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Soothing the wounds of war: One physician's journey

Lessons learned in troubled lands suddenly apply here.

By Kathleen F. Phalen, amednews correspondent. Nov. 19, 2001.

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War is harsh and unrelenting. It devastates families and leaves nightmares in place of dreams. And when it's over, the human toll goes well beyond the dead and the orphaned. It leaves behind a bleak and fractured landscape laced with hopelessness, chronic illness and psychological casualties.

But war is also where James S. Gordon, MD, was struck by peoples' courage and dignity -- and their capacity to change. War is where he gave people hope through his not-so-mainstream sessions -- sessions that happened along riverbanks or in the mountains, even while warplanes still flew overhead. Sessions where refugees danced, meditated, moved to the music of Jimmy Cliff or Bob Marley and talked about their pain.

And war is where the victims and caregivers gave Dr. Gordon new insights about the power of communities. Insights, he says, he might never have learned had he not gone to South African villages to spend time with Mozambique's child soldiers. Or had he not worked with the scarred people of Sarajevo. Or traveled through gutted villages and past makeshift graves to try and help the refugees in Kosovo. These are lessons, he says, he wants to bring back to America.

"I was just leaving a simmering war in Macedonia. I was in Zurich when I saw the bombings of the World Trade Center," says Dr. Gordon, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C. He also heads the White House Commission for Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. "My first reaction was one of shock and my second was that war has come home." [...]