Dancing with Life (10 page)

However, the lady for whom I found Dr Rashmi Jha was not too regular in going for her acupuncture treatment so there was not much progress in her case, but Dr Jha became yet another inspiration for me with her never say die attitude.

Anil Kapoor
*
(name changed)

Anil, a forty-two-year old man was diagnosed with MS in 2011. He suffered from double vision, fatigue, weakness, dizziness and slurred speech. As he was in a senior position at a corporate office with too many responsibilities, he just could not continue working anymore and took a break for some time. He tried various things, including Ayurveda, and was referred to Dr Madhusudan Aggarwal in Delhi by his Ayurvedic doctor. He underwent treatment for a year and has improved considerably. In fact, his body had started responding to acupuncture in the course of three months itself. Today, he does not have double vision, doesn’t suffer from slurred speech, and his gait has also improved considerably. As we can see, acupuncture has indeed given him a new lease of life.

Shrishti
*
(name changed)

In June 2005, Shrishti started suffering from cotton feet (crawling sensations that made her feel as if she was walking on cotton wool) and other sensation-related problems.

She really did not know what was happening to her. By September 2005, she also had back pain near and the MRI confirmed MS. Then, in November 2006 when she started suffering from blurred vision she was admitted to the Apollo Hospital and methylprednisolone (a corticosteroid drug) was administered to her. She was also advised to take some other medicines, but avoided them, fearing they would have side effects.

Little over one month of being discharged, she lost vision in her left eye. She was just thirty and to her life seemed to have come to an end. She wondered what to do and kept groping for solutions, and in 2007, she restarted taking homeopathy treatment from Dr Kalyan Banerjee.

Her homeopathic treatment from 2007 to 2011 brought about quite a significant change in her health. She moved in 2012 to another city and continued taking homeopathic medicines but could not consult her homeopathic doctor regularly. She was faced with another challenge in 2012: she suffered from a severe MS attack which resulted in blurred vision in her right eye and she also started suffering from mobility issues. She could not continue working and took a long leave. Life again came to a standstill.

It started moving again when she read my article on acupuncture in
Life Positive
magazine in 2013. She looked for an acupuncturist and found one Dr Purushottam Lohiya in Aurangabad, was nearby. In March 2013, she started with her acupuncture treatment. Just after twenty sittings, she was able to walk for thirty minutes at a stretch. Her eyesight was also getting sharper. As we can see, it was alternative therapies that helped her heal.

She says, ‘If we think we have issues, others have more difficult issues. I also hope and pray that everyone finds a solution to whichever challenge they may be facing.’

B.K. Jyoti

Jyoti was struck by MS in 2007. Like most MS patients Jyoti felt lost too when she found out that MS has no cure. Initially, her feet went numb and then the numbness traveled upwards to her thighs, just like in my case. However, Jyoti had always believed in God and was part of the Brahmakumaris Movement since childhood, and her faith kept her going.

She tried naturopathy, electropathy, magnet therapy, etc. without much success and finally somebody told her about acupuncture in 2008. She began taking acupuncture sessions in October 2008 from Dr Raman Kapoor in Delhi and has responded very well to acupuncture.

Her MRI reports show deterioration in her condition, but she claims she is really feeling much better and can also drive her car comfortably. In a sense, if someone asks her how she is, she says she feels hundred per cent all right. She says no matter what the reports say she knows she is improving all the time, thanks to acupuncture.

Overall, she is extremely thankful to God for leading her to a therapy that could make her cope with her disease.

Ginni Ujjai Singh

In another case Ginny, who is forty-three now, started suffering from a bad case of double vision in 1997 after losing her balance and falling down once. However, no one knew what was happening and she continued living a normal life. Even the doctor couldn’t tell her if anything was wrong.

Everything was fine till 2006 when she came to India from the US to look after her mother who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease (another nervous system disorder). She again started suffering from double vision and was finally diagnosed with MS. Her double vision later became better with the yogic practice of
anulom vilom.

She also took allopathic treatment for eight months, which didn’t work and she soon became wheelchair-bound. She later took steroids for three years as she had no other option. She could then at least manage to walk.

Like me, she had also read
Yoga and MS: A Journey to Health and Healing
by Loren M. Fishman and Eric L. Small.

As far as diet is concerned, Ginny had also read Dr Swank’s
MS Diet
²
and Dr Terry Wahls’ book
Minding
my Mitochondria
³
, and followed a judicious mix of diets prescribed by both the books.

In 2011, Ginny joined a group for Buddhist chanting. It was there that she met a lady who gave her the magazine
Life Positive
with my article in it and told her to e-mail me which she did. This happened in February 2013. I asked Ginny where she was and she said she was in Chandigarh. I traced an acupuncturist in Chandigarh, Dr Tanuja Mathur, whom she still takes treatment from. She started going there from April 2013. Ginni’s condition improved amazingly: On the eighteenth day she was able to work on the computer for forty minutes straight with no break and her arms and shoulders did not hurt. Earlier, they used to start hurting after ten minutes. Even her brain did not get tired and lose focus. She even entered the kitchen and baked a dish a few days later.

Then after doing a regular session of the yogic breathing exercise,
kapalbhati
, she was able to walk her German Shepherd dog, which weighs fifty kilograms, all by herself with other dogs around her. I have remained in touch with Ginny all through. Walking her dog and baking a dish were both clearly wow moments for her, as she now knows she is truly on the path to recovery.

She is also able to handle weather changes better than before and even in the extreme heat of Chandigarh in 2014, was able to move around in a better way than ever before. I am sure Ginny will indeed experience more wow moments due to her never say die attitude.

Sonia Banerjee

In 1989, when Sonia Banerjee was just nineteen, she developed a cyst in her neck. The cyst was not cancerous and she had an operation to get it removed. However, after the operation, she could not walk properly and also developed a vision problem. After a few tests were done, it was discovered that she had MS. Back then Sonia did not even know what the term meant. She was given a few steroids to correct her vision and life went on.

Sonia completed her studies and started focusing on building a career. Love blossomed while at work. Being an extremely honest person, she told her soon-to-be husband about her operation and resultant health problems. Both of them thought it was no big deal and got married. Life went on normally until MS struck her the second time, which manifested as a lack of balance during walking. She tried Ayurvedic treatment, some allopathic medicines, and even took multivitamin tablets. However, her condition didn’t improve.

She really didn’t know what to do next or whom to approach. She could not even go do her regular grocery shopping and had to resign from her job as well.

In 2013, she found an acupuncturist, Dr P. Dixit, near her home in East Delhi and went there regularly. In a matter of four months she had recovered enough to be able to do all her shopping herself and to walk comfortably for ten minutes at a stretch.

Harsh Grover

Harsh started suffering from numbness in his legs and hands in May 2005, when he was just thirty-three. He took homeopathy medicines for a while and became more or less all right. He was later diagnosed with MS.

In November 2007, he suddenly lost vision in his left eye and was given steroids for a while, after which his condition improved a little. He used to work on the computer but chose to take on fieldwork to avoid straining his eyes. From 2008-2011 he had four attacks of MS and each time he was administered steroids. Both his vision and mobility issues became worse and he began using a stick. At one point he was so depressed that he even thought of ending his life. Fortunately, the Art of Living course and flute meditation taught by Brahmarishi Subhash Patriji made him more positive and hopeful in life.

In 2011, Harsh started taking acupuncture treatment in Surat. However, he needed to commute twenty-seven kilometers every day for the treatment. But because of tiredness from the journey back and forth, he suffered another attack. In 2013, he started going for acupuncture to Dr Vikram Kalra, who had a clinic near his house. His incontinence issues improved after just fifteen sittings with the acupuncturist.

Charu Patel

In 2014, I also came to know about forty-four-year-old Charu Patel from Surat. Charu was diagnosed with MS in 2008 and soon became immobile and bedridden. The steroids that were given by allopathic doctors did not help her enough. Her father-in-law is an Ayurvedic physician and treated her until she became better and did not suffer from any more attacks.

In 2011, however, she had an attack of trigeminal neuralgia (a neuropathic disorder) that caused her intense facial pain. It is the same disease that Bollywood star Salman Khan suffers from. Allopathy provided no real solution for Charu, who finally went to Dr Sachin Lohiya’s clinic on the recommendation of their family friend. She is now on the path to recovery.

Incidentally, Charu’s husband, who is also a doctor, had learnt acupuncture in 1995 from Dr Sachin’s father, Dr Purushottam Lohiya. He did not practice it earlier but is now convinced about its efficacy.

T
HE
N
EXT
S
TEP
F
ORWARD

One may ask, is continuing with the treatment necessary? Is acupuncture a therapy that one would need lifelong?

One does hope this is not the case.

However, even if I do need to go for a little longer and then taper off the sessions like Karen Cioffe (who was the first one to tell me about acupuncture) then all I needed was to go through one more stage of acceptance and perseverance.

This was actually the time when I needed to apply the principle of surrender. I needed to realize that the only thing we have in our control is the present moment and the present breath. This, of course, is true for everyone. But do we always remember this? Do we realize nothing is in our control? Unfortunately, not many of us are able to lead a life with minimal expectations. This, indeed, is the touchstone of life.

This was when I also remembered Carol Schuller who had been quoted in her father Dr Robert Schuller’s book
Tough Times Don’t Last, Tough People Do.
Her father, though a pastor, had not known what to do when he met her after her motorcycle accident. She was the one who spoke first, saying, ‘I know why it happened, Dad. God wants to use me to help others who have been hurt.’

Maybe just like her I was chosen to prove the efficacy of alternative healing techniques, as taking the treatment personally proves its efficacy more than any amount of writing can do.

Surely, in the process of becoming better I also became something of a role model; many people explored acupuncture on seeing the improvement in my health. Till date I have many people asking me about it. In the process, I have found acupuncturists all over the country, learnt more about this therapy and helped many people heal.

Acupuncture is a medicine system that is over five thousand years old. It is the insertion of very fine needles (sometimes in conjunction with electrical stimulus) on the body’s surface in order to influence physiological functioning of the body. In fact, the first record of acupuncture is found in the 4,700 years old
Huang Di Nei Jing
(
Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine: Inner Canon
), which is said to be the oldest medical textbook in the world. The therapy is said to have originated in China.

Disciplines such as acupuncture are not yet fully accepted by mainstream doctors but the World Health Organization (WHO) published an official report in 2003 listing thirty-one symptoms, conditions and diseases that have been shown in controlled trials to be treated effectively by acupuncture.

Acupuncture is now gaining wide acceptance in Western countries, especially in the US and UK. The Indian psyche is such that it values a new trend only after it has been venerated in the West, even if it has its origins in Asia.

Acupuncture is currently being evaluated and might soon be recognized by the government. The Indian Government through the Ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, and Homoeopathy) is doing a lot to encourage and propagate alternative healing therapies. Apart from these initiatives, a course on acupuncture is also conducted at Singhania University, Rajasthan and there is a course in IGNOU (Indira Gandhi National Open University) also.

Notes and References:

1
. Anton Jayasuriya,
Clinical Acupuncture A-Z
, B Jain Publishers, New Delhi, 2002.

2
. Roy Laver Swank and Barbara Brewer Dugan,
The Multiple Sclerosis Diet Book: Low-Fat Diet for the Treatment of MS,
Doubleday Publishers, New York, 1987.

3
. Terry Wahls,
Minding My Mitochondria 2nd Edition: How I Overcame Secondary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis And Got out of My Wheelchair,
TZ Press, Iowa, USA, 2010.

*
Moxibustion
is a form of heat therapy in which dried plant materials called moxa are burned on or very near the surface of the skin. The intention is to warm and invigorate the flow of Qi in the body and dispel certain pathogenic influences. Source: Wikipedia]