Mind Body Therapy

If there is a set of diseases that modern medicine seems to have passed by, it is psychosomatic disorders. Most surgeons and specialists find themselves unable to recognize or deal with them effectively, while dissatisfied patients knock door to door with little respite.

A 40-year-old Russian woman came to see me for symptoms of gas and acid that had vexed her for the last 5 years. She had visited several gastroenterologists, had undergone 4 endoscopic examinations, and had been offered similar prescriptions of proton pump inhibitors (medicines that reduce the production of acid from the stomach) sometimes with tranquilizers that had made her sleepy and had interfered with work.

I realized that I was in line for being counted as yet another doctor. Not to be clichéd, I threw her a few questions and discovered that she had been staying and working in India for 8 months, leaving her 2 children and mother in her hometown 8000 km away. Her father, who had been caring and supportive, had died a year ago. She stayed here alone in Gurgaon, often waking up with a startle at night, dreaming of her children who were miles and miles away!

She sportingly agreed to my offer of a session of Mind Body Therapy, a technique I had learnt during a workshop in Germany 20 years ago, that I had practiced in my early days in Lucknow with gratifying results.

She was soon seated comfortably in a chair, letting her taut muscles to relax and breathing smoothly. The induction of self-hypnosis was easy and quick. Soon her right index finger was responding with a mild lift , indicating that we had established the vital ideo-motor signaling link that is crucial to this form of therapy.

I kept her at a very mild level of hypnosis, just enough to enable her to delve beneath her conscious mind, and reach down to the upper layers of her unconscious mind. It is here that most of the emotions such as stress, fear and sadness reside, and it is this portion of the mid that needs cleansing and strengthening through mind body therapy after the conscious mind has been bypassed.

Within 25 minutes, Elena was looking relaxed, with her eyes closed, the furrows of her forehead straightened, fist opened and breathing jerkless. She could see through imagery, soft blue soothing juices wiping away the red angry “acidiy” ones from her stomach, while a smile gently stretched across her face in a way that had occurred very long last.

Elena woke up from a deep relaxing sleep, felt refreshed and light, and said she had never felt as light in several years.

Mind body therapy has many methods and techniques, each with its own proponents that wipe scars imprinted in the unconscious mind to allow the body functions to be smoothly restored.

As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) dated 25 November, 2012.

Halwai’s and Gyms tie the knot on Diwali

Unlike most businesses that peak during Diwali, fitness centers patiently wait for the last diya to die out and the last cracker to fall silent for their clients to walk in. Weight watchers, who usually go off-guard for a few weeks, find themselves piling up two to six kilos around this time.

Diwali, and the weeks that lead to it, is a time when calorie intake shoots up dangerously. Dry fruits, sweets and barfis start coming home, and most of us are unable to keep our hands off the loaded trays. Aritual visit to a relative or friend’s home is customarily associated gorging of sweets or snacks that are dense in calories! And no matter how health conscious you may be, refusing to pick up a piece from the thali and depositing it into your mouth is fraught with the risk of being labeled stiff, snobbish, unsporting, or lacking in the “Diwali Spirit”, that you can’t afford at this time.

While talking of spirits, yes,spirit consumption also goes up significantly at these times. Alcohol is notoriously calorie-rich, providing 7 Kilocalories for every ml, compared to a humble 4 for each gram of carbs. And spirits go down the throats of spirited revelers in the company of fried snacks and nuts, which in turn are loaded with fats, that provide 9 Kilo cals for each gram that you consume!

Responding to the call of the times, several mithai-wallas have started selling “low cal” sweets for their health savvy customers. Lucknow’s prime sweet maker, Chhappan Bhog is offering three varieties of low cal (cane-sugar free) sweets this season, innovatively named Fig, Date and Nut Berries. Another one, patronized by a diabetic patient whose blood sugars remain at dizzy heights, makes ‘Son Papdis’ and Chamchams without using the regular sugar.

Funnily, the festive spirit of Diwali also absolves us from feelings of guilt or remorse in skipping our regular dose of exercise. It is parties in the evenings, card sessions late into the nights, the late rise in the mornings when it is well past tennis-time, and hot puris and kachoris greet us at breakfast.

 Post Diwali then becomes the festive season for fitness centers. Irresistible promises and lure of discounted packages lead us up the steps to gyms and saunas. And back then we return to the mocking treadmill to sweat and pant as penance for all our indiscretions and sins!

Gym owners are the last to get Laksmi’s blessings during Diwali, but they get it in abundance! And it is through the Halwai’s that she sends her blessings!

As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) dated 11 November, 2012.

Dengue Debacle

Our media has been so obsessed with scams and corruption that it has not had space and time for the Dengue epidemic raging across the country. And in a country of 1.2 billion, numbers of those affected or dead have ceased to shock us any more.

The travesty of the Dengue epidemic, in Shakespearean parlance, could go well in the way “When beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes”. Let us therefore not count the number of the incognito dead but focus on a few precious lives that fatal mosquito bites have claimed.

When the nation of movie lovers had just celebrated the 80th birthday of one its best loved romantic movie-makers, Yash Chopra, and started marveling at his good health at this vintage, the Aedes mosquito struck stealthily with its fatal sting. And as is typical of Bollywood, our media and us Indians, while we went into hysterical reminiscence of the lovely movies that he had made in his lifetime, we chose to overlook the fact that his precious life was lost due to the shoddiness of the municipality which failed to control the breeding of mosquitoes and allowed the epidemic to occur.

Another shocker was the death of Mr RN Trivedi, a senior lawyer of the supreme court, who hailed from Lucknow. I saw his familiar picture staring at me from the pages of the daily newspaper, announcing his demise. I wondered how a man who seemed so reasonably fit the other day could die so suddenly, and speculated if it was a heart attack. I learnt later that he was a victim of Dengue fever.

I remember meeting Mr Trivedi in his River Bank Colony house in the early 90s when he was a lawyer in the Lucknow high court. He then rose to the position of Additional Solicitor General of India, and moved to Delhi. Like many Lucknowphiles, his trips to Lucknow continued with regular periodicity, and we often bumped into each other at the airport and shared our nostalgic memories of this city.

His life was another precious one that Dengue claimed this season.

Dengue fever and deaths should not be given the status of accidents. They are a reflection of the apathy of our municipal services, and our tolerance of this apathy. And as said in the Mahabharat, “While we see people die around us, we refuse to believe that we too shall die”.

If Yash Chopra and RN Trivedi can fall victim to Dengue and die, we too are not beyond mosquito bites, Dengue and death. 

As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) dated 28th October, 2012.

Re discovering the Bicycle

In our present times when we are excessively dependent on cars, piling up excess weight, and falling prey to the epidemic of diabetes and heart disease, the bicycle can roll into our lives as quite a game changer.

There are 5 good reasons why we should take to cycling:

1. For Your Body:  The bicycle has been acclaimed as a great device for working out and keeping you fit. It increases cardiovascular fitness, strength, balance, flexibility, endurance and stamina and is an excellent way to burn the extra calories.

One major advantage that cycling offers over jogging or the tread mill is that being non-weight bearing, it causes less pressure on the ankles and knees in overweight people with creaking joints.

During a fellowship to Germany, my host and friend Dr Winfried Hauser had arranged a bicycle for me and insisted on showing me the countryside on bike. I remember the ordeal of the 1st day when I found myself out of breath after cycling a mere 2 kilometers. Over days and weeks, he kept pushing the distance up and after a month, we were cycling 30 km every evening, exploring farms, hills and villages in the picturesque Saarland. At the end of 3 months, I had shed 8 kg of weight and was at my physical best.

2. For Your State of Mind. Riding a bike is a proven stress buster. Regardless of whether you are riding purely for pleasure or for a specific purpose, you will arrive at your destination feeling relaxed, energized and happier about the world and yourself.

Anyone who has visited Cambridge will tell you how the small university town virtually moves on bicycle. From Nobel laureates and senior-most professors to the fresh university entrant, everyone moves, chats, discusses, ruminates and thinks while biking.

3. For Your Community. Being out on your bike is good for the people around you as well. You are able to go the places you want to go and yet put one less car on the road, with that much less noise, fumes and pollution. And the energy and materials used to manufacture one automobile could be used to create a hundred bikes.

4.  For Convenience. If you have ever been in crowded streets such as in the heart of Varanasi, you will realize the advantage of a 2 wheeler over the car. The cyclist can wiggle out of jams and hold-ups while you could keep sitting in your car for hours, vent your ire on the state of traffic in the city and push up your blood pressure.

5. It is easy on the pocket too.

If reforms are the need of the hour, promoting the use of bicycles over cars should take precedence over all others, and should be done with seriousness and care. The government needs to chip in its bit and ensure that bikers don’t become victims of hit-and –run cases, and that they get suitable facilities such as dedicated lanes and good parking lots. 

As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) dated 7th October, 2012.