May 2004 | Living Healthy: Practitioner Profile
Self Healing
by Ginger Flath
Quality of life largely depends on attitude, belief, and perception, according to Adam Burke, PhD, MPH, LAc. He’s a teacher and acupuncturist who believes that health is more than the absence of disease and its symptoms; cultivating a healthy approach to life means integrating the psychological and spiritual with the physical.
In 1978, while a UCLA graduate student, Adam Burke struggled with stress-related symptoms for which Western medicine offered no remedy. Doctors told him his problem was nonexistent. Only when he began acupuncture treatments did he find any relief. And the benefits went beyond the loss of physical symptoms. Acupuncture brought him a sense of peace and well-being.
That experience fueled Burke’s already burgeoning interest in mind-body healing, and he went on to get his PhD in social psychology at UC Santa Cruz (1984). Toward the end of his studies there, he began acupuncture training at the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine (1986), and then apprenticed with an experienced elderly Chinese herbalist. What he learned inspired him to spend two summers studying in Sichuan, China, at Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Currently Burke teaches at SF State University through its Institute for Holistic Healing Studies, where he is associate director. Though he still maintains a small private practice, today Burke focuses on helping others to heal themselves, teaching them how to actively engage their own healing processes. “To me, teaching is a healing practice. Healing is about transformation and teaching is about transformation,” he said.
Burke recently authored Self-Hypnosis: New Tools for Deep and Lasting Transformation (Ten Speed Press). The book explores the idea that “people have an innate capacity to heal themselves. Often they are sick because they don’t have the skills or the knowledge or the energy to tap into that resource. The role of the healer is to act on, inform, and energize that inner light, that healing capacity.”
So important is the patient’s role in healing, Burke has observed, that for some of his clients “acupuncture has limitations. In many cases, there are psychological underpinnings to illness” that need to be resolved before healing can truly occur. Because chronic pain is frequently accompanied by anxiety and depression, Burke has discovered that using hypnotherapy along with inserting acupuncture needles can achieve good results.
A focus on whole-being healing also informs Burke’s current work with the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Recently, NCCAM decided to fund eight international collaborative research efforts that will give researchers an opportunity to study another culture’s medicine in its country of origin. Burke and Rick Hecht. M .D., the director of research at UC San Francisco’s Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, are among the first on board: they will go to Bangalore, India, collaborating with the Vivekananda Yoga Research Foundation (VYASA) to study how yoga (as an integrative system not just a series of postures) addresses diabetes. The pair will spend time with VYASA researchers there while its director, ex-NASA engineer H.R. Nagendra, will be able to spend time with researchers at UCSF.
Ultimately, we are our own best healers. As Burke observes: “It’s hard to change anybody, even if they want to change. The only one we can change is our self. That’s the game. It’s figuring it out for ourselves.”
Ginger Flath is a freelance writer and editor in Sausalito
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