Taking Stock …
Apr 16th, 2010 by admin
Hello Friends of Dharmadoctors,
It’s been almost a year and a half since this project started and it seems like a good time to take stock of what this has all been about. When the site was initiated, the goal was to attempt to join the two great practice traditions of Medicine and Buddhism in a way that made it clear that many commonalities and bridges between the two exist. In many ways, one thing that seems evident thus far is that such shared aspects are abundant. In fact, thanks to the science behind mindfulness (as reported here over and over again), one could almost venture to say that meditation, mindfulness and Buddhism in fact, have become mainstream. This is incredible! When I started my residency a mere three years ago, the idea that meditation might have real, practical and scientifically validated benefit was an eccentric, fringe idea, especially at major academic teaching hospitals. The situation is now radically different.
So if all of this eccentric stuff is now somewhat mainstream, now what? Originally there was a sense (at least in my mind) that the purpose of this endeavor was to convince, or at least show, my colleagues in medicine that the ideas of Buddhist meditation were not so far fetched after all. And now, much to my surprise, it is not uncommon to hear topics such as those covered here, bandied about the wards of teaching hospitals. One is forced to wonder if, in the course of the last few years, the dharma has officially landed into the mainstream consciousness of medicine.
One reason this has been so successful has been through the work of the people who have created completely secularized, mindfulness training programs to address the numerous medical afflictions that are known to benefit from this approach. In some ways the dharma has been re-languaged into a vernacular that modern physician-scientists can use. (The upcoming Stanford project to further define this language is taking this to a new level–see post from earlier this week). Overall, this fits with the age-old Buddhist idea that the Buddha himself gave a multitude of teachings to different audiences who were ready for those specific ideas. It was never a “one size fits all approach,” and this is no exception.
The concern I have, however, is that during this process of re-languaging and secularizing the dharma to fit into our scientific view, there is the possibility that something very important may be lost. What this something is I would like to explore in the coming months, and it has to do with an idea that usually medicine is very uncomfortable with: the sacred. I’ll end this post with the question, what is the sacred and is there a place for it either in evidence-based medicine or at least in the care-giver/patient encounter? Stay tuned …