Ayurveda - The Power to Heal

By Paul Dugliss

This book provides an understanding of the vast potential we hold for creating health from within. Healing is not the purview of doctors and nurses - it is the power inherent in each of us, hidden deep in the essence of our beings. This truth is understood in the timeless knowledge of health known as Ayurveda. The mother of all the natural medic

• Language: English
• Publisher: New World Ayurveda, LLC
• Release date: Aug 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9780692522110

Paul Dugliss

Paul Dugliss, M.D. is the Director and Academic Dean of New World Ayurveda school. An internist by training, he now devotes his life to helping others achieve the inner transformations that lead to healing on all levels of life.

Book preview

AYURVEDA – THE POWER TO HEAL

BY

PAUL DUGLISS, M.D.

No part of this book is to be taken as a substitute for medical advice. Consult your health-care provider before making or implementing any changes based on this book.

Copyright © 2007, 2013 Paul Dugliss. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.  THE FABRIC OF THE HEALING PROCESS

2.  THE SOURCE OF HEALING

3.  CONTACTING THE SOURCE

4.  REMOVING THE BLOCKS TO HEALING

5.  GETTING IN TUNE WITH OUR NATURE

6.  ULTIMATE PREVENTION

7.  MAKING AYURVEDIC PREVENTION PRACTICAL

Dedicated to my patients…

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all those who have made my life in medicine possible, particularly David McClanahan, Philip Conran, Clinton Greenstone, and D. Edwards Smith. I would especially like to honor my parents who valued education and inspired and supported me in switching to a career in medicine. I would also like to express my appreciation to my beloved Sandra who continues to support and inspire my quest to find better ways for all to heal.

Preface

A Blessed Life

You hold in your hands a book that is the result of a most blessed life. Through it you will become part of a quiet revolution in health care. I write these words with a profound awareness of what a blessed life I have lived. I have seen incurable diseases cured, the permanently crippled walk, and the infertile give birth.  I have seen patients hobble into a clinic with debilitating back pain and walk out pain free. Through these amazing experiences, I have seen the great potential ancient medicines hold for healing and transforming the lives of people everywhere.

The profession of a physician has not been without its tragedies. I have seen more people die in a few short years of training than most will ever see in several lifetimes. I have seen people cut down in the prime of their lives by cancer, leaving young children and successful careers behind. I have seen men in their early forties die of heart attacks, and I have seen a three-year-old die as a result of complications of a tonsillectomy. Having experienced such tragedies, I now hold in my mind the blessing of how precious and delicate life is. It has also steeled my will to do everything in my power to prevent such tragedies from ever occurring and to finding less invasive ways of healing.

Having lived within two cultures — within the modern medical system and the alternative medical world — I have been given the fortune of a unique, first-hand perspective on the problems confronting health care and the solutions that are being overlooked. When I read about the numbers of people injured by medical errors, for me, these statistics are more than numbers. I remember faces and names, friends and colleagues, patients and families who have suffered from these mistakes. When we learn about the number of deaths that occur each year from prescription drugs, I am once again reminded that each of these numbers represents a precious human life that could have been spared.

Year after year, what becomes clearer to me is that these tragedies can be avoided.  I am increasingly convinced that we have not even scratched the surface of the potential that the ancient systems of medicine hold for modern life. With the great blessings I have had, I can no longer simply focus on my own private practice integrating modern and ancient medicines. The time has come for the miracles I have witnessed to be commonplace. The time has come for the tragedies to cease. The time has come for a transformation in the practice of medicine.

When David Eisenberg showed in his 1993 New England Journal of Medicine article that there are more visits to alternative medicine practitioners than to primary care physicians, it was a wake-up call for the medical profession. We, the people, create the medical system by our passive or active use and acceptance of it. And we are creating an alternative system of medicine through our interest, demand and practice of ancient medicines such as Ayurveda. With our energy and will directed toward a more enlightened approach to medicine, we cannot fail in transforming medicine. No other approach to medicine is so comprehensive and readily understandable as Ayurveda.

Ayurveda recognizes that we cannot be healthy in isolation. As long as a large proportion of society is ill, we will all be ill. The reality of human existence is that we do not live in isolation. Those with an enlightened perspective know that all life is interrelated. As long as illness exists in the world, none of us can be truly healthy. If we wish to be healthy, if we wish our families to be healthy, our only choice is to create something better. Rather than reinventing what has already been given to us, we are truly fortunate to have the ancient secrets of Ayurveda revealed to us in this modern age.

What you hold in your hands is an introduction to this marvelous system of health and longevity. By learning about your power to heal through Ayurveda, you are participating in one of the most important transformations in history – the transformation of modern medicine. Never before has there been a time when the hidden secrets of health and longevity have been made so widely available. Never before have the advances of one group of people been so instantaneously visible and available to the whole world through modern communications technology. Never before has there been such an opportunity for change and transformation.

The time has come to end the tragedies of modern medicine. The time has come to create real health. The time has come for us to take our health into our own hands and to learn a more enlightened medicine – the natural medicine known as Ayurveda. The time has come for you to fulfill the potential you hold for making perfect health a reality. My hope is that the book you hold in your hands will be the key to a marvelous transformation for yourself and the world. You are the future of medicine. 

It is indeed a blessed time and blessed life.

Paul Dugliss, M.D.

CHAPTER 1

THE FABRIC OF THE HEALING PROCESS

This book is about you. It is about your power to heal. It is about the source of this power within you and how to contact it and maximize it. It is about the rediscovery of a whole system of health that can understand and guide the process of healing anything from an emotional hurt, to a cut finger, to a chronic disease. It is about how we heal. And it is about the blocks to healing and how to eliminate them.

The power to heal is not limited to doctors or nurses or health-care workers. It is a huge, almost unlimited power, as big as nature itself. And still it remains subtle, hidden, and misunderstood. It remains outside the field of normal study. Experts in health abound, but where does one go to study healing? The process is elusive at best, esoteric at worst. Its presence, though, is unmistakable.  Consider my patient Susan.

Susan’s Story

At 28 years of age, Susan was an electrical engineer for a Detroit automaker. She almost married three years prior while involved with a man she met at work. After they split, she became depressed but continued working. Her depression lifted when she met Sam, a resident in Pediatrics at the University of Michigan.  They had been dating for almost two years when she noticed some pressure in her chest. She mentioned this to Sam, who passed it off as insignificant and most likely related to heartburn or reflux. You are too young to be having a heart attack. It is nothing to worry about. She continued working but had intermittent periods of intense chest pressure.

One day while she was walking up the stairs, a crushing sensation took her breath away. She felt like she might pass out. Alarmed, she rushed to the hospital emergency room. After having multiple vials of blood extracted from her arm, an electrocardiogram (EKG), and a chest x-ray, the emergency room physician came in to assure her that was not a heart attack.

Your EKG is normal, and there was no evidence of any damage to the heart in the blood tests we did.

Thank goodness, said Susan.

However, we need to send you for a CT scan of the chest, said the ER doctor. There is a shadow over this area of the heart that we can’t decipher, and a CT will help us to know if it is related to your symptoms.

What does ‘a shadow’ mean? asked Susan.

We don’t know. It may be just an artifact. That’s why we need the CT, said the doctor.

Several hours passed while Susan waited her turn in the scanner and then awaited the results. For her it seemed like an eternity, but at least she felt like her chest pressure was lessening and she was getting help. Finally, the curtain surrounding her gurney was pulled aside and three white-coated individuals appeared.

Susan, I am Dr. Woolscroft and these are my residents, Drs. Adam and Ockner. Your ER physician called us to meet with you because of this finding on your CT scan.

He began to point to a blur of gray in the middle of one of many views of what seemed like photographic negatives.

"You have some sort of mass