunate reflection of the tendency for the mainstream to squash its rivals, even when they don’t truly threaten it.
It's important, therefore, that we all keep our eyes wide open and practice critical thinking (and not just when it comes to medicine). Be your own advocate, trust your intuition, listen to your body, and don’t assume that just because someone has a degree they know what’s right for you.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
- https://www.hri-research.org/resources/essentialevidence/use-of-homeopathy-across-the-world/ ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_prevalence_of_homeopathy ; https://homeopathyeurope.org/
[post_title] => Are We Fooling Ourselves When We Believe in Alternative Medicine?
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When I was in grad school for Chinese Medicine, I’d often see students hanging around campus engaged in related ancient Chinese arts, such as tai chi, qi gong, calligraphy, studying Chinese astrology or feng shui. It was also common to see a group of students hitting themselves and each other.
They were training in the toughening exercises of martial arts, which I had never witnessed before. This entailed repeatedly knocking the edges of their shins or forearms against each other, or whacking their bodies with a thick bundle of metal wires (called an “iron bundle” or tetsutaba). As I tentatively tried hitting myself with this implement, one of them told me, “You really want to feel your bones rattle when you do it.” Needless to say, they had lots of bruises.
They finished every session by taking out a jug of some pungent brown liquid and rubbing it all over the impacted parts of their bodies. As an herbalist, this was the most interesting part for me. Each guy actually had his own jug of brown stuff, and they often argued about whose was the best.
The brown stuff was called dit da jow (AKA die da jiu) which means something like “hit fall wine” and it’s sometimes just called a hit formula or training formula by martial artists. The purpose of the stuff is to help one recover faster after taking a bunch of kicks and punches. It’s made from a variety of herbs, resins, and minerals that have been soaked in alcohol for about a month. Famous teachers and martial arts schools often have their own recipes, many of which have been in continuous use for centuries and are often held in great secrecy.
Over years of begging and pleading with my fighter friends and hunting down obscure texts, I managed to procure about a dozen different recipes, then proceeded to spend more years studying them. I had hundreds of jars of my own “brown liquids,” made out of countless combinations and permutations of these formulas. Since most of my patients weren’t fighters I expanded the application to include the various ways we’re battered by modern life – athletics, poor posture, sitting for way too long at a desk, carrying kids around, using backpacks, sleeping on a crappy bed, standing on hard floors, wearing heels, etc.
By tracking people’s responses, I gradually moved toward what would eventually be our Muscle Melt liniment. It features a gigantic number of ingredients, but every one is in there for a reason. My high-performance athlete patients regularly tell me that it makes it possible for them to do a super intense workout and be back in action the next day with minimal downtime. If you’re feeling beat up by life, give it a try and tell me what you think.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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