Thoughts At Year’s End 2016
I will not subject you to my thoughts on
2016. Instead, I will turn my thoughts to the future, 2017.
In 1975 in Tokyo, I was introduced to a
young epidemiologist/cardiologist, Hiroshi Shibata, recently returned from
Geneva after a stint as Japan’s representative to the World Health
Organization. I spent twenty-seven years working with him, his team, and
international teams on projects for the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of
Gerontology (TMIG), the world’s largest public health institute dedicated to
gerontology. TMIG operates a 1200 bed hospital for the elderly, and has living
facilities for the healthy elderly around Tokyo. International epidemiology
surveys were undertaken together with the U.S. National Institutes of Health,
the Karolinska Institute of Sweden, the Framingham Study of Massachusetts, and
other first-rank research institutions.
While
in Geneva, Dr. Shibata had upset the powers-that-be by making two (of what were
then) revolutionary proposals.
The
first was to classify poverty as a disease. By doing so, the international
community would use its collective powers to eradicate poverty in the same way
it financed the research and treatment, both curative and preventive, for
smallpox, polio, tuberculosis, and malaria. The proposal was both humane and
cost-effective. It was never adopted.
His second proposal had to do with gerontology. The medical and
scientific communities gave their full attention to diseases of the elderly. No
one was talking about health. He proposed international epidemiology surveys
into healthy aging. We all know what kills the elderly, but what are the
factors that lead to successful, healthy aging? To this end, he proposed a new
category of investigation: Quality of Life (QOL). QOL is today taken for
granted, but forty years ago it was considered a crackpot idea. QOL would have
two prongs: objective factors and subjective factors. For example, “financial
security in old age”. Elderly Americans had more savings and more financial
support from family than the Japanese, but the Japanese elderly responded more
positively to the subjective question of Happiness. The French elderly
complained across the board and produced a low value of Happiness, though their
objective factors were satisfactory. Clearly cultural and societal factors
affected the statistics however they were correlated. What was useful was that
individual nations could use these surveys to provide more and better services
to their elderly.
After twenty years of investigation, the following factors obtained the
highest values for successful aging: Education
(the better educated lived longer and had more satisfying lives); Curiosity (intellectual stimulation was a vital
factor for successful aging); Social Relationships
including Family (loneliness and feelings of alienation produced significant
negative outcomes. The Japanese scored highest in social relationships because
of the high number of municipal community centers throughout the country
catering to their social needs and desire for friendships. Some American
researchers wrongly concluded that the high Japanese values for social
relationships were due to the Confucian tradition of filial piety—they did not
know the saying “When I finally got around to acts of filial piety, my parents
were dead”.); Financial Stability (economic
stress was the leading cause of hypertension and hypertension related illness
including kidney failure and stroke); Diet
(the ideal diet had animal protein, animal fat, fruit, carbohydrates, and
vegetables, all in moderation. Moderate liquor intake had no significant value
for longevity or health.); Exercise (walking, working,
cooking, playing a musical instrument, dancing, traveling, etc.).
When you look at the above six factors, it is inevitable that you think,
“Well, of course, this is what everybody needs for a happy life,” and you would
be right to think so. Achieving the six factors requires more than individual
effort. It requires a community. I am not heading into “it takes a village”
territory. I am heading into “it takes a nation committed to providing a level
playing field for the pursuit of Happiness” territory. We need a well-funded
and ambitious public
school system. We need to stimulate the
curiosity and intellectual powers of citizens, which would be a concomitant to
better education. There should be publicly funded facilities for the healthy to
develop and maintain social networks, not just day-care centers for the infirm
and demented. There should be a national safety net to catch those falling into
financial distress. We do not need fad diets that are costly and difficult to
maintain. We need common-sense nutritional guidance and publicly broadcast
guidelines. How many public service announcements on nutrition do you see
compared to fast food commercials?
It is delusional to adopt an “I’m all right, Jack” attitude because your
subjective criteria have been met. Your taxes, your money, go to paying for the
young and the old who are marginalized beyond the six factors for health and
happiness. You pay their medical expenses, their social welfare, and their
incarceration.
It costs far more to maintain a person in
jail than to provide that person with preventive educational, medical, and
social services. It is far more productive and financially rewarding to have a
nation of educated people exporting inventions and innovations rather than a
nation of minimum wage earners in service industries. Prevention makes sense
economically, and is the humane thing to do.
I
entered a two-year illness in 1979. Dr. Shibata, looking at my X-rays,
concurred with the other doctors that my only hope was back surgery. When Mrs.
Matsuura cured me in 1981, Dr. Shibata was the first to want to meet her. She
treated him successfully for a persistent kidney problem. He came away with a
profound respect for her knowledge and the modality she practiced. He was
impressed by her holistic vision of health and healthcare. He actively
encouraged me to learn from her and the association she worked for.
His revolutionary nature was captivated by the marriage of qi to modern
medical practice. As much as he admired the curative powers of the work, he was
even more enthused about the work’s preventive power. He considered it the most
effective modality for public health he had ever encountered from both a
medical standpoint and a cost-benefit standpoint. He wanted to train hundreds
of practitioners at government expense, and have them work in the public health
sector as health monitors and gatekeepers to physicians. Specifically, people
would go to a SIKE practitioner at each change of season to have their health
monitored as prevention. People with poor health issues would visit a
practitioner to have the issue resolved, and failing that, the practitioner
would refer them to a suitable physician. All of this would be low-cost because
SIKE is a hands-on modality—no machines or equipment of any kind is used—and no
medicine is given or prescribed.
It was also his vision that the SIKE technique of Kiryu would be taught
to the public at large for people to do at home for health maintenance. It is
easy to learn, and takes only minutes a day to keep the body in top condition. In
addition, he wished to teach people how to transmit their qi for treating the
aches and pains and minor ailments of friends and family. He saw SIKE as a
comprehensive holistic medical program that could be learned by
non-specialists.
Therese and I fulfill Dr. Shibata’s vision. We cure ailments, but we
prefer to prevent them. We give seminars and private instruction in Kiryu,
transmitting qi, and home healthcare. I have published two books on the
subject. Our ambition of founding a school to train people in our work as a
legacy to the nation has not yet been realized. That is our vision for 2017.
What we do makes sense to us and to those who have treatment from us. SIKE is a
new, rational, and natural approach to health. It creates community. It is what
Odysseus, in The Odyssey, meant when
he said, “One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin.”
