A Journey to the Meaning of Health

By Unamarie Clibon, Pharm.D., M.D.

(Page 2 of 3)

I learned the material well, completed residency in Internal Medicine, then completed a fellowship in Medical Oncology/Hematology, and finally went into private practice. “Surely,” I thought, “with all we were learning about cell function and with the development of new drugs to change cellular function, curing more cancer was just around the corner.” I have always been an optimist. After 15 years in private practice, it was clear that each new drug and all the detailed cellular function discoveries were only making small differences in cancer treatment. A cancer diagnosis often makes patients look at their entire lives. So as a medical oncologist, I now observed how patients felt about their lives and choices and how that affected their treatment decisions and outcomes. In some cases, I cared for patients as they approached death. I often asked them to share their thoughts and feelings, so I could learn and help them as best I could.

Occasionally, I read about complementary and alternative medicines. The field was just emerging and being quickly applied to cancer patients. These areas included use of herbal treatments, acupuncture, learning mind-body connections, movement therapy, music therapy, and meditation. Also, this resulted in my thorough study of nutrition for health and its role in the treatment of disease. I thought, “I’ll learn this and apply it to the care of my cancer patients and surely they will do better.” It was exciting to see studies including consideration of the connection between body and mind in balancing energy to restore health in addition to all the other treatments. However, even though it was a more holistic approach, it was still limited by primarily concentrating on treatment of disease.

I began to recognize that despite medicine’s ability to describe what is wrong with the body in great detail, mostly that description is not the cause; it is only a description of the effect. After all my exploration, I still did not have answers to some basic questions: What is health? Is it just the absence of disease? Is it a state of being? What causes disease and how can that be interrupted or reversed? Often after encounters with patients, I said, “There is something very basic and probably very simple that we are missing here, something that applies to everything.”

It was during this time that I encountered the path of HÜMÜH and Wisdom Master Maticintin. I became a student and began to study the Teachings, which I am still continuing today. I brought with me my curiosity and questions about health, disease, and the choices people make. One of the basic principles of Transcendental Buddhist logic is that all conditions are contained in the mind, and one of the first questions I asked the Wisdom Master was, “Are all physiological conditions really contained in the mind?” She said, All conditions are contained in the mind, not some conditions, but all conditions.

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