GAGORI MITRA: I’ve never before heard of a doctor publicly recommending bodywork quite as enthusiastically, at least here in India. Why you? What do you see is the benefit?
DR. SHIKHA: If they were to look at bodywork as a kind of free flowing and intuitive physiotherapy that can balance both body and mind, many doctors would recommend it to their clients. But then, they would need to know something about it – or be acquainted with a quality therapist. As a matter of fact, in western countries doctors, especially if their approach is integrative, frequently recommend bodywork. Like yoga or other forms of exercising, bodywork can be a part of many detoxification and rejuvenation protocols prescribed frequently by doctors of integrative or functional medicine, which is the kind of medicine that I myself mostly practice.
GAGORI MITRA: All right other doctors particularly in the West do it. What are your reasons, specifically?
DR. SHIKHA: As to the benefits, there are both physical and psychological aspects. Overall, bodywork helps to refresh and reactivate the body and the senses, thereby indirectly relaxing and invigorating the mind. Of course, the benefits can also be quite specific, depending on the individual case, and ranging from healing sports injuries to help people overcome chronic low-level depression or lack of vitality. You know from your own first-hand experience how well bodywork can actually assist in dealing with medical problems. You have cooperated with an orthopedic surgeon in Pune who was astonished about what you could do for his patients and how much relief the bodywork that you administered, brought them.
GAGORI MITRA: True, but giving bodywork sessions is what I do professionally. I trained for it. Whereas you are a rare example, you were both physician and bodyworker rolled in one, at some point, I believe. That is one step further beyond cooperating with a physician. You have experimented with practicing bodywork yourself, haven’t you?
DR. SHIKHA: Well, I was actually more than experimenting, with it. I treated people regularly and sometimes even daily with different modalities of therapeutic massage for about three years, 2005 to 2007.
GAGORI MITRA: Was that before, or after you became a doctor?
DR. SHIKHA: After.
GAGORI MITRA: As a doctor, did you not consider yourself much too superior to do manual labor, in the form of hands-on treatments, like ‘massage’, a word that does not have the best ring to an Indian ear?
DR. SHIKHA: I must admit, thoughts of this kind occasionally run through my head, yes: the status issues. They are deeply rooted and part of our culture – but in truth only silly, non-issues, really. Come to think of it, it is at the root not very Indian to devalue physical forms of treatment, as the vaidyas or Ayurvedic physicians of old looked favorably upon therapeutic massage and exercise regimens. These were and still are an integral part of our authentic form of Indian medicine. May be in this respect, in our habitual denigrating the body and despising working with our hands, we think and act more like the Victorian English, rather than Indian. The irony is, today, the English have left such hang-ups behind, and long ago. It is high time for us to get over them as well, otherwise we will miss out on many good opportunities for helping our clients.GAGORI MITRA: You are saying we Indians learned to denigrate the body from our previous colonial overlords. Now they have dropped their prejudices, and we are coming back full circle to the ancient Indian approach of using massages to treat some, even serious conditions.
DR. SHIKHA: Yes. Let me give you another example of how well medicine and bodywork or therapeutic massage, go together today. I have a good friend from Germany; she is a naturopathic physician herself who frequently cooperates with MDs and recently opened her own practice in Berlin. There she not only treats patients but teaches aspects of naturopathy, and therapeutic massage. She is successful. People seek her out. The MDs, all of them interested in integrative medicine, who send her clients, cherish her expertise. So, come to think of it, why should I be down on myself for having been a massage therapist or bodyworker as a sideline venture, besides being a doctor? It makes no sense. The bodywork episode actually made me a better doctor.
GAGORI MITRA: How so?
DR. SHIKHA: Through teaching me how to understand body psychology.
GAGORI MITRA: What are you saying?
DR. SHIKHA: In order to do bodywork properly, you have to be aware of the client’s body. You have to listen to and observe its subtle messages of how it may want to be touched, to be treated. Otherwise your treatments will remain mechanical and effective only in the most superficial sense. Likewise, when a client now sits before me in my consultation room, his body gives a lot of unspoken messages, which may or may not become part of the diagnosis. But apart from the question of diagnosis, these unspoken messages tell me how I need to address a client in order to reach him. I get a better sense of what words and what tone to chose.
GAGORI MITRA: In other words bodywork sharpened your skills for appropriate doctor/client interaction.
DR. SHIKHA: Precisely. American medical textbooks now speak of the necessity of “Activating the patient.” In other words, how do I start and maintain a meaningful dialogue, a real exchange? In my own medical college days, I had never even heard of ‘doctor/client interaction’, or the communication skills that a doctor needs to have. It simply wasn’t part of our curriculum. However, doing bodywork for three full years, while also practicing medicine, definitely gave me an excellent education in the field, one that I am thankful for even now. My patients often comment on the fact that I have the ability to reach them. They can hear me. Well, they can hear me because to a certain degree I am able to ‘hear’ and ‘read’ them. All other medically relevant ramifications aside, this makes for much more pleasant doctor/patient relations. I wrote an article about this whole subject. May be you’d want to look it up: healthyhealingcentergoa.blogspot.in/2011/08/doctor-patient-interaction-or-necessity.html. I posted this in August 2011.
GAGORI MITRA: How did you get into bodywork? This is not the most natural thing to end up with, for a graduate from a medical college? Did your family not want you to get a post-graduate degree? I mean, follow the usual career path?
DR. SHIKHA: Initially such was also my own plan. Then, in the course of a longer-term internship in a gynecology ward, I started to become disenchanted with the allopathic approach. I started to see the shortcomings necessarily involved in a form of medicine that only works at suppressing symptoms and is hardly ever interested in going to the root of the problem. At that time, I even contemplated studying Ayurveda, but during further research found out that the quality of the college level Ayurvedic training is deplorably low, much lower even than in many medical colleges. At that point I received an offer to work as a doctor in a bio-oxidative clinic in Bangalore, which was a specialization that interested me. Through further contacts this led to my attending a 300-hour residential course in bodywork and finally to accepting a position as a medical advisor for a day-spa, in Goa. I guess, I was in an exploring mode and trusted that everything would eventually work out perfect, which it did; because only one year later I was able to open Healthy Healing Medical Center.
GAGORI MITRA: What happened to your career as a bodyworker? Are you still active?
DR. SHIKHA: No, there is not enough time left for it. Besides, I never really wanted to do this professionally, full time. I had always wanted to be a doctor who also understands this particular aspect of the body – from hands-on experience rather than only from a textbook.
GAGORI MITRA: Do your patients get good bodywork?
DR. SHIKHA: If they want it and ask for it, yes. And to some I recommend it specifically. Last season, I also offered detoxification and rejuvenation packages, all of which included bodywork sessions. Some people really liked these programs.
GAGORI MITRA: You have someone working for you then?
DR. SHIKHA: They do not work for me but with me, and unfortunately they are not always available. They are free lancers, very well trained with years of practical experience and a good college education as their background. For the level of massages that I want to see delivered I need mature and well-established therapists. Regarding bodywork it is my view, that the therapist is more critical to the outcome than the technique. I think it was Michael Murray who said, that in bodywork, “The technique is only the tool; the result is largely dependent on the person using the tool.” If the therapist is himself a deeply balanced person, not holding back, not uptight, not intrusive, yet very skilled – then bodywork can indeed be good medicine.