Thoughts on Healing

I was looking at a scar on my knee today, from when I skinned it this past summer after I fell down in the gravel while hiking. It was a big, gaping wound, and it took a long time to heal. In fact, it even hurt to kneel as recently as a month or two ago. The scar is still quite pronounced, but after applying pure vitamin e oil to it every night for the past few weeks, I've actually noticed an improvement, thankfully. I don't remember the last time I skinned my knee prior to this - it was probably over 20 years ago!

But anyway, I got to thinking about the body's ability to heal, and the difference in our perception between disease and injury. One of the lessons Bikram himself took with him as a yoga teacher was that terrible injuries, such as shattering one's knee, as he did in a weightlifting accident, can be healed through the correct application of yoga. His doctors told him he might never walk again, but his knee did heal. Similarly, we hear many stories of injuries being healed, or at least the healing process being greatly sped up and enhanced through yoga and other sustaining practices and exercises.

But even without any outside influence, cream, treatment, therapy, or exercise, our bodies do have the genetic instructions to heal on their own - without this mechanism, we would never have made it to where we are today. If I cut myself, and then proceed to live my life as though nothing ever happened, the wound will naturally close up and disappear. If I break a rib, the broken pieces will eventually fuse again, even without a cast. 

In the case of injury, it's clear what has gone wrong, and what it will take to fix it. If I keep poking at an open wound, it's going to interfere with the healing process, or even stop it. My body will keep trying to heal, but my actions do have the power to overtake the mechanism.

In the case of disease, we often don't know what the cause is, or figure there could be multiple causes. Some diseases have a clear cause. For instance, many of the students I teach from polluted regions of the world, such as mega-cities in Brazil and Taiwan, suffer from asthma. Within a couple of weeks of being in Canada, their symptoms frequently disappear completely. So we can see quite clearly that there was a definite cause in their disease, and once it was removed, the condition dissolved. With heart disease, it's clear that diet and lifestyle are huge contributing factors. As with injury, once a person changes what they eat and starts moving their body, reversal of this type of disease comes quickly. Even doctors agree that as long as a person is truly committed to change, heart disease needn't be a death sentence. On the other hand, continuing with the same food and sedentary habits that led to the condition of heart disease is like poking an open wound; it interferes with the healing process, and actually, quite often, stops it, and pushes the person to death. In the same way, when my students go back to their smog-ridden cities, their asthma returns immediately.

As we're all aware, there are hundreds, even thousands, of names for diseases out there, and much of the time, doctors and patients alike don't have any clue what the cause is. Maybe it's genetics. Maybe it's stress. Maybe it's just a part of getting old. Armed with this surrendering to the general consensus that cause can be classified in the realm of life's grand mysteries, doctors get busy working on methods of relieving the symptoms. This is an oversimplification, yes, but I can't help but think that this is the essence of Western medicine. Very rarely do we hear medical experts compare healing in the case of an injury to healing in the case of a disease. But as I become more and more health-minded, I see a deep and important connection between the two, and I just can't accept that we are so quick to dismiss the possibility of figuring out what the causes of many or even all diseases are, and getting busy eliminating them! I can't imagine that anything could be more important to a sick person than figuring out why they are sick, and what to do about it. 

It might sound silly, but to me, medicine is actually kind of ridiculous - even natural medicine. It's a quick fix. Of course it has its place, its use. Yes, it saves lives and improves quality of life, and all of that. No doubt about it. But how many people and how many of their doctors take a step back and say, "wait a minute. Wait one minute right here. Everything in this entire universe that exists has a cause, and therefore, your disease also has a cause. Let's figure out what it is!" Many people turn to yoga as an alternative or complement even to natural medicine, and that is good, but there is a sense in which I think that yoga is a form of medicine that, for some people, is only relieving the symptoms. Yoga - when it works - is more ideal, because of the lack of side effects, as well as the additional benefit of being a very effective stress management tool. However, I have come to believe that the vast majority of illnesses we see in our species have emotional disturbance at their root. In one person, this might manifest as Fibromyalgia, while in another, it may be kidney stones. In some patients, treating the symptoms is enough for a long and fulfilling life, while in others, no medication or treatment known to Western medicine can do a thing for them. Whatever the case may be, as soon as the health begins to dip, we really need to ask ourselves the honest question, "Why?" There is always an answer, and in isolating it, I truly believe that we can allow our bodies to heal a disease the same as we can a broken bone. On the flipside, merely treating the symptoms is like deliberately keeping a wound open. It interferes with our bodies natural process.