So this is the generation of doctors in their thirties and forties. They really know little about healing; they’re technicians. And they’re so busy and so burdened that it’s all they have time for. As for the young people in medicine, well, I teach in the CAM program at Georgetown, and they use my book. We hope we have an impact. They love the course, they’re engaged, and they lift my spirits. But can they withstand all the obstacles that they’re going to face?

Sometimes I feel like there is almost nowhere to turn. And so I focus on trying to capture the great information we have about healing from ancient and historic times. That’s also much of what the fourth edition of our book is about. I’m also doing another book with Kevin Ergil on classical acupuncture. The other books on Chinese medicine are basically translations that express one person’s view and therefore don’t fully reflect the richness of Chinese medicine. Patients often find that a particular treatment doesn’t work for them, for their condition. But it turns out that the Chinese have entire “classics,” or texts, on what to do when you have a person with a particular kind of problem and your usual treatment doesn’t work. At that point, you need to go to a whole different level. So many of the modern texts are just grafting these ancient procedures onto the way contemporary medicine is practiced. What I’m trying to do is to help save the ancient wisdom.

That raises a serious philosophical question about integrative medicine, which goes to the point of whether it involves more than that kind of uninspired grafting. Does it sometimes reflect a higher synthesis that enhances both the ancient tradition and contemporary conventional medicine?

My experience at the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia left me feeling disillusioned (with apologies to Thomas Jefferson). I was brought in to start a CAM policy institute. The dean at Jefferson couldn’t believe that I really wanted to do that. Because to them, it’s nothing serious. And that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the leadership of the medical center thinks that your integrative medicine program really is not serious, and they’re only doing it because they have to do it to satisfy civilians on the board, then the whole thing is a sham, although it need not be.

After a year, they moved me, in addition to running the policy institute, to also run their CAM clinic. I told myself, “Well, by bringing it into the mainstream, we’ll make these modalities more widely available to people.” But in my experience, you lose more than you gain. In no case was an alternative treatment ever substituted for the regular treatments on which the hospital makes more money. And every time I brought in a new donor for the center, they cherry picked them for the hospital. I was tired of being window dressing and went out the door.

It was purely additive? That is very, very disappointing.

Yes, purely additive. One of the big projects I got funded for the policy institute was that meta-analysis of back pain studies through the Palmer College Consortium. Now here you have over 700 studies, all saying that spinal manual therapy is usually the appropriate treatment. I remember participating in a Congressional field hearing in 2003 during the medical malpractice crisis. I remember Governor Rendell [of Pennsylvania] getting up there. He’s a good guy, and an acquaintance, and he was saying, “It’s getting to the point where doctors cannot even get insurance in Pennsylvania to do back surgery.”

After it was over, I talked to him. I said, “You know, Governor, that might actually be a good thing, because in most cases we should not be doing back surgery. We should be sending people to chiropractors.” He listened, and at his request I sent a summary of our research to his office. But in my experience, little makes it into practice because of the phalanx of the health insurance, PHARMA and biotech, as we just saw again with the charade and abomination of health care reform.

So that we don’t close on that somewhat depressing note, can you offer any suggestions to students in professions like chiropractic, or medicine, about how to have a career that connects to the essence of healing?

Despite the follies and fiscal misdeeds of the organized government-industry-medical complex, we remain surrounded by the reality that, outside the mainstream, practitioners and people still have access to a better, more optimistic, more complete kind of healthcare that recognizes the limits of biomedical technology as well as the limitless possibilities of human capabilities and the boundless human spirit.

Daniel Redwood, DC, the interviewer, is Associate Professor at Cleveland Chiropractic College–Kansas City, and Editor-in-Chief of Health Insights Today and The Daily HIT.