Comparing Eastern vs.

Western view of medicine

In the story of First Do No Harm, Lisa digs deep into the world of healthcare and hospitals and the questions that we ponder about in our daily lives about our health. We ponder if medicine and all the tools we have developed to perform surgeries are saving our lives or actually helping us cheat death. When we develop a problem or a sickness, the first thing we think about is if this disease is curable and if not maybe surgery can help reduce the spread of this disease. Yet, there are reasons things go wrong in our bodies. Sometimes our body is trying to tell us that something when wrong and that we should not try to fix it because the body can only handle so much. That is why Eastern view of the body takes a different approach. Eastern view focuses on the body as a whole and focuses on maintaining of a state of equilibrium throughout the body. While Western view focuses on the pharmaceutical drugs that we can create to reshape our bodies, the Eastern view sets out on ways to channel energy from nature to disperse it throughout our bodies. In the book First Do No Harm, Lisa tells us the story of a teenage boy who had Hirshsprungs disease and was not supposed to live past a certain young age. However, this boy actually lived to be fifteen years old due to

drugs and surgeries, which broke a record of how long he was supposed to live. This begins to make us question if what were doing with all this medicine and new technology to prolong our lives is actually right for our bodies. How do we know that our bodies can take on all the drugs we throw in or the chemotherapy and radiation we treat it with? Prolonging death might actually be destructive to our bodies. The boy was only allowed to live to fifteen years old because his body eventually gave in. Most of the time after we treat the body with years of chemo and radiation it fails eventually. We try to believe that we can salvage as much time as we have with our loved ones so if we find anything that prolongs theyre illness we will strive to help them. But what we are failing to understand is the body might not be able to handle what surgeries and drugs it is continuously given. Should we be okay with proposing tests and studies that allow us to find out info about a child before his death and then decide if we can terminate the childs death? On the other hand, the Eastern cultures view the body in a different way and therefore treat it in a different way. They look at the body through a holistic point of view. When they come across a problem in the body, they look at the body as a whole and try to see how they can resolve the problem from the whole bodys perspective. Reading the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali has

opened my mind to the meaning of yoga and the effects it can have on the body as a whole. The disturbances are disease, idleness, doubt, carelessness, sloth, lack of detachment, misapprehension, failure to attain a base for concentration, and instability. They are distractions for the mind (Y.S), these are identified as being harmful to the mind and body. They put stresses on the body that are not necessary. Disease occurs when one of these is in excess. We have observed this in our everyday lives. If any one of these things are in excess, then we develop problems in our body such as: stress or migraines, or anxiety problems. We become distracted from the more important things in life such as our health, goodness, kindness, etc.. According to the Yoga Sutra, if one fails to maintain concentrations on the most important things then one fails to perform a state of Samadhi and it is only when Samadhi is maintained will the mind be stable. At that stage, the mind and the body are at peace and unlike Western culture there wouldnt be a need for medication. In the story of Greek love, the characters have extraordinary bodies. They have missing chunks in certain places or like Miranda she has a tail. This is normal to them however; there are people who try to manipulate how they look because someone might look better than the other. In Western society this is still a typical view, you cant have people walking around who

look better than you so everyone tries to look better than everyone else. They are too concerned with trying to manipulate the pieces on their bodies that we never take time to study the body as a whole. In Eastern cultures, doing anything to the body (tattoos, piercings) is usually prohibited. We may ask why is that? Well this is because they worship their body as if it were a temple. It is a sacred place that they must protect and manipulating it would destroy that sacred place. Eastern traditions believe in taking care of their body as a whole and that is why they choose to perform yoga rituals over surgeries of medications that might affect the shapes and conditions of their bodies. Eastern traditions believe that yoga rituals and Tai Chi can generate energy from nature that can be spread to the entire body and fix the problems going on. Western tradition tends to be lazier and therefore tries to come up with a way to solve the problems right away with a drug that can have an affect in a matter of seconds. When performing yoga rituals we tend to escape the feeling of pain and all the problems that have come across our bodies. We tend to focus on the energy that we are generating from the ground and using it to put into our body to heal us. Such posture should be attained by the relaxation of effort and by the absorption in the infinite (VS), by relaxing we are able to generate the energy from nature and come to a calm state of mind.