Energy is the ability to do work. Where work means being productive by moving something or lifting something — something that requires effort and expends energy to accomplish the task, physics views energy as a scalar quantity that can only be measured in magnitude or intensity. Over the years, we have drawn on ancient wisdom and rediscovered that energy is not just quantitative, but qualitative as well.
People feel an energy when they enter a room, and they can tell if it is good or bad. Energy medicine has been the bastion of alternative healing modalities that espouse the belief that an imbalance in this flow of energy leads to physical maladies. This is often criticized by skeptics, as these claims of feeling, redirecting, and channelling energy to treat physical illnesses can only be theorized and never proven.
Until now.
Nanoparticle research has made a breakthrough in numerous studies, from detecting starting materials in Homeopathic dilutions, thus ruling out the placebo effect, to employing quantum field dynamics in nuclear medicine. More research is being undertaken to understand cellular voltage potentials and how they relate to health and wellness, understanding the overlap between the endocrine and chakra systems, and understanding how energy medicine therapeutically enhances psychoneuroimmunology (mind-body) medicine.
But why do we feel the need to understand and scientifically define every phenomenon around us? When someone says they are in love, society does not put them on a pedestal of science, put probes on their cranium and electrodes on their chest to measure brain signals and EKG, measuring endorphins to confirm that what they feel is actually love and not a state of inebriety.
After over 16 years of medical practice, I have learnt to ignore the distracting clamour of critics, and focus on giving results. Not just removing symptoms from my patients, but actually curing them as it is meant to be. Each patient has a different journey in their path to recovery. Some take longer to heal than others, and at times it has nothing to do with the underlying pathology. It is determined by their constitution — their genetic make-up and the environment their minds and bodies have been exposed to. Every single patient is a new case that brings to me something I have never seen before, in terms of how they and their illnesses have evolved over the years. I am invested in their quest for health and at times it can be taxing on my own system.
This past May, India saw a tremendous surge of COVID-19 cases that had my old patients reach out to me to help their relatives and friends. My goal was to keep these COVID positive patients at home, and not seek hospital treatments, where either no beds were available or a lot of unethical practices were rampant. For instance, ordering unnecessary tests, forcing every patient to be hooked on to a ventilator, and charging medical fees and supplies at a premium of almost 3 to 5 times the regular cost. The poor could not afford medical care, and those who could were skinned to their second and third mortgages.
The lowest point in my medical career was in June, when I had to “negotiate a bribe” with an influential figure in one of the suburbs of Mumbai, who guaranteed a bed, ventilator and oxygen supply to a patient of mine in a municipal hospital when there were no beds available. He audaciously claimed that he had the power to have another patient discharged and have my patient admitted after a handsome sum was paid, and that I should understand, as these were tough times and he had a family to feed!
I started taking these cases online and by phone, and I did not have the heart to say “No! I cannot take on anymore patients!” because I knew if I did not help them, they would fall through the cracks and would become yet another person that I knew who succumbed to this pandemic. I would be up until 2 or 3am for a better part of 6 to 8 weeks, trying to be there for my patients, who in some cases needed follow-up every hour as they coughed up blood, ran a high fever, or complained of difficulty breathing.
Some fell in deep throes of depression as they were forced to isolate away from their loved ones. Remedies like Phosphorous, Ignatia, and Stramonium helped in these cases to help with mental symptoms, as well as COVID symptoms. Some expressed grave concerns about how their businesses would suffer because of their absence from their work. Here, remedies like Bryonia alba, Arsenic album, Sulphur, Nuxvomica, and Rhus tox helped in a matter of hours! Some were concerned of the stigma they’d have to carry in society for being infected and worse, being shunned by their neighbours. Here, in situations of mortification and embarrassment I prescribed remedies like Ambra grisea, Staphysagria, Colocynth,Phosphoric acid, and Lycopodium.
In all I treated 37 cases, of which 2 needed to be hospitalized for a short duration and put on oxygen concentrators to stabilize them. All this while, I felt drained as I was literally burning the candle at both ends as my practice here in North America was still in full capacity. In May, my family and I all tested positive and were in quarantine in the midst of Ramadan. I attributed my lack of energy to lack of sleep and fasting long hours. But the hours that I lost in sleep, were in fact hours of hope and optimism that I imparted to each of my 37 patients, who now proclaim it was the golden thread they hung by in times when they saw nothing but darkness ahead of them.
When I started seeing the events of the last 4 months in this new light, my mind and body experienced a huge shift. I felt this renewed sense of energy that no chronically sleep deprived human could otherwise experience. Seeing those Whatsapp messages of gratitude still warms my heart.
I learned an important lesson that energy can simply not be quantified or measured by our bodily functions. Sometimes a change in perspective is all you need. You have an innate capacity to heal and create your entire life experience minute-by-minute. Imagine if we learned to release this false sense of perception, this story that your mind tells you about what is and what is not possible for you, and to master the energy that is you. That is when this paradigm shift will help clear those blocks in your energy fields, and open up avenues to cure.
“In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy.”- Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893-1986), Hungarian Biochemist and Nobel prize winner in Physiology/ Medicine in 1937. First isolated Vitamin C and discovered cellular citric acid cycle.
