When I went to see Dr. Scott Gerson (an MD and an expert in the five-thousand-year-old practice of Ayurveda) in Manhattan thirteen years ago, all I knew about Ayurveda was what I had read in Deepak Chopra’s bestseller, Perfect Health. I had debilitating lower-back pain and had tried everything.
I expected to meet a solemn guru who somehow accidentally had a Jewish name—perhaps someone who was really from Bombay, but his father’s father had been Jewish. The man I found instead was another addition to my collection of sensitive/emotional Jewish men who make me feel as if, being the rational shiksa, I’m the one who has my shit together. He is, indeed, the fountain of knowledge that I was hoping for. It’s just that as a modest Jewish doctor practicing ancient Indian medicine, he made me feel like I knew it all along, as if to say, it’s not a gonsa magilla.
When I sat down across from him at his desk, in the basement of a brownstone with the evasive smell of something relaxing (bergamot? ylang ylang?), he noticed I wasn’t wearing a watch, and asked if I was prone to skin rashes (yes). As I listed my biggest complaints, he nodded knowingly; all your complaints, added up, may be part of a general discordance; I had back pain, anxiety and dry skin, all symptoms of a vata imbalance.
Ayurvedic doctors believe that the body is made up of three doshas, or forces, and one or two of them dominate a person’s constitution. Our environment can make them go out of whack, and then illness sets in. I had moved to New York and started a new job when the back pain started. Major life changes can set off vata and cause an imbalance (people often experience lower back pain when they’re recovering from emotional upheaval as well). Before I left, Gerson wrote all of his instructions on an 8 1/2 x 11” pad and gave me a carbon copy.
I have years’ worth of these tattered, stained carbons in a file, and I refer to them frequently. Afterwards, he sent me out to his assistant to load up on herbs shipped from India. (My favorite is Gulkhand, or mashed rose petals with sugar, which make a tonic for too much pitta, the dosha that is associated with heat. This causes rashiness, short temper, and upset stomach, and it often coincides with light hair and fair skin.)
I became a loyal patient, visiting him if I had any major complaints. The last time I went, I was so jacked up on coffee that I could barely sit in the chair in front of him. My husband and I had written, produced, and directed a no-budget feature film showing downtown in the East Village, and I’d been a wreck as the critics alternately praised and slaughtered it.
I’d spent the previous night in an apartment in Trump Tower owned by Steven Spielberg (one of our actors has a business connection), and I’d woken up in what looked like a hermetically sealed yacht from the nineteen-eighties. I was late to Gerson’s office, but he smiled and said, “I can sense that you’re a little out of whack, but underneath that, everything seems fine.” This reminded me of my favorite thing about him: his lack of preachiness. In fact, he told me once that as he was writing a book about Ayurvedic weight loss, he gained forty pounds.
My visits to Gerson over the years have been cathartic, silly, and life changing, and I’ve sent many people to him as well. Years ago, I talked my mother from the mountains of Virginia into seeing him after she’d been diagnosed with a form of heart disease. She has a flare for the Southern Gothic, and she had started clutching her new nitroglycerine tablets and talking about her funeral.
When I picked her up from Gerson’s office, she had a smile on her face and held her medical chart tightly to her chest. She refused to talk about her visit. Eventually she admitted that Gerson had looked at her file and said “There’s nothing wrong with your heart.” At that moment, he became my Favorite Person. There is no one else on Earth who would have gotten her attention the way he did. To this day, she has not had a problem with her heart. My oldest sister (back pain, stomach pain) who has always been a super-athlete went to Gerson too. Twelve years later, she’s still stupefied by the curative powers of the hot oil enema.
I even sent my husband, the dramatic, emotional two-hundred-pound Jewish director, to Gerson after an electrocardiologist told him he needed to have wires inserted into his heart to shock it and reset the heartbeat. He’d been suffering from arrhythmia and frightening panic attacks. When he met Gerson, they fell into a brotherly love. They talked about their common Russian Jewish ancestry, their love for jiu-jitsu, and when my husband left, they actually hugged. That visit changed our lives. After examining Adam and reviewing his medical files, Gerson told him that his panic disorder and arrhythmia were psychological. He taught him breathing techniques, prescribed a cocktail of herbs, sesame oil massage, and told him he would get better. Adam hasn’t had a panic attack or irregular heartbeat since.
What makes Ayurveda so different from other types of alternative medicine is the fact that, once you learn how things work, you can do it yourself. It’s empowering and positive, not rigid and dogmatic, if you learn it from the right person. And it works seamlessly with Western medicine, which can be nice, especially since it increases your chance of getting reimbursed by your insurance company.
Check out Dr. Scott Gerson’s Web site for more information. He runs the National Institute of Ayurvedic Medicine and has written two books about Ayurveda.
