This week at the Medicine Meets Virtual-Reality Conference in Long Beach, California medical educators from the Banner Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix presented a paper describing how surgeons improved their skills. Using Wii game technology, surgical residents who played the game Marble Mania in between stints in the operating room, had strikingly better operative performance than those who didn't play.

Using "cyber gloves", a tool that tracks surgeon’s movements as they operate, the researchers were able to assess each doctor's performance. Those who played the game averaged 48% better than those who didn't.

This is the next-generation gaming; the skills required to play these games helps develop delicate hand muscles and coordination skills. The game is clearly a valuable tool in helping surgeons work faster and more accurately, it also makes it easier to train doctors (surely dentists will follow), in the developing world. I add this cautionary note; it’s not just good hands that make a surgeon, it’s a good heart that connects them personally with their patients that will make them healers.

It doesn't matter how many technically competent cardiovascular surgeons there are to unclog your coronary arteries, if they don't inspire you to change your behaviors you will likely get sick again. If you don't stop smoking, drinking, stressing out, eating poorly, and not exercising, you’ll be back within seven years (if you survive the next attack at all). The doctors who touch your heart will get you to become the principal agent in your continued health.

There is not yet a Wii game that awakens a doctor’s soul to improve their ability to reach out and touch patients with an open heart. So in the meantime I suggest this alternative; go away somewhere, a place that fills you with awe, it could be a mountaintop, cave, or ocean; someplace that separates you from your ordinary reality and makes you gasp in amazement. A place where you recognize it's not all about you, that you are connected in some soulful way to something other than yourself and you are not alone.

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Did a workshop last week with my brother and friend Brad Keeney, a visionary psychologist, anthropologist, and jazz musician whose healing journey has taken him many places, including to the Bushmen of the Kalahari in Namibia. The workshop was entitled “The Dancing Healers,” and we each told our stories about the importance of getting out of your head and into your heart, if you’re interested in maximizing your healing power.

The Bushmen taught Brad their “shaking medicine,” and they could see his ability to be moved by the energy they call “the Big Love.” They saw him “pierced by the arrow of the Big Love”, feel the Spirit, and transmit that energy to others.

For a long time I have known that if you can’t dance you can’t heal, ever since I met Santiago, a well-known Pueblo medicine man over 40 years ago. I asked Santiago if he would teach me how to dance the way he did, and he answered, “I can teach you my steps but you have to be able to hear your own music.” As a healer, I have danced and let the music flow through me to open a channel of healing power and love; I’ve even learned to hear the music a different way.

But, I have never danced the way Brad does — the energy flows through him (what he calls “working the spirit”) until it makes him quiver and utter guttural sounds. When he is filled with that energy he has to share it with someone. Truth is . . . it scares me to be that out of control. I am a product of Western medical training where our healing practices seek to explain, predict and control outcomes. An unfortunate result, however, is that we deaden the expression of how we can connect with patients. I am more comfortable analyzing the process before experiencing it, which keeps me from truly feeling it.

During the workshop, we felt the vibes of the drumbeat and the blessing of sacred objects. We danced together into the early morning, hearing our own music and letting go to become a channel for loving energy.



And as I write this, I know many of you will think this too fluffy and that I must have been bitten by an infected Tsetse fly, but this is my story and I’m sticking to it. If you are willing to open up a channel to your unconscious mind, you can also hear the music that receives and offers healing love.

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I was in Red Wing, Minnesota, last week and visited with Winfred Red Cloud at the Prairie Island Lakota Community. He is the tribe’s Cultural Liaison: the traditional intermediary between the tribe and the outside world. We were introduced by the Fairview Hospital CEO and started gently listening to each other’s stories, experiences and relationships, and then talked about health and healing,

Winfred is in his mid-fifties, his face lined and rutted, hair tied into braids that reach mid-chest. He is Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and the great grandson of the great Oglala Chief, Red Cloud, who led the Red Cloud War (1886-1868) which resulted in a complete victory for the Oglala and temporarily preserved their homeland on the Powder River. Chief Red Cloud was the only Indian leader to win a major war against the U.S.

Winfred married a Mdewakanton Lakota woman from Prairie Island and has lived here for 20 years. In addition to his outside work, he also teaches the Lakota children to speak their tribal language and sponsors a dance and drumming group who travel to schools all over the state, performing and telling their stories. It makes the kids feel good about themselves, and they see non-Indian kids look at them in a different way.

He was candid about the difficulties the kids faced as well. “The casino is a blessing and a monster,” he said. It paid for many tribal improvements and is also profitable enough to give every tribal member a significant yearly income. For kids under 18, the money is kept in a trust fund until they’re of age and get a lump sum. “Easy money without work is not the traditional way,” Winfred said, “they don't need to do anything to get it, they’re dropping out of school early, being recruited by gangs, selling and using drugs, losing touch with being Indian. I’m trying to recruit them too, but too many don’t want to hear my stories.”

Winfred’s lament is also mine; we both know that those who tell the stories define the culture. Today’s storytellers don’t sit around campfires with drums, but rather around video screens with games of unrelenting violence. The stories are told with blood curdling sounds of dying, blood-letting, torture, and are now even being told in churches. The New York Times reported (October 7, 2007) that churches are using video game nights featuring mature-only, violent entertainment to recruit young men. Churches are stocking their youth centers with game consoles so teenagers can flock around big-screens and shoot it out; their religious leaders say it’s the most effective thing they've done to get kids hooked on coming to church.


We must be telling better stories. We do not teach kids to be respectful and to value life by seducing them with the thrills of violence and pornography. Our survival and the quality of our lives should not be defined by blood-letting and suffering, but rather by the dance and drumbeat that kindle the spirit. I’m hoping that here is another Red Cloud at the sunset of a generation who can find a way to win his war and preserve his culture for another generation.

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On my recent trip to China we visited Beijing’s prestigious University of Chinese Medicine, the premier teaching facility for traditional Chinese healing practices in the world. Under the direct supervision of the Education Ministry, its highly qualified teaching faculty brings students from all over the world. The campus has 18,000 students, 1,900 from overseas. The University now co-sponsors English-speaking training programs with universities in England, Iran, Mexico, and Indonesia.

I don’t know anything about traditional Chinese medicine, although as a medical student I was fascinated by a film of a woman undergoing a complete removal of her thyroid using only acupuncture anesthesia. After the gland was removed (in the largely bloodless field), she was helped to sit up and then stepped down from the operating table by herself; it was an impressive demonstration.

My own interest in traditional medicine began in the 60s when I first came to work as a physician with the Indian Health Service. Over the next 20 years, I learned how to integrate Western and traditional views of healing. As Chief of Psychiatry at the Phoenix Indian Medical Center, I invited Native American medicine men and women and gave them space to work with patients and families. We instituted a traditional talking circle as a weekly therapeutic gathering, and built a sweat lodge on the hospital grounds. But this was an Indian hospital and, therefore, receptive to the idea. In most American hospitals, however, there is little encouragement to include other healing practices.

I was interested in seeing how the Chinese medical system integrated traditional practices and decided to visit the campus, even though I had no appointment. I arrived with my wife and two close friends, found some non-Chinese medical students whom I asked where the International School was, and we were directed to the building and the Dean. Dean Chen greeted us warmly and invited us to join her in the conference room. We introduced ourselves; I told her of my experience and interests, and she arranged for us to meet the Medical Director of the International Program, Dr. Ma LiangXiao.

Dr. Ma was a small, vibrant, younger woman (perhaps late 30s early 40s), who spoke English well and was remarkably candid. We talked about healthcare availability in China, and I was surprised to learn that there is no universal healthcare here. There is a growing disparity in the health care in urban and rural areas and a source of increasing social strife. Ironically, it’s pretty much like in the U.S., those who can afford it and/or are insured get excellent care. But most Chinese can’t afford it, and the common folk who don’t have insurance scramble for what they can afford, which are herbalists and street doctors.

However, when it comes to an integration of healthcare practices in Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) hospitals, the Chinese come from a place of mutual respect. Both hospitals have integrated staffs, and doctors here routinely prescribe medical Qigong as a health maintenance program. This is an aspect of traditional Chinese medicine that coordinates breathing with various physical postures. Often in groups, people practice Qigong everywhere: in parks, on the street, and under trees.

Coming together in community to get energized through the coordination of breath and movement is a common traditional healing practice. It’s the idea that harmony between body, mind and spirit (the worlds of actions, thoughts and feelings) need to be in balance if you are to live fully.

Find a practice, — it might be Qigong, yoga, meditation, tai-chi, dancing, drumming, chanting, or line-dancing — that gets you away from ordinary ways of seeing, breathing and moving, and you will face life’s stressors better.

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