APR-C-8
SECOND DAY OF CLINICS IN SHERBALING MONASTERY
April 23, 2002
With a groggy jet lag affecting my mid-afternoon performances, I decided to try to balance out the day and night after my third attempt to stay awake in the process of just spell checking the prior chapter. When I woke last night, at what I thought was near morning, and found it to be 1:20 AM, I not only finished the proofing of the last chapter, but also advanced one more from the events of yesterday. I had been loaned a new book by a refugee South African surgeon named Kaplan entitled the “Dressing Station” and could not read it without nodding off. I brought it and also the book of Sikkim and the book of Chakras the imaginary “energy meridians” in the body that correspond to no provable anatomic or biochemical events in the body, but justify a whole different cosmogony of Buddhist medicine. As is true with the transplantation of much of the mysticism of the orient through the new-age wannabe Californian-type mystics it can be largely summarized with a single descriptive term: “DREK.” Sikkim looked interesting.
I got the teams to move more efficiently and independently by hovering from a greater distance. That does not yet keep the less secure ones from summoning me at a moment’s indecision, but I was able to notice at a glance what a number of the patients had based in the demographics and epidemiology of the circumstances. At the end of the day, we again had case presentation s and discussions, which I briefly summarized, in a serial letter home.
I then sat down and reviewed the book I then started in earnest “The Dressing Station.” Dinner took a forever in coming, so I state dink the dining area and read about sixty pages while reading under the light there which is better candlepower than that which is in my room. As I was there awaiting supper, along cam and Australian immigrant from somewhere in the East who is finishing his own course of “intensive meditation”—I still consider that term an oxymoron---and since he was going back to Australia next to practice his monkshood, he was the subject of entreaties on the part of our more gullible participants to have him stay through diner and enlighten us on the mysteries unlocked for him by his guru.
It had been ironic enough to hear the student presentation on the Guest House porch while hearing the blaring of horns and cymbal clashes against the monotonous droning of the mantra chants, but then I heard the “evidence based medicine presentations” against the shouted clapping backdrop choreography of the Tibetan Buddhist dialectic—showing “proof” of the tenets of there faith and a holistic approach to all truth with the slapping conclusions in front of a guru. So among the enamored with all things mystical and irrational, I was still eliciting some evidence that would be externally verifiable for the conclusions as to clinical diagnosis and management. India—a land of contrast in the East that will never meet the West, and the Twain shall go on amusing each other with less than complete understanding on either side.