In the East, students are encouraged to acknowledge and credit their important teachers throughout their lives for having contributed to the very essence of who they have become.
The concept of teacher is quite different in the East and the West. In the West, students attend schools and have internships under the auspices of an educational institution for fairly short periods of time, In the East, students, in addition to attending educational institutions, may also study with a teacher for years, or sometimes, even for the life of the teacher. Students in the East take on additional commitments and devotion to study with individual physicians or teachers, often as interns or apprentices; thereby giving them intimate learning opportunities not afforded most students in the Western Tradition.
Teachers in chronological order:
Professor Michio Kushi, Phd
Born in the year of the Fire Tiger on May 17, 1926, Michio Kushi is an author, educator, scholar, and visionary. Founder and Director of the Kushi Institute, he is one of the primary people to introduce the concept of macrobiotics to the West. Macrobiotics is the practice of living in harmony with nature and eating a simple, balanced diet. The ideal is to tailor the diet to the individual according to Yin and Yang principles. It is best known for the treatment of cancer, although it has been used successfully in treating and preventing all kinds of illnesses.
During World War II, Professor Kushi studied political science and law at Tokyo University. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made a deep impression on him, and he decided to devote his life to world peace and harmony. In Japan he studied briefly with George Ohsawa, who taught that food was the key to health and that health was the key to peace.
Professor Kushi came to the U.S. in 1949 and did graduate work at Columbia University. It was while he was in New York that he changed his way of eating and experienced positive changes in his own health and consciousness. Over the next ten years, with the support of his wife Aveline, Michio Kushi continued to study traditional and modern approaches to diet and health and to teach macrobiotics.
During the last twenty-five years, Professor Kushi has lectured all over the world on diet, health consciousness, and the peaceful meeting of East and West. In 1971 his students founded the East West Journal, and in the following year the East West Foundation began disseminating information related to macrobiotic education and research.
In 1978 Michio and Aveline founded the Kushi Institute in Boston. Their seminars on diet and degenerative disease have influenced thousands of doctors, nurses, and nutritionists. Medical researchers at Harvard Medical School, the Framingham Heart Study, Boston University, Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York, as well as other institutions, have reported on the benefits of the macrobiotic diet in journals like the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. They also founded Erewhon, the nation’s pioneer natural foods distributor, to make organically grown whole foods and naturally processed foods available to the general public.
In October 1975, Marsha Woolf began studying with Professor Kushi, integrating his dietary concepts into her work just in time to help her mother, who had been diagnosed with Primary Stage IV liver cancer and Primary Stage IV colon cancer. Given a prognosis of no more than three to six months to live, her mother lived four and a half years. She did not die of cancer. Dr. Woolf has integrated these dietary principles into her natural medical practice ever since. Her ongoing communication with Professor Kushi spanned decades.
Born in the year of the Metal Pig, in Dinging County, Guangdong, southern China on July 14, 1911, Dr. Tin Yau So was a Chinese Christian minister and an accomplished acupuncture master who is known as the Father of Acupuncture in America.
Determined to help as many people as he could, Dr. Tin Yau So spent years traveling to villages near his home in southern China to treat thousands of patients in their local hospitals and meeting halls. After World War II, he spent approximately ten years traveling, preaching, and offering medical treatment, in addition to educating students in acupuncture in many countries and regions in Asia. As a result of this work, he trained many highly qualified acupuncturists.
Forever grateful for the gift of Christianity, he was determined to repay the West. He decided the best way to do this was to share the wealth of his experience and wisdom as a master of Traditional Chinese Medicine. President Nixon’s visit to China in 1971 sparked a new found interest in Chinese Medicine and acupuncture. With the help of two of his American students who had studied with him in Hong Kong, he came to the USA in 1973 and worked with UCLA in establising a clinic there. Since there was no legal vehicle allowing acupuncture to be practiced outside of a research setting, Dr. So and the same two students who were sponsoring him decided to move to Boston in 1975. Together, they created the first licensed acupuncture school in the U.S.A. in Watertown, Massachusetts: The New England School of Acupuncture.
Many of his students in America have started some of the most well-known acupuncture schools (all still in operation); became involved and/or engaged in the governing of acupuncture in the country; introduced legislation; have taught or are teaching in some of the top educational facilities and hospitals; and continue to participate in groundbreaking research.
Enrolling in one of the first classes at NESA, Marsha Woolf is one of Dr.Tin Yau So’s senior students, and continued to apprentice with him for many years. In the 1990s, they worked together on developing a ‘barefoot doctors’ course in keeping with Dr. Tin Yau So’s treatment techniques to teach the Tibetan refugee health workers living in refugee camps in India.
Leaving a legacy of wisdom that spans the world, and continues on through his devoted students, he died in August, 2001 at 90 years of age.
Dr. Ted Kaptchuk, OMD, C.Ac
Born 1947, he is an author, scholar, scientist, and Associate Professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School where he is a researcher on the placebo effect. He earned his doctorate in Chinese Medicine at Macao Institute of Chinese Medicine, China. Following his graduation, he accepted a position to teach Principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine at the New England School or Acupuncture. He also accepted the position of associate director of the Center for Alternative Medicine Research and Education at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
He is one of the few individuals who manage to comfortably straddle both the alternative and conventional medical worlds. He is an acknowledged scholar of East Asian medicine. His Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine is a classic in the field. He is also considered an expert in many other forms of alternative medicine.
For the last ten years, he has led numerous NIH-funded investigations. He recently completed a four-year service as an expert panelist of the FDA and is currently serving his second four-year term on the National Advisory Council of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), NIH.
Dr. Kaptchuk was invited to sit on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Informal Discussion on Research Methodologies for the Evaluation of Traditional Medicine. Since 2001, he has served on the Advisory Board for Tufts Program in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine at Tuft’s School of Medicine in Boston.
From 1976 through 1982, Marsha Woolf did an apprenticeship, internship, and acted as administrative and personal assistant with Dr.Kaptchuk.
Dr. Paul Nogier, M.D.
Born in 1908, Dr. Nogier of Lyon, France, neurophysicist and neurosurgeon, is known as the Father of Auriculomedicine. He discovered and developed the practice of treatment and diagnosis of the body through the use of the auricle, or ear, as a vehicle to carry messages to the body; there are neurological pathways on the ear that lead to every organ and system in the body.
While traditional body acupuncture had been in existence for close to 5,000 years, there was never a comprehensive system for ear acupuncture. Different families knew of secret points to treat certain conditions, but there was not the interconnectedness of a single system.
In the 1950s, he developed the revolutionary hypotheses that if the ear (which appears to be in the shape of a fetus) was a micro-neurological system with tributaries running through the entire body, there was the potential of this complete system to treat the whole body. After years of research, he developed a complete map/system of the ear, and his findings were published in 1956. Sometime later, one of his students, Dr. Frank Bahr of Germany, personally introduced the report of Dr.Nogier’s discovery to China. Dr. Nogier is the only Caucasian to have ever been recognized by the Chinese as having contributed to their system of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Continuing his research, Dr. Nogier went on to prove the electrical potential in the pulses at the radial artery, thereby being able to do complex diagnostic testing for illness. This discovery led him to develop a method for accurate allergy testing at the site of the auricle by using the pulse as the vehicle for measurement.
Beginning in 1978, Marsha Woolf traveled to Lyon, France, as a member of the first delegation of students from the United States to study with Dr.Nogier. She studied extensively with him for four years, and continued consulting with him for the next decade; he passed away in 1996.
Auriculomedicine became instrumental in the effectiveness of her work and in the treatment of thousands of Tibetan refugees from 1983 to the present.
Dr. Yeshi Dhonden T.M.D., TTM
Venerable Dr.Yeshi Dhonden, personal physician to His Holiness the Dalai Lama from 1960 to 1980, is a renowned traditional Tibetan Medical doctor and one of the world’s foremost living authorities on Tibetan Medicine.
Born in 1927 near Lhasa,Tibet, he became a Tibetan Buddhist monk (i.e., priest) at the age of six. Because of his exceptional abilities in memorization, at eleven he was sent to study medicine at Men Tsee Khang, the Medical College in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Dr. Dhonden began his medical practice in 1951, returning to his home district and developing a high reputation for his great skill.
When His Holiness the Dalai Lama fled from the Chinese Communists in 1959, Dr. Dhonden decided to leave Tibet to follow him to India where he began treating Tibetan refugees. In 1960, at the request of His Holiness, Dr. Dhonden was appointed his personal physician, and took on the challenge of founding Men Tsee Khang, the first Tibetan Medical College in exile. He was both Director and principal teacher until 1979.
Over the last 50 years, Dr. Dhonden has successfully treated patients suffering from all kinds of maladies. One of his specialties is cancer. He has treated thousands of cancer patients from all over the world, including, but not limited to, women with breast cancer
Marsha Woolf first met Dr. Dhonden in 1981. Since one of her specialties is the treatment of cancer with Asian and Natural Medicine, it was a perfect match of student to teacher. This year marks their 30th anniversary.
In 1994, Dr. Dhonden and Marsha Woolf, director of Menla Tibetan Medical Institute, an initiative of Alternative Resources Unlimited, met Dr. Helene Smith, the renown cancer researcher, genealogist, and director of California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, and Dr. Debashish Tripathy, oncologist at University of California, San Francisco. Together. they agreed to collaborate on the first formal FDA approved Phase I/II study in the world assessing the efficacy of Tibetan Medicine in the treatment of Stage IV metastatic breast cancer. The study was successfully completed in 1999. Dateline, NBC, on January 1, 2000, after closely following the study and research team for a year, aired an award winning documentary of the study.
At age 85, Dr. Dhonden is still active and sees many patients every week at his clinic in Dharamsala, India.