In the past ten months, Dr. David Edelberg says, “I’ve written more prescriptions for people to read the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying than I have for antibiotics.” He adds, “Usually when you clear up the mind problems, the body problem becomes more controllable.” After 25 years as an MD, Edelberg established the Chicago Holistic Center as a place for Western medicine to work cooperatively with Eastern, eclectic, and bodywork therapies already widely available elsewhere.
But gathering all these radically different healing traditions under one roof raises basic questions about our understanding of health. Who’s in charge when East meets West? Can the largely materialistic Western view of the body coexist with the more spiritual views of other traditions? Does market-driven medicine make scientific sense? The answers are fragmentary and day-to-day.
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Unlike most medical students of the 1960s, David Edelberg learned a little about chiropractic and naprapathy, which emphasizes the manipulation of connective tissue rather than bones. “I knew what they were,” he says, and he was sympathetic enough that as a premed student he once gave a talk on how to get into the “healing game” if you weren’t admitted to medical school.
A 1991 article in Time proclaiming the marriage of conventional and alternative treatments “inevitable” provided the catalyst for action. In the spring of 1992 Edelberg placed ads in two local new-age publications, Conscious Choice and the Monthly Aspectarian, asking for people who wanted to help establish the center. Within five weeks he had 200 replies, all but a couple from alternative practitioners.
Edelberg finds other contrasts between alternative and conventional medicine. At the institutional level, he says, “the staff here really wants to make the center go, with an intensity of dedication you rarely see. I’ve been medical director of Health First for 17 years, and it’s been hard to get doctors motivated about spreading the word. In this group there is unmitigated enthusiasm to make it succeed.”
The 60 listed practitioners (37 of them women) one by one describe a huge and seemingly mutually incompatible array of healing alternatives. Through the center you can get your three principles (movement, metabolism, structure) properly balanced. You can get your yin and yang balanced and your natural flow of chi improved. You can get your spinal column realigned. You can have a variety of massages. You can take herbal extracts or highly diluted homeopathic medicines. You can undergo humanistic, transpersonal, awareness, person-centered, or Gestalt psychotherapy.
“If a woman comes in with a breast mass and wants herbal therapy for it, we have to say, ‘No, you need a biopsy. If you mess around with that for a couple of months, you could die,’” says Edelberg. But with a chronic condition like arthritis there’s time to try alternative things. He acknowledges that those things don’t always work. “Not all sciaticas will respond to acupuncture, etc. We’ve sent our share of people to neurosurgeons.”
