My Jewish Indian Doctor

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.