This piece is written by Mark Morford - his sister just graduated top of her ND class at Bastyr University. Soon, in 11 months, I will be finally graduating from Bastyr as an ND as well - so what Mark writes below is an inspiration. Thank you, Mark.
Mark attended the graduation ceremony and from reading his column, I gather he was quite impressed. Enjoy the column:
My college graduation ceremony sent roughly 300 sunbaked, slightly baffled, exasperatingly verbose, Shakespeare-drunk UC Berkeley English grads out into the world without the slightest clue as to what the hell they were going to do with their lives.
Most, I imagine, became teachers. Or maybe attorneys, for which I hereby apologize. A few became authors. Many found no immediate work being brilliant Milton-quoting wits at celebrity parties and hence promptly moved right back in with their parents. They went on not to figure out their lives until they were roughly 37 years old, at which point they realized they'd been managing that particular Starbucks for about 12 years already, which prompted them to say, "OK, I guess this is it. I mean, I suppose it could be worse. I mean, hell, at least I'm not a former
communications major who's now stocking little pink socklets at a Baby Gap in Tulsa, am I right? Damn right."
But never mind all that. Here is the good news: Thankfully, amid the tens of thousands of bewildered college grads leaving the hallowed halls of the academy every spring to face the Thunderdome of Brutal Reality, not all such ceremonies are equally fraught.
I am here to tell you, I have recently witnessed a different sort of matriculation, a different sort of human launch. It was the 2006 graduation ceremony of Bastyr University in Seattle, perhaps the finest, most respected and most difficult naturopathic medical school in the nation. And it was something to behold.
Bastyr is an alternative medical academy. It is perhaps most famous for ranking out world-class naturopathic doctors who, for the first four years of their studies, work through the same basic, science-intense material as their Western-trained counterparts, all about cadavers,biology, hard-core physiology and all the accompanying anxiety and viciousattrition rate for first- and second-year students who just can't hack theinsane pace and staggering workload.
But after four years, the ND students switch gears and move toward the real work of alternative healing, consisting of two or three more years of natural medicines and wellness and whole-person treatment; compassion, prevention and organic systems; and an astounding array of ancient nontoxic practices, none of which resort to slicing the flesh and loading it up with chemicals as a first mode of therapy.
It's a funky school. One part Birkenstock, one part slick modern facility, one part extremely rigorous university, one part spiritual quest, and all parts full of slightly oddball, uniquely attuned students who have dared to say, "Screw the traditional Western medical establishment and let's see if we can't try something more, you know, whole." Crazy, isn't it?
(I attended the ceremony, by the way, because my brilliant and goofy older sister was graduating from Bastyr's naturopathic doctoral program at thetop of her class, and it was she who delivered the commencement speech for the ND grads, which is amazing and wondrous in its own right. But that's another column.)
Oh, make no mistake: The Bastyr ceremony was a bit tedious. It was slow and formal and there were lots of people parading around in the typical black gowns. There were long speeches and staid processions and meek piano music, and the whole thing took well over three hours, during which the primary challenge became escaping the tightly packed aisles to find a restroom.
Then again, it was this very formality that made the event rather extraordinary. Because, despite its alternative bent, this was no hempy hippie, shaman drum circle out in a field by the woods. The venue (the Seattle symphony building) was beautiful, the ceremony professional, full of elegance and class, and the president of the university spoke eloquently and passionately, and gave advice of such articulation and grace, you couldn't help but feel that something rather exceptional was
happening here.
In other words, this was not a ragtag assortment of herb-crazed eccentrics
promoting medical pot and compost toilets. These were deeply trained healers and full-power doctors, just doctors of a different, more openhearted, open-minded bent. What a thing.
In fact, the Bastyr ceremony possessed an element that seems to be missing from the huge array of grad ceremonies happening across the nation: change. Cool and atypical, hopeful and deeply informed, and just a little bit unexpected. Which is, by most accounts, the best kind.
Oh sure, you attend a regular ol' university and watch the engineering department grad ceremony or the comp lit ceremony, the physics department ceremony or the botany department ceremony and you get a feeling that, well, at least we're still trying to pump smart people out into the world. Many of them are still full of new ideas, fresh integrity and crushing debt that will take roughly 77 years to pay off, and yet, most will invariably end up jaded and burned out, working in marketing for a dot-com, wondering what happened to their dream of writing a book on how to make your own absinthe.
But watching the Bastyr ceremony was different. It was like watching a bucket of very peculiar and incandescent flowers get tossed onto a field of coal. This year, the school pumped more than 250 alternative healers out into the pill-popping, surgery-happy, overmedicated world (up from just 35 grads only a dozen years ago), from Chinese-medicine practitioners to professional acupuncturists, holistic-nutrition experts to spiritually aware alternative psychologists to even a few young 'n' sexy midwives, along with dozens of full NDs who will take their state board exams (just like Western docs) and enter into the teeming world of suffering and pain and not offer surgery or Lipitor within the first 10 minutes of your
consultation.
These doctors will, instead, spend hours getting to know patients, understanding lives and tapping into ancient ideas of medicinal arts; these are doctors who will harness the formidable power of nature and spirit and time-tested human wisdom to help smack illness upside the head and, hell, after all that, if you still need some Prozac and a surgical rearrangement of your spleen, then by all means, they can recommend that,too.
I know, it sounds crazy. Integration and balance and the honoring of nature and ancient medicine? Mutual respect for all healing arts, from tincture to scalpel, herb to chemical? What a thing to watch new healers of this ilk enter the world. It's almost enough to give you a dose of that most rare of healing inoculations: hope.
Mark Morford's column appears Wednesdays and Fridays in Datebook and on
sfgate.com. E-mail him at mmorford@sfgate.com.
Some real estate judge is forcing Abraham, who has cancer of his lymph system, to re-enter chemotherapy against Abraham's will. Abraham researched which treatment he wanted and is choosing an alternate approach.
Chemo is not fun at all - it may be effective for some cancers but if Abraham wants to choose a different path, by all means it is HIS CHOICE. Not some judge's.
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