Manifesto for a New Medicine

James Gordon, M.D. Manifesto for a New Medicine 1996 Daniel Redwood, D.C. James Gordon has long been recognized as one of alternative medicine’s foremost spokespersons. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Gordon worked for ten years at the National Institute of Mental Health, where he developed the first alternative program for runaway teenagers. Now Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Community and Family Medicine at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, he also serves as Chairman of the Advisory Council to the National Institutes of Health Office of Alternative Medicine, and is Director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C. Over the past 15 years, Gordon has developed the first comprehensive medical school program in mind-body medicine, conducted a private practice in which he utilizes a wide range of approaches including acupuncture, homeopathy, spinal manipulation, nutrition, and various forms of mind-body medicine, and appeared countless times in virtually all major media (CNN, Newsweek,Washington Post and New York Times among them) as an articulate and knowledgeable representative of the alternative medicine community. Dr. Gordon’s new book, Manifesto for a New Medicine: Your Guide to Healing Partnerships and the Wise Use of Alternative Therapies (Addison-Wesley) is a dramatically written, highly informative, and at times deeply moving story of his work as a holistic physician and teacher. Perhaps more than any other book, it demonstrates what a truly holistic medicine looks like, and how it can be made available to those who have not yet experienced its benefits. In this interview with Dr. Daniel Redwood (whose first Pathways interview was with James Gordon ten years ago), Gordon speaks of the dramatic advances in public acceptance of alternative medicine in the past decade, discusses how he first became involved with alternatives, and offers inspiring stories of healing from his practice. He also describes outreach programs in which natural healing approaches have been brought into the D.C. public schools. For further information: James Gordon, M.D. 5225 Connecticut Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20015 (202) 966-7338 James Gordon Interview Daniel Redwood: What is different now than it was ten or twenty years ago when you are interviewed about alternative medicine? James Gordon: Twenty years ago, or ten, or in some instances even five years ago, people acted as if I were an anthropologist bringing news back from some strange tribe about their customs. Now when people talk to me, the questions are: How do I use this in my daily life? How do I integrate it? What do I do about my conventional doctor? It’s as if I’d gone from being an anthropologist to being a friendly family doctor and adviser. DR: Alternative medicine has penetrated much more deeply into the culture during this time. JG: It’s very much a part of the culture. First of all, people are much more sophisticated about it. Its not, "How can you possibly think of using herbs?" On the skeptical side, it’s "Are you sure the herbs are safe?" and on the more informed side, "Exactly which herb do you think would work better?" and "Why do you use Chinese herbs rather than western herbs?" So it’s a whole other level of sophistication. People understand that this is being used and they want to learn how to use these approaches most intelligently. I think the issue thats still there with many people, and this is partly why I wrote the book, is people thinking, "Well, this stuff sounds great, but is there any evidence for it all?" I was being interviewed the other day by a very intelligent college professor, who said, "Well, of course, there’s no evidence for any of this." I said, "Wait a minute, there are hundreds and hundreds of studies on many of the modalities, and many of those studies are very good." Part of what Im trying to do is to make that evidence available in a way that people can read it, understand it, and put it in context with stories about people very much like themselves who got better. DR: Which of the alternative modalities would you say have the strongest documentation at this time? JG: I think theres a tremendous amount of documentation for most of what we call the mind-body approach. For hypnosis, imagery, biofeedback, attitudinal change, relaxation therapies, and meditation, theres very strong evidence. I think there is very good evidence for some herbal therapies. We understand what the constituents are, we understand the pharmacology of the constituents, and we understand that there are clinical studies on a number of them that are just about as good as the clinical studies on drugs. There certainly is good evidence for chiropractic and low back pain, both clinical and epidemiological studies, the workers comp studies. I dont think the studies are as good yet for some of the other uses of chiropractic, but there are some studies. We have some idea of the physiology, and the same thing is true with acupuncture. In some areas there are wonderful studies on acupuncture. We know a lot about the physiology of acupuncture. We know that the points have a different electrical potential, we know how they affect neurotransmitters, and the physiology of breathing and immunology. So theres a tremendous amount of evidence that’s gathering. Its not as if we have evidence on the use of acupuncture to treat every condition, but we know that it makes real physiological change, we know what some of those changes are, and we have some clinical evidence. DR: What about homeopathy? JG: Homeopathy has become a kind of lightning rod, because from our western point of view it seems so improbable. We really dont know what the mechanism is; people are just guessing at this point. And yet, there are perhaps 20 studies, double-blind, controlled, sometimes crossover studies, on the use of homeopathy. DR: The Scottish physician David Reilly recently had an excellent paper on homeopathy published in Lancet, which demonstrated clear benefit from homeopathic treatment. He said afterward that based on his study, you had to conclude that either homeopathy works or clinical trials dont. JG: Thats a very good point. DR: How were you first attracted to alternative forms of healing? JG: I was first attracted because I was made uncomfortable by conventional psychiatric treatment. I was working with psychotic people, who seemed not to be sick in the way that people with gall bladder disease or people with heart disease or cancer are sick, yet they were treated as if they were physically ill. They were put in pajamas, and given large doses of medication. I didnt understand it. It seemed like they had certain difficulties; they were sometimes harder to understand or more erratic than most so-called normal people, but they certainly didn’t seem sick. So I began to question the whole medical model. That is, that there was a specific disease entity that people had, and a specific kind of pharmacological or surgical treatment for them. I began to question whether for these psychotic people, if we regarded their experience as essentially a human experience, if we created a healing environment in which they would be fully respected, could change the nature of their illness? So I was questioning the whole notion of fixed diagnostic categories. DR: How did that play out? JG: Quite remarkably. I was given the opportunity when I was chief resident in psychiatry at Albert Einstein in New York, to create a ward in which psychotic people could come and not have to take medication, in which they could go through their psychosis. It was an extremely popular ward, both with the patients and with the residents and doctors who wanted to come work there. The most dramatic instances were among people who were psychotic for the first time. These were people with acute schizophrenia, who were able to go into their psychoses, to go down into their madness, often to regress to earlier stages of their lives, and then to grow up again. That happened in several instances it was very powerful. DR: To turn the breakdown into a breakthrough. JG: Thats right. Exactly. With people who had been psychotic for a long time, it was harder. It had become a very fixed pattern in their lives. But even with those people, they were able to express themselves more freely and able to feel more relaxed. One young guy remarked, "Everywhere else Im crazy, but here Im sane." He became a member of our community and he was able to function. So it was a very powerful experiment. When I came to the National Institute of Mental Health after my residency, I was still quite interested in working with very troubled and troubling people. I was working with runaway and homeless kids, and runaway houses that worked with those kids, trying to see, again within the context of a place that respected their experience, if their experience could change. I began to think about what we could do by changing our attitude toward people and changing the setting in which we treated them, creating a real therapeutic community. But I also started wondering about biology, and whether there was a way to work with biology to promote transformation. I thought medication and electroshock therapy simply suppressed the symptoms, and what I was interested in was seeing if this process of transformation, this kind of breakthrough that you mentioned, could happen on a biological basis. So I was open to the possibility of looking at other kinds of alternative therapies. DR: Did your experience at Einstein at that special ward turn out to be one unique and wonderful episode, or was it something that grew and developed in other settings? JG: Later, when we were working with the runaway kids, it was based on the same kind of principle. The counselors who had created these programs initially were very much on the same wavelength as I was. They were not psychiatrists or mental health professionals, some were ministers, some were draft resisters, some were hippies, they were just people who wanted to create an environment that was friendly to these kids. They saw themselves as big brothers and sisters to the kids. It didn’t occur to them to think in diagnostic terms. It didnt occur to them to see these kids as having a disease. They were very puzzled and troubled by how disturbing some of the kids were, and how upset some of them were. It was my job to help them to understand the inner experience of these kids, and to create a setting where the kids could go through that experience, in which they would be dealt with as people and not as patients. DR: It sounds like even back then you were playing a bridging role between the alternative culture and the establishment. JG: Thats right. I feel that has been my role at least since that time. DR: What forms is that taking now? JG: I have all these establishment credentials: Harvard College, Harvard Medical School, residency in psychiatry, ten years at the National Institute of Mental Health. What Im trying to do is use the credentials, and my experience as somebody who has the capacity to take a hard critical look at these therapies, and to say, "Lets take this look, but lets do it in an open-minded way. Let’s open ourselves to the experience of some of these approaches, and let’s look at the actual scientific literature that backs them up." So as somebody who has worked with some of these alternative therapies for 25 years at least, I am now saying to the medical establishment and to what I hope is a mass of people in this country, that here’s how we might think of looking at these approaches. You have to keep an open mind. I am somebody who has been there, and I am hopefully a reliable observer. So here, look through my eyes, and then having looked through my eyes and my experience, take a look for yourselves. Heres the information. Dont necessarily believe me. See what Ive learned, and then check it out for yourself. Im doing that as I go around giving lectures at medical schools and hospitals. Im doing it with the book, reaching out to non-medical people, and Im also doing it at the National Institutes of Health. Part of my role is to present to NIH what is going on, to try to make it available to them. DR: When you were offered the position as chair of the Program Advisory Committee for the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM), did you have any hesitation about taking that job? And how is it going? JG: I didnt have any hesitation at all, because the job is to advise the office. What I am bringing to that advice is 25 years of experience in the field, 25 years of working with these approaches, of meeting the people, knowing the people who are pioneers, of knowing people who are practitioners of indigenous healing systems, and learning from them. I see my role as trying to make my experience available to NIH as it formulates policy. So I feel very good about being a kind of messenger as well as an adviser. DR: What are some of the projects that the OAM is currently involved with that you find the most exciting or of the greatest potential value? JG: Speaking for myself rather than for the OAM Advisory Council, I think the one thats absolutely crucial is providing a database, so that all the information about alternative medicine will be easily available to anyone in this country who wants to have it. The information about whats being done, whats working. To say here are all the studies, here is what has been learned. DR: Does that database not currently exist anywhere else? JG: It does not exist. Obviously anybody with a computer can begin to tap into it, but to gather all the information from the databases all around the world is very difficult. DR: At what stage is this project now? JG: The very early stages. Its a massive project and were just at the beginning. Another part of that project is to gather fact sheets together, to answer or at least provide references for the most commonly asked questions. The greatest number of calls we receive are about alternative therapies for cancer. In my own office I must get a dozen calls a week. The OAM gets far more calls, of course. DR: How do you deal with the people who call? JG: The OAM is putting together a fact sheet about what is known, and thats taking some time. In my own office, I talk to them about what the options are. Sometimes I refer them to Ralph Moss in New York City, whos got an up-to-the-minute database with which for $250 he can give people information about specific therapies that are being used around the country for specific cancers. In most cases there are no controlled studies at all, so we give them what is available. I tell them to read Michael Lerners book, Choices in Healing. And then I sit down and talk with them. I can’t meet with everyone because I don’t have time. For those patients I do meet with, I talk about what the possibilities are. I tell them to check out the information, so that we can then go over it together. DR: Your role as a healer goes beyond direct application of therapies into an educational function. JG: Yes. And thats the focus of the book too, education. I think the role of the healer is at least fifty percent guide and teacher, and probably far more. I am there to help teach people how to understand themselves, to become more aware of what’s going on in their lives. To see how to use what they’re learning to help themselves, and how to look beyond wherever they are to what may be most useful to help them go where they want to go. Whether that’s in terms of looking at alternatives for cancer, or in terms of looking at alternatives for their work situation, I think these are absolutely crucial functions for a physician to have. DR: You have some deeply moving stories in your book about patients you’ve worked with. The book begins with a Washington, D.C. attorney you call David. Could you briefly tell us that story? JG: I started the book with that story because David in some ways represents all of us. He is a man who is very conventional, a man who wants to trust his physicians. He has serious rheumatoid arthritis. I said he represents everybody, but actually he represents the fortunate everybody,’ because he has access to the best health care this country has to offer. He’s going to an excellent internist and an excellent rheumatologist. He’s been going for ten years, and getting worse every year. The rheumatologist has tried every kind of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory, steroids, antibiotics, even plaquenil, which is an anti-malarial drug they use for rheumatoid arthritis. He’s been on pain medicine constantly for ten years, and he’s gotten progressively worse. His hands have gotten so deformed that theyre like claws, and he can’t close them. He’s coming to me because hes desperate, not because hes interested in alternative medicine or he thinks it’s cool. It’s that nothing else has worked. His physicians have said there’s nothing else they can do for him, and at the same time theyve said that they dont think there’s anything to alternative medicine. So in a sense he’s in the position from which I think most people come to alternative medicine. It’s not curiosity, and it’s not because they hate their doctors. It’s because what they’re doing is not working. They’re not getting anywhere. So hes very skeptical, but hes also open because he’s desperate. The message is very clear that there comes a time for a change. Thats what hes ready for. DR: How do you give him hope without promising too much? JG: When I first talk to him, I tell him that I think Ill be able to help him, that I’m not sure, and that hes going to have to do a major part of the work. He’s going to have to take a look at all aspects of his life; physical, emotional, spiritual, family, work. And that he needs to be thinking about whether he’s open to changing these aspects of his life, and that he’s going to have to be the one to enact the measures to make the changes. I tell him that there will be changes in diet, and changes in attitude. That I’m going to ask him to do something different than what hes doing with physical exercise, and that I’m going to want to do acupuncture. DR: Whats his response? JG: He agrees. He says that hes heard that Im a reliable doctor, and that hes desperate, hes in pain, his eyesight is going from the plaquenil, and he really would like to play golf again. In some ways, that was one of his strongest motivations. Thats whats needed. People need to have a real reason to get well, whatever it is that they want to live longer, they want to go on a trip, or they want to play golf. So during the first session we talk about some of the things that I do, and I teach him a very simple breathing meditation. I do some acupuncture. I put him on a fast of watermelon. DR: I remember you writing that when you told him to eat nothing but watermelon for a week, in his attorney mode he looked like he had just caught a witness stepping on his best alibi. JG: He was thinking "what is going on here?" It sounded totally mad, but he said yes because he was desperate. So he did all these things. He’s a very sincere, committed man, so when he says he’s going to do something, he does it. And a week later, he had lost about ten pounds, he looked about ten years younger, he was able to cut down his medication some, and his hands were somewhat more mobile. He was so impressed with what he had been able to do using these approaches. He was doing the yoga regularly. That initial sense of increased well-being, decreasing the medication, looking better and feeling better, encouraged him to do more. Within a couple of months, he was off all medication. He had been taking five or six kinds of medication for years. DR: Simultaneously? JG: Simultaneously. And he was now off all of them. He was feeling much better. He was beginning to hold a golf club again, and within four or five months he was back at the golf course. He was playing golf at very close to his previous level; he had a seven handicap. In fact, a wonderful part of the story, which kind of certified the miracle I mean it already looked like a miracle to his friends and family, but what happened was that he shot two holes-in-one in the first five rounds of golf. I don’t think he’d had one in twenty years previously. So it was like okay, here’s the final stamp of approval. DR: There was also something else in this case, about prayer. JG: David had previously asked his physician about the power of prayer, because he had a sense that prayer was important to him. The physician, I’m afraid like most physicians, said it didn’t make much sense to him, and he wound up prescribing more medication. The spiritual dimension has been amputated from medical education. When David spoke to me about prayer, I started talking to him about the fact that prayer would certainly mobilize his own capacity for faith and hope, which we know from quite good studies is itself quite therapeutic, but that also, who’s to say that there might not also be other forces at work? So he started praying regularly, and he felt very good. He felt in touch with some larger force that knew more than any doctor could about what was good for him. He felt and continues to feel that that is an integral part of his healing. It’s now four or five years later, and David is fine. He had one minor flare of the arthritis for which he had to take a couple of Advils for a day in a period of extreme stress. Otherwise he’s fine. He still has the deformities, and those don’t go away, but he’s able to play golf, and do whatever he wants, and he feels great. DR: Considering the range of therapies that you brought to bear in this case, I think it would be rare to find too many health practitioners who could draw on that range of treatments. How can the lessons of a case like this, which seem very profound, be generalized, so that it’s not just people who come to one unique physician who can benefit from this? JG: That’s a great question. DR: A tough one. JG: I think that every physician needs to have as a central part of his or her practice: self-awareness, relaxation/meditation, nutrition, and exercise. DR: Have you brought this point of view into your work as a professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine? JG: This is what I tell students. They ask, "What should we learn? We can’t learn acupuncture, homeopathy, all this stuff." So what I say is that at least you have to learn these approaches [self-awareness, meditation, nutrition, and exercise]. So what I teach in my first-year class called "The Healing Partnership," is this: every student is meditating, every student is keeping a journal, every student is doing physical exercise every day of one kind or another. So they’re getting first-hand experience. And, they’re reading the literature on attitude, relaxation, meditation, and some on exercise as well. So that’s basic for all the students who take this elective with me. The other thing that I’m trying to teach them is to keep an open mind about all the other modalities. DR: To at least know what they are, and what they might be helpful with. JG: Exactly. That’s the purpose of the book, to provide an easy introduction to many of the modalities that every patient and every physician should know about. DR: It’s the single best book I have seen for accomplishing that. JG: Thank you. Then beyond that, if they’re interested in manipulation or acupuncture, they should spend time studying those things. To study, take some courses, and really focus on it. But there’s this basis that everybody should have. Not only every physician or health care professional, but everybody in the country needs to know about these things for themselves. And then they’ll be able to take care of so many things. I’d like them to take a look at my book, and then go on from there. There’s no reason people can’t use homeopathy for themselves, and there’s no reason people can’t learn massage to help themselves and their families. As opposed to rushing off to some expert all the time, all of us need to learn more about how to take care of ourselves. That’s the message I’m trying to convey to medical students, as well as the general public. DR: If you were to look down the road a generation or so further, in what ways would you imagine that alternative and conventional medicine will integrate to a greater degree than they already have? JG: I think they’re going to be integrated to a greater degree in medical education. Because of the changes in the culture, because of the demands of patients, and because medical students are part of this culture, they are going to increasingly demand that these approaches be included in their curricula. I see the medical school curriculum changing slowly, but changing. I think that many of these approaches are going to be integrated into primary care practice of physicians, or will be covered by insurance policies or HMOs, because so many people want them. DR: What do you expect in terms of cooperation or integration between the medical profession and professions of alternative and complementary practices such as acupuncture, chiropractic, and naturopathy? JG: I think it’s going to increase. In the medical profession, there have been some people who have been very interested and very collaborative, while others have been very fearful. Chiropractic was an obvious case, where medicine, based on no evidence at all, completely rejected chiropractic and stigmatized any MD who would even talk to a chiropractor. They regarded chiropractors as demonic figures. That’s certainly changing. There is more openness, but there’s also a defensiveness. The defensiveness is partly ideological, the concern that "can these people do something better than I can?" Part of it, of course, is economic. Certainly for orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons, if somebody can manipulate your back and do the job and prevent someone from having to have surgery, it may be better for the patient (and the surgeon may understand that, and on one level feel fine about it), but there’s also going to be another level at which there’s some feeling of being threatened. I encourage students going into orthopedic surgery to learn manipulation. I say to them that if what you’re interested in is helping patients and not just making money, you’ve got to learn it. DR: What about the question of how well physicians with brief training in manipulation or acupuncture will be able to deliver those services, for which chiropractors and acupuncturists spend years in training? JG: Speaking about acupuncture, there are going to be physicians who are not going to be enormously skilled acupuncturists, but who can use acupuncture in a way that is very, very helpful. For pain, for relaxation. Since they’re already seeing the patients, and since they certainly know all the contraindications from being deeply schooled in medicine, there’s no reason for them not to be able to use acupuncture in that way. DR: Do you feel that there may be a danger to patients, or perhaps more likely, a danger of the patient getting sub-optimal care, if they go to someone who’s taken a brief training, as opposed to going to someone who uses these methods as the centerpiece of their practice? JG: I agree. What’s required is something that we’re also not taught a great deal about in medical school, a "becoming modesty" about what we can do. I practice manipulation, but I do not consider myself the most skilled manipulator. In some cases, I refer. I say I’ve done what I can, and I think you need someone else. Sometimes with a child who’s had a major birth trauma, I’ll refer to a colleague, osteopath or chiropractor, who’s very good with craniosacral work. Or take Chinese herbs. I use Chinese herbs, but there are people who have been doing it for 30 or 40 years in China. They certainly know more, and if I am concerned, I refer. As long as we have a sense of what we can do and what we can’t do, then we’re okay. If we think we can do more just because we have the license, then we’re in trouble. DR: Tell us about the work you’ve done in the Washington, D.C. public schools. JG: One of the purposes of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine is to extend teaching people how to take care of themselves out into the community. In particular, we want to reach out to people who would not otherwise have had access to this holistic approach, or some of these alternative therapies. People who don’t have insurance, and don’t have money to pay for it out-of- pocket. So a major focus of our work has been education in the community. We’re working with old folks, people who are coming out of prisons, pregnant teenagers. What we’ve done in the D.C. schools is to go initially into a school called City Lights, which was created by the Children’s Defense Fund, essentially for high school kids who can’t be in the public schools. Many of them have been seriously abused, physically and sexually. Many of them have been in jail, and for the time being they just can’t fit into the D.C. schools. We started working at City Lights, trying to create a healthier, more fulfilling environment. The way we work there, and this is also the way we work at other schools, is to initially work with the faculty, the teachers, and staff. If you just work with the kids, whatever you do will disappear when you go, whereas the real goal is to change the way everybody is feeling about their own health. To put the tools for how to take care of themselves into everybody’s hands. If we work with the teachers and the staff, including the administrators, secretaries, security guards, maintenance people,everybody,then we can change the whole atmosphere and they’ll bring this sense, this possibility of self-care, and of enjoying self-care, to their students. DR: What are some of the specific methods you teach? JG: We’ve taught relaxation and meditation, nutrition classes, herbalism. One of the things that the teachers and staff got particularly interested in was massage. So about a year ago one of our volunteers brought in 12 massage therapists, who were also volunteers, who gave a massage to every teacher and staff member at the school. I don’t think there was anyone at that school that had ever had a massage. They hadn’t had that kind of experience. And out of that, not only have the teachers and staff gotten very excited about the work that we’re doing, but the kids got interested. They said, "Hey, what’s going on?" So now we’re teaching a number of the students how to do massage on themselves and on each other. They’re learning how to touch another person in a way that is caring and therapeutic, that’s not either violent or exploitative. For some of these kids, it’s the first time they’ve ever had that experience. We’re also working in another school called Bell Multicultural. It’s a very crowded school that goes in two shifts, so none of the teachers have homerooms. The first thing we did was to create a place in the school where teachers and staff can come for one hour each day and be quiet. It was a matter of helping them to organize this. Because unless you have that space, it’s hard to do anything else. There are now 25 schools that want us to bring in these programs of teaching self-care, of teaching mutual help. DR: You’re moving beyond those first couple of schools, gradually? JG: We really need to raise money to do this. We’re dependent on contributions from individuals. We have a small grant from the Meyer Foundation, but we need a lot more money. We have a proposal to bring this program to 12 schools: four high schools, four middle schools, and four elementary. We have one staffperson, Jane Kauffman, who is coordinating the program. We have 40 volunteers working. What we need is to be able to hire a number of people, so that we can really be in the school and establish a presence with faculty, staff and kids. We want to be able to hire people to go into the schools to do that, to establish this healing presence and to coordinate bringing our volunteers in. DR: Are you aware of similar programs elsewhere, or is this relatively unique. JG: Herb Benson [Herbert Benson, MD, of Harvard University] is doing a program bringing the Relaxation Response into a school in Boston, and there are a couple of schools in Los Angeles. But this approach of trying to work with the whole school, and bringing in volunteers from the community, I don’t know of anyone else who is doing it in the country. Our hope is to create a model that other people can then pick up and use. One of the things we’ve seen is how many people there are in our community who want to be helpful, and we’re giving them a way to do it. We’re giving them structure, we’re giving them opportunity to use their talents and skills. Some of the meetings of the volunteers are so, so moving. The massage therapists, for example, say it’s wonderful doing massage therapy with individual people (and it’s important because it’s how they make their living), but that it is so fulfilling to be able to go into schools and to be able to bring this approach that we love, this massage, to people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to it. We also have teachers who work with us, who may teach at a suburban school, a relatively sedate place, but they know the enormous problems of the inner city and they want to do something there. We have a judge teaching Tai Chi. We have ministers who volunteer. DR: This sounds like breaking down barriers of all kinds. JG: That’s right. It’s multiracial, multicultural, people of all ages coming in and helping with the work. It’s wonderful. Very exciting. DR: What a beautiful vision. Daniel Redwood, a chiropractor and writer who lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia, is the author of A Time to Heal: How to Reap the Benefits of Holistic Health. A collection of his writing is available on the WorldWideWeb at http://www.doubleclickd.com/danhome.html. He can be reached by e-mail at Redwoods@infi.net.