The Qi-Unity Report interviews Chris de Vries

What’s it like to become an AOM student in the later years of one’s life experience? The Qi-Unity Report interviews Chris de Vries, a third year student at the Eastern School of Acupuncture and Traditional Medicine.

Rumor has it you are approaching the celebration of your 68th birthday. What made you decide to study acupuncture in this chapter of your life?

It is true that I will be 68 years old in September, 2009. My path to pursuing the art of acupuncture came from a therapist who I was seeing as part of a requirement of Mind of the Cells that is a healing program based upon Tibetan spiritual practices. One of the requirements of this program was that a participant had to see a therapist for a minimum of once a week. After about a year of consultation, my therapist said that I would be wise to study acupuncture. I asked him why, and he proceeded to give me his view of the matter for the next 45 minutes. The insight he provided was clear enough to move me to act. My therapist was in New Rochelle, NY, where Mercy College had an acupuncture clinic in the Sound Shore Medical Center of Westchester (SSMC). I left his office and went directly to Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, NY. I signed up there for an undergraduate program that would qualify me to enter graduate school for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). This was the beginning of my journey to master the practice of the art of acupuncture.

Can you share a couple of stories of how your previous job led you to your current direction?

I was working as an associate engineer at Electro Nucleonics on the development of a centrifugal blood chemistry analyzer. During one of the tests that we were conducting, a need arose for a staphylococcus aureus culture. I went into our clinical laboratory and asked our clinical technologist for one and was told we were fresh out. When asked how soon she could obtain a culture, she said 72 hours. She went to the lab refrigerator taking out 3 Petri dishes filled with agar, picked up a sterile swab that she proceeded to swab behind my left ear, and then she dabbed the swab onto the agar in each dish.

I restated that I needed a staphylococcus aureus culture. She replied that staphylococcus aureus grows all over your skin. I enquired as to why I did not then have a staph infection. The answer was that I was not susceptible. She gave me an explanation of susceptibility that did not make scientific sense to me. I told her so, and she referred me to our staff pathologist. He explained his answer to me for the better part of 2 hours. It was complex, interesting, and from my understanding did not explain it, either. The power of the question, “What is susceptibility?” has been part of my motivation to study other healing arts ever since.

You apparently lost your voice and came into contact with alternative healing through that process. Could you tell that story?

I was a product manager for Panasonic in the U.S. and traveled to the Far East. During one of those trips I came down with a persistent case of laryngitis. My ear nose and throat (ENT) specialist (otolaryngologist) prescribed antibiotics that did not resolve the condition. I had acquired a virus that had affected my right recurrent (inferior) laryngeal nerve. Weeks turned into months and several ENTs, neurologists, and surgeons told me that surgery would give me a 50/50 chance of recovering my voice. These were not good enough odds. In investigating what others had done for similar voice problems, I became aware that there were other approaches that had been used successfully. I enrolled in a 3 year certificate course on hands-on healing at the Fire and Wind Healing Institute of Tarrytown, NY. As part of the course I wrote a thesis on “Magnetic Healing.” In the literature research for the thesis I became aware of Chinese medicine as being one of the healing arts that connects more of the dots between the energetic and the physical. The head of the Fire and Wind Institute, after reading my thesis, said that I would be practicing Chinese medicine. At the time I had no interest in doing so. How wrong I was.

Do you sometimes wish you had started studying AOM earlier in your life or are you content with doing so at this point?

Now is the best time of all to be studying acupuncture from my point of view. Today’s context allows more possibility for acceptance of integrated medicine than ever before. One only has to look at redwingbooks.com or Amazon.com to see the wealth of information about acupuncture and Oriental medicine (AOM) that is available today. I had to go through a lot of unlearning and self realization before I was ready to study AOM. I needed to have the time of losing my voice for 4 years to learn how to listen more deeply. My opportunity to study the art of AOM came to me at just the right time in my life. It was no accident.