Dr. Wilner: Do you have a program that’s specifically for health care providers?
Dr. Gordon: Yes. The Center for Mind-Body Medicine is primarily an educational organization rather than a service organization. Since the beginning, I’ve been focused on training health professionals. My first passion was for training physicians – I’m a physician, so there’s a feeling of fellowship there – but also health care workers and mental health professionals of every kind.
We teach health professionals a whole system, a comprehensive program of techniques of self-awareness and self-care. We teach them so that they can practice on themselves and study the underlying science, so they can then teach what they’ve learned to the patients or clients they work with. They integrate it into what they’re already doing, regardless of their specialty. At times we also offer some of the same kinds of mind-body skills groups that are the fundamental part of our training as a stand-alone intervention. You can’t really teach other people how to take care of themselves unless you’re also doing it yourself. Otherwise, it’s just a theory.
Dr. Wilner: As a neurologist, I’m interested in the mind-body system. You are a psychiatrist and understand that it’s a lot more difficult to objectify certain things. What is stress? What is happiness? What is sadness? It’s very hard to measure. You can have scales, but it requires insight on the part of the individual. So I think it’s certainly an ambitious project.
Dr. Gordon: You’re absolutely right. It requires insight. And one of the shortcomings of our medical education is that it doesn’t encourage us to look inside ourselves enough. There’s so much focus on objectivity and on data, that we’ve lost some of the subjective art of medicine.
My experience with myself, as well as with the thousands of people we’ve trained here in the United States and around the world and the many hundreds of thousands with whom they’ve worked, is that all of us have a greater capacity to understand and help ourselves than we ordinarily think or than most of us learn about in our medical education.
This work is saying to people to take a little bit of time and relax a little in order to allow yourself to come into a meditative state. And I don’t mean anything fancy by that. Meditation is just being relaxed. Moment-to-moment awareness doesn’t have to do with any particular religion or spiritual practice. It’s part of all of them. If you can get into that state, then you can begin to say, “Oh, that’s what’s going on with me. That’s why my pain is worse.”
For example, you often wonder in people with peripheral neuropathy why it becomes worse or better at certain points. I would encourage neurologists and other physicians to ask your patients, “Why do you think it’s worse?” They may say, “I don’t know, doc; that’s why I’m here.” But I would ask them to take a couple of minutes to let me know. They could think it has something to do with the fact that they had a big fight with their wife that morning, they don’t want to go to work, or whatever it is. This is part of the lost art that we need to bring back into medicine for ourselves and especially for our patients.