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Several years ago, an old friend of our family from Germany got the highest gamsat scores of her batch and became a proud graduate and got her online science degree. She worked at several hospitals in Europe and Israel and then was awarded a residency at a prestigious medical center in the U.S. I was very curious to hear about how her experience at this American facility compared to those on the other side of the Atlantic.
I expected that she was probably awed by the cutting edge equipment and the level of training and care that can be bought for the huge sums we spend on healthcare in this country. But that wasn’t exactly her experience. No, instead she was rather disappointed. She explained that the doctors she had worked with previously (like early American physicians) had spent their careers developing their senses, perfecting their bedside manner and the art of rapport, and honing their skills of observation. In contrast, she felt that the doctors at this renowned facility didn’t seem to trust their own diagnostic abilities, nor did they appear driven to hone these skills. Instead, they relied heavily on their technology. It all came down to interpreting tests and following protocols, and there was little consideration of the person upon whom these tests were being conducted – or the innumerable individual factors that no test can perceive.
It reminded me of how new modern medicine really is – and of how effective the American Medical Association was at discrediting nearly all other forms of medicine in the 1900s. Its youth doesn’t make it less brilliant, but neither does the age of certain older systems of medicine make them archaic.
Twenty years ago, I had a terrible cold and I missed a week of important college classes – including organic chemistry, which was one of those subjects I couldn’t just learn from a textbook. I needed to get better fast, or else I’d fall way behind. I had recently acquired a book on Ayurveda – India’s traditional system of medicine – and I was keen to put it to use. I made a cup of warm, salty water and snorted it up my nose, spitting it – and a lot of other gunk – out my mouth. (Mind you, this was before commercially available neti pots.) Then I spent half an hour chanting certain tones that are meant to resonate in the skull to decongest the sinuses. At this point, I felt about 75 percent better. Next, I searched around Northampton for some Ayurvedic herbs, found them, prepared them, drank the tea and went to bed. The next day I woke up feeling great.
This was one of the early experiences that got me interested in traditional systems of medicine. Age doesn’t necessarily make something wise, as can be seen by the many useless medical practices we’ve abandoned (many of the most atrocious are found in the history of our own Western medicine). But some systems, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda, have been “living” and in continuous use for thousands of years, because they work. Unlike Western medicine, these systems began with foundational texts more than 2000 years ago, and they’ve built upon these foundations ever since.
The fundamental work of Ayurveda is called the Charaka Samhita. It consists of eight books with 120 chapters, detailing pathology, diagnosis, nursing, hygiene, the preparation and use of drugs, diet, the duties of a physician, and many other facets of medicine. It was written at least a few centuries BCE. I think it’s safe to say it was ahead of its time.
One of the things that stands out about Ayurveda as a medical system is that, unlike modern medicine, it’s not particularly focused on disease. The word Ayurveda comes from the Sanskrit terms ayus (life) and veda (science or art), and so it means the science or art of life. Consider how different “the art of life” feels in contrast to the Western medical paradigm: “the obliteration of disease.” It concerns itself with all of the factors that contribute to the attainment of a good life, rather than the specific elimination of illness. A huge portion of its wisdom thus pertains to the routine things we do to maintain health and happiness – things that we’re so prone to overlook if we put all of our eggs into the Western medicine basket, ignore self-care, and hope for the best.
As a philosophical cornerstone in the development of our treatments, the principles and practices of Ayurveda will be our focus this month. To start, Ayurveda emphasizes the consumption of good food. Food that feels vital, nourishing, and constructive. The Charaka Samhita says, “The life of all beings is food, and all the world seeks food. Complexion, clarity, good voice, long life, understanding, happiness, satisfaction, growth, strength, and intelligence are all established in food. Whatever is beneficial for worldly happiness … and whatever action leads to spiritual salvation is said to be established in food.” With that, I dedicate the coming week to a special awareness around food selection, preparation, and consumption. Imagine that you’re selecting from the finest offerings of the world to incorporate these offerings into yourself.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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As we approach spring, it’s a good time to discuss seasonal junctions. Both Ayurvedic and Chinese systems of medicine see the changes of seasons as times when we are more susceptible to being thrown out of balance as our body is challenged to adapt to the shift. Ayurveda has a saying that “diseases are generated at the junctions of the seasons.”
Other junctions are also challenging, with the challenge generally proportional to the magnitude of change. Ayurvedic teacher Robert Svoboda writes, “Ovulation and menstruation are the ‘joints’ of the menstrual cycle, dawn and dusk are the joints of day and night, and adolescence and menopause are the junctions of life.” If you have kids, you know that the “joints” of the day are the times you’re likely to have trouble, and if you’re clever, you find ways to make these transitions easy, such as the ever-popular “five more minutes until we’re leaving.”
Depending on where you live and your personal constitution, different seasons and junctions will be challenging for different people. For example, because spring tends to be wet, moving into this season means taking on more of what Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) calls dampness, or in Ayurveda an increase in kapha (“kaap-ha”). This will be most difficult for those who already have constitutional kapha or an accumulation of dampness in their system. Some of the signs and symptoms include: being overweight, having loose, sticky, or incomplete stools, a wide or coated tongue, feeling heavy and tired, finding it hard to wake up in the morning, and a tendency to be phlegmy.
Ayurveda might prescribe some therapeutic vomiting for such a condition, but these days, especially in the West, we prefer more pleasant medicine, ideally in gummy form, and we engage in therapeutic vomiting only after an excess of margaritas. Luckily, there are gentler ways to restore balance, and when it comes to management of the seasonal junctions, the most natural is to be aware of vulnerability during seasonal transitions and treat yourself with extra care. For someone with a delicate constitution or pre-existing health problems, this may be prudent at every season change. For others, only certain season changes may be troublesome. In any case, it’s a good idea to get extra sleep and to eat with greater care during the transition month.
If you have a personal challenge with the transition to spring, here are some more specific recommendations for this time.
- Eat more warm, cooked foods. Soups and stews are great. An ideal one is kitchari, made from rice and mung beans (there are lots of recipes online). If you have some of the kapha / damp challenges described above, you can add plenty of warming spices, including ginger, turmeric, cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, fenugreek, caraway, nutmeg, and black pepper. As the world gets warmer, start incorporating more fresh local produce.
- Avoid heavy, cold, and sweetened foods. These all tend to be cloying. Also, stop eating before you’re full, and let yourself get hungry between meals (don’t snack).
- Do some movement every day. Kapha / dampness tends to congeal in us when we’re immobile, sometimes making us feel achy, heavy, phlegmy, or groggy in the morning, after we’ve been horizontal for several hours. Daily movement, ideally with enough vigor to break a sweat, will help.
- Try a dry sauna. If you have access to a dry sauna, it can help counteract the effects of a damp environment. It doesn’t need to be too hot. You shouldn’t be pouring sweat. More sustainable is to have longer sessions in which your skin is just glistening.
- If you tend to get spring allergies, this is the time to prepare by babying your digestive system (eat slowly, deliberately, and only easily-digested foods) and taking some things to stabilize your immune system. Some of my favorites are quercetin (500mg twice a day), nettles (pick and steam your own if you can), local bee pollen, and homeopathic preparations of the things you’re allergic to. As for this last item, it’s akin to the old-school method of desensitization. There are companies that make super-dilute tinctures common allergens, such as tree pollen, grass pollen, animal hair, mold, dust, etc. I’ve had good experiences with ones made by a company called BioAllers.
For everyone – including those who have no particular challenge with the transition to spring – it’s worthwhile to pay attention to what’s happening in nature. Be fascinated by the return of new life. Notice the boisterous energy in the flowers and birds. Admire the vigor in the shoots that push their way through the crusted soil. The rising energy and lengthening days make it the ideal time for: planning, visualizing, cleansing, and shedding.
Wishing you a harmonious junction and beyond,
Peter
[post_title] => How to Optimize the Transition to Spring
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As we approach fall, it’s a good time to discuss seasonal junctions. Both Ayurvedic and Chinese systems of medicine see the changes of seasons as times when we are more susceptible to being thrown out of balance as our body is challenged to adapt to the shift. Ayurveda has a saying that “diseases are generated at the junctions of the seasons.” Other junctions are also challenging, with the challenge generally proportional to the magnitude of change. Svoboda writes, “Ovulation and menstruation are the ‘joints’ of the menstrual cycle, dawn and dusk are the joints of day and night, and adolescence and menopause are the junctions of life.” If you have kids, you know that the “joints” of the day are the times you’re likely to have trouble, and if you’re clever, you find ways to make these transitions easy, such as the ever-popular “five more minutes until we’re leaving.”
Depending on where you live and your personal constitution, or prakruti (which I discussed in last week’s article), different seasons and junctions will be challenging for different people. For example, because spring tends to be wet, moving into this season means taking on more kapha. This will be most difficult for those who already have a lot of kapha in their constitution. Traditionally, kapha types might be prescribed some therapeutic vomiting to make the transition easier, whereas pitta types should require only moderate cleansing, and vata types would do well with the most gentle and slow cleansing.
I don’t know about you, but some therapeutic vomiting would really hit the spot, right? No, these days in the West, we prefer more pleasant medicine, ideally in gummy form, and we engage in therapeutic vomiting only after an excess of margaritas. Luckily, there are gentler ways to reduce each of the doshas (also explained last week), and when it comes to management of the seasonal junctions, the most natural is to adjust one’s diet and activities from season to season. Kapha is cold and moist, so, during the late winter and spring, we should employ anti-kapha measures. Pitta which is hot, should be controlled in the summer. And vata, which is dry and cold, should be reduced in the fall and early winter. Meanwhile, whichever dosha or doshas are predominant in your constitution require year-round management.
The junction at hand, from summer to fall, typically means an increase in vata, due to the drying out and loss of leaves, the approaching cold, and the reduced moisture-holding of cooler air. But in a place like the Pacific Northwest, this is the beginning of the long rainy season, and thus, an increase also in kapha, so it’s an especially challenging transition. In Portland and Seattle, it’s getting both dryer and moister. How do you manage it? Well, it’s a balance, and it depends partly on which of these factors affects you more.
If you don’tlive in a place where it’s about to get very wet, you have only to deal with an increase in vata, which can be balanced with nourishment, stability, consistency, warmth, and moisture. Vata is characterized by extreme changeability, and more change tends to make people in this season (and especially those with vata as a predominant constitutional factor) feel out of whack. So, making your routine as consistent as possible can really help: going to bed and waking up at the same time each day, eating at the same times each day, moving your body about the same amount and exerting roughly the same amount of energy each day, and having other self-care practices that you do each and every day. If you’ve been eating lots of fresh, raw summer produce, you can begin the transition to cooking more of your food. Warm, cooked food should form most of your diet in fall and winter.
Massage is excellent for reducing vata. Ghee and sesame oil are especially good for vata, both eaten and applied to the skin. A wonderful daily practice, especially if you have a vata constitution, have dry skin, or an overactive mind, is self-massage. You can obtain some sesame oil (not the toasted kind) and simply get naked and rub the oil into your skin from head to toe. Then, if you like, jump in the shower and rinse off, but without using soap, so that you finish with skin that’s still moist.
If you live in a place where the rainy season is beginning, it’s a good idea to begin your kapha-reducing routine now. Like vata, kapha benefits from heat, so spending time in a sauna can be good for both doshas (just don’t get dehydrated or sweat profusely, since this can exacerbate vata). Movement is essential to keep damp kapha weather from causing stagnation in the body, but since this is also a vata season, make sure your movement is even, smooth, not excessive, and at roughly the same times each day.
As for food in places with a damp autumn, there are not many things that are good for treating both kapha and vata. Since vata is dry, it benefits from moistening and oily foods – exactly the kinds of things that worsen kapha. Some of the only overlap occurs in the realm of spices, most of which tend to be good for both doshas, including these in particular: garlic, ginger, bay leaf, black pepper, caraway, cardamom, cinnamon, coriander, fenugreek, nutmeg, and saffron. Try incorporating them liberally into your fall and winter cuisine.
Wishing you a harmonious junction,
Dr. Peter Borten
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Several years ago, an old friend of our family from Germany got the highest gamsat scores of her batch and became a proud graduate and got her online science degree. She worked at several hospitals in Europe and Israel and then was awarded a residency at a prestigious medical center in the U.S. I was very curious to hear about how her experience at this American facility compared to those on the other side of the Atlantic.
I expected that she was probably awed by the cutting edge equipment and the level of training and care that can be bought for the huge sums we spend on healthcare in this country. But that wasn’t exactly her experience. No, instead she was rather disappointed. She explained that the doctors she had worked with previously (like early American physicians) had spent their careers developing their senses, perfecting their bedside manner and the art of rapport, and honing their skills of observation. In contrast, she felt that the doctors at this renowned facility didn’t seem to trust their own diagnostic abilities, nor did they appear driven to hone these skills. Instead, they relied heavily on their technology. It all came down to interpreting tests and following protocols, and there was little consideration of the person upon whom these tests were being conducted – or the innumerable individual factors that no test can perceive.
It reminded me of how new modern medicine really is – and of how effective the American Medical Association was at discrediting nearly all other forms of medicine in the 1900s. Its youth doesn’t make it less brilliant, but neither does the age of certain older systems of medicine make them archaic.
Twenty years ago, I had a terrible cold and I missed a week of important college classes – including organic chemistry, which was one of those subjects I couldn’t just learn from a textbook. I needed to get better fast, or else I’d fall way behind. I had recently acquired a book on Ayurveda – India’s traditional system of medicine – and I was keen to put it to use. I made a cup of warm, salty water and snorted it up my nose, spitting it – and a lot of other gunk – out my mouth. (Mind you, this was before commercially available neti pots.) Then I spent half an hour chanting certain tones that are meant to resonate in the skull to decongest the sinuses. At this point, I felt about 75 percent better. Next, I searched around Northampton for some Ayurvedic herbs, found them, prepared them, drank the tea and went to bed. The next day I woke up feeling great.
This was one of the early experiences that got me interested in traditional systems of medicine. Age doesn’t necessarily make something wise, as can be seen by the many useless medical practices we’ve abandoned (many of the most atrocious are found in the history of our own Western medicine). But some systems, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda, have been “living” and in continuous use for thousands of years, because they work. Unlike Western medicine, these systems began with foundational texts more than 2000 years ago, and they’ve built upon these foundations ever since.
The fundamental work of Ayurveda is called the Charaka Samhita. It consists of eight books with 120 chapters, detailing pathology, diagnosis, nursing, hygiene, the preparation and use of drugs, diet, the duties of a physician, and many other facets of medicine. It was written at least a few centuries BCE. I think it’s safe to say it was ahead of its time.
One of the things that stands out about Ayurveda as a medical system is that, unlike modern medicine, it’s not particularly focused on disease. The word Ayurveda comes from the Sanskrit terms ayus (life) and veda (science or art), and so it means the science or art of life. Consider how different “the art of life” feels in contrast to the Western medical paradigm: “the obliteration of disease.” It concerns itself with all of the factors that contribute to the attainment of a good life, rather than the specific elimination of illness. A huge portion of its wisdom thus pertains to the routine things we do to maintain health and happiness – things that we’re so prone to overlook if we put all of our eggs into the Western medicine basket, ignore self-care, and hope for the best.
As a philosophical cornerstone in the development of our treatments, the principles and practices of Ayurveda will be our focus this month. To start, Ayurveda emphasizes the consumption of good food. Food that feels vital, nourishing, and constructive. The Charaka Samhita says, “The life of all beings is food, and all the world seeks food. Complexion, clarity, good voice, long life, understanding, happiness, satisfaction, growth, strength, and intelligence are all established in food. Whatever is beneficial for worldly happiness … and whatever action leads to spiritual salvation is said to be established in food.” With that, I dedicate the coming week to a special awareness around food selection, preparation, and consumption. Imagine that you’re selecting from the finest offerings of the world to incorporate these offerings into yourself.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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