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.”