Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/72312
ANCIENT MEDICINAL ROOTS Remaining fragments of the texts, however, were commissioned to be redrawn as stone etchings by King Rama III in 1832. Today, more than sixty such epigraphs showing treatment points and energy lines are on public display at the famous Wat Pho temple complex in Bangkok, where the golden statue of the Reclining Buddha lies. In 1856, King Rama V appointed the royal doctors to also translate and edit Indian Pali and Sanskrit medical texts into a Thai version, called Medical Science Textbook, with another version known as Thai Massage Handbook. Western medicine was introduced to Thailand in the middle of the nineteenth century, mainly by American missionaries, and traditional treatment approaches fell out of favor—another example of Western influence on Thailand. In 1962, as the story goes, the current King, Bhumibol Adulyadej, Rama IX, visited Wat Po and asked about Thai traditional medicine and particularly massage, which triggered renewed interest in it. A council of traditional medicine doctors was granted approval by the Ministry of Heath to establish Wat Phra Chetuphon Thai Traditional Medicine Science School. Since then, the so-called Wat Po style of massage evolved. One of the original teachers at that time, Ajahn Sintorn, eventually moved to Chiang Mai, where he started the Shivagakomarpaj Hospital, now called the Old Medicine Hospital. No longer serving as a hospital, it has become one of the best-known massage schools in the country. THE DOUBLE-HEADED DRAGON OF EAST MEETING WEST The attempts to corroborate Eastern approaches to healing by applying Western empirical testing is "a mixed blessing, a double-headed dragon," says Pierce Salguero, perhaps the most knowledgeable Western authority on Thai traditional medicine. He has authored several books on the subject, studied it for five years in Thailand, and is currently completing his doctorate in the History of Medicine Department at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. "On the one hand, it breathes new life into traditions and practices, dramatically increasing their relevance and legitimacy on the world stage and making them marketable and exportable," he says. "This awareness of and attention to them will preserve practices that could have been lost and forgotten altogether. "On the other hand, the marketplace has forced a homogenization. What's now called Thai traditional medicine is a standardized system that comes mainly from the top down, from Bangkok bureaucrats. We lose the regionally distinct knowledge practiced by ethnic minorities in the mountains of remote Thailand, for example, who use local plants and herbs. To a large extent, those village healers are the losers." Among the winners is the entire city of Chiang Mai, where Thai massage schools have become a growth industry. "When I first came to Chiang Mai in 1997 to study, there were four or five schools," Salguero recalls. "I was in a class with seven people." Now there are some thirty schools, plus many other private teachers. Each class has between twenty and thirty students who sign up for five-day to two-week courses (average cost is about US $160). Wasan Sintorn, the son of the Old Medicine School's founder and now director, said twenty years ago about twenty non-Thai people took the course each year; last year he had four hundred. One of the reasons for the increase, he says, was good old marketing with a modern Western adaptation. "My father was a great doctor but not a good promoter," he says. "When I took over, we made brochures, put up posters, and spread the word. But when we put up a website, things really took off. We got interest and inquiries from all over the world. Now the majority of our students are from the West." A former student, David Bliss, a twenty-eight-year-old New York massage practitioner who has lived in Thailand for seven years studying Thai traditional medicine and massage, says the techniques he has picked up are valuable assets to his body of knowledge as a health practitioner. But he remains ambivalent as to whether, even as a Westerner, accumulating data through the evidence-based medical model adds anything to his own knowledge of the body. "Everyone here knows that massage and herbal treatments are good for you," he says. "It's the West that needs to validate it with science, because science is the religion of the West. This healing tradition is older than science. If anything, it's science that should be questioned." Nonetheless, he conceded, if not for the interest from and influence of the West, Thai massage and medicine may well have become an all-but-forgotten healing relic, to be bronzed and displayed in some imaginary Museum of Endangered Healing Traditions. And that would have improved no one's health. or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness and the Man Who Found Them All (now in paperback from Three Rivers Press, 2007 ; www.BuddhaorBust. com). He's covered the convergence of Eastern and Western health, psychology, and spirituality trends for thirty years. Perry Garfinkel is the author of Buddha 80 massage & bodywork january/february 2008