interview: Dr. Brons, PhD, MAOM

this is the second interview in this series (see the first here), conducted with our first year physiology professor, Dr. Brons.








what is your experience with chinese medicine and naturopathy?

my introduction to naturopathy was accidental. i was just looking for a job in 1981, somebody told me that this school was looking for a teacher- i came looking for a job and they picked me right away. so i simply joined the faculty knowing nothing about naturopathy and learned it as i went. one of the reasons i've stayed with it is that i do like a lot of the ideas that they have and wanted to see them succeed, so i thought "maybe i can make a contribution of some sort". but i'm not a purist; i'm not a naturopath, at all.

as far as chinese medicine: in 1990 i went back to school at OCOM [oregon college of oriental medicine] and became an acupuncturist. i graduated in 1993, had a small practice for a few years, then gave that up because i really ended up liking teaching better- so i came back to school. but i still found that chinese medicine was a great intellectual exercise. it's true mind expansion in a way, i will always cherish it. i really enjoy that part of it. i still teach classes here in terms of point location, etc.

what mystifies you most about the human body?

what mystifies me most is the fact that it just keeps going. in the early days of complexity theory in the 1950's and 60's, one of the problems that the physicists encountered was: why were simple systems so unstable? when they were trying to build something, why would it fall apart so easily? and then the other question came up later on- why are complex systems so stable? if you buy a car with lots of parts to it, lots of moving items and electronic gadgets, you're always in the shop getting one or more of them fixed at any time because they're going to break down.

but the human doesn't do that often; you do get sick, but not that often. and you heal- you don't have to go into the shop necessarily, but you heal most of the time, getting over colds and flus and that sort of thing. your wounds heal. that in itself tells you an amazing amount about the human body- that for all its replication and for all its efforts it manages to stay stable. and its reproducibility, in a sense, is what's incredible about it. and so that's what i'm interested in- biology from a "complexity" view. i'm really a biologist at heart, not really a medical person. so i'm interested in how the machine works, the "ghost in the machine" so to speak. being here gives me the opportunity to look into that, because we don't have to do research, so i can spend my time being the scholar. and the scholarship work doesn't go into books, it goes into lectures.

do you ever have doubts or problems with particular aspects of chinese medicine or naturopathy? do you ever doubt the efficacy of it?

the efficacy- basically i understand that there are major limitations in both areas of medicine. now i don't have a lot of experience with chinese herbal medicine. i didn't go into that direction. i do take them, and i've seen that they do a good amount of work. but in china, most of the medicine they practice there is western- it tells you something there, that the old model wasn't quite enough. so i do recognize that there are limitations to the alternative medical model.

and what i've noticed is that naturopathy has morphed itself- it was at one time felt to be competing against allopathic medicine, and now it's become more adjunctive, to actually work with them rather than instead of them. knowing full well that you cannot take care of some of the heavier problems where you need a little heft. but obviously they're building a role for themselves in the world. which is admirable because it's a necessary role.

conventional medicine has basically degenerated into an outlet for drugs, and everybody sort of knows this, even the doctors know this. so it's an appropriate thing to do, it's just the evolution of medicine itself. i don't foresee that naturopathy by itself will become a "leading light" so to speak. it will basically assimilate in some way, much like the osteopaths have.

even osteopaths are kind of losing their reputation as well, of being the "body doctors". because the osteopaths call themselves the practitioners of "holistic medicine" and resent the naturopaths for using the same term. they're basically at odds, because there's a lot of common turf. and osteopaths also do regular medicine, so they feel they have the upper hand. and in many ways they do.

so it's just a natural evolution of many elements coming together to form another medicine. and i think in ten, twenty years you'll see a whole different medicine arise out of the dialectic, if you will. that's what happens when you have many different competing fronts coming from different directions. one or two will dominate and the others will assimilate in. that's basically what i think will happen, we'll see a new model and doctors practicing differently. they can only make so many drugs for so many things after a while- soon they'll say "how do we take care of people"? [laughs]

in your opinion, can naturopathy and chinese medicine be effectively integrated?

in my mind, no. because they involve such completely different mindsets. you can not work in naturopathy and use chinese medicine using the same framework of mind because chinese medicine has its own framework that is unique. and i think it's one of the most elegant and organized systems i've ever seen. they've really had a chance to work this out- they've done it for thousands of years. so they've come up with a system that is so clear and yet it is very phenomenological in the sense that it doesn't really deal with mechanisms. it's not a physiologically based medicine. it's not scientifically based at all. it's based on the more phenomenological based aspects like what you see, how do you interact with it, and you basically make divisions. binomial separations of yin and yang, blood and chi, this kind of thing. by sorting yourself out this way you can come up with a very interesting picture of what's wrong here, what's the imbalance, what can you do about it?

so i found it to be so different from western medicine... when people ask me about the dual degree, whether you can integrate the two, i tell them: keep them in separate compartments of your mind. because they're so incongruous, even though they're both very good in their own direction. they use such a dissimilar basis. chinese medicine is basically imbalance of yin and yang, if you had to boil it down to something. western medicine is still a purgative world. it's still basically "demonological"- getting rid of something in the body that you don't want, getting something out that got in, that shouldn't be there. in chinese medicine, you only use a phase of that, in generally it's balancing a process that's already there. you don't get rid of it, you simply restore the balance. it sets up a whole different paradigm of diagnosis and treatment.

do you think that NCNM students get enough basic science training to be competitive with allopaths?

yes i do. i basically model the courses i do, for example, on the other medical schools- as well as the professors of biochemistry and pharmacology, etc. we all use pretty much the same curriculum, same textbooks. it's all the same stuff. i never modeled it to be like: "i'm going to come up with this naturopathic science" some people did- they wanted to have a naturopathic science. but there's no such thing. it's just what the body is and what people know about it. that's all. so i keep it at the same level.

what are the most common stumbling blocks for students? what do successful students have in common?

the people who stumble here walked in with inappropriate expectations. they basically thought they could come into a program that was a bit easier to do than say regular medical school, or were expecting more of a user-friendly approach; a little more artistic and a little less scientific. i'm being very simplistic on this because everybody has a slightly different take on it. but it's a sense i get- that people want a more qualitative approach to medicine rather than a quantitative one. the fact is you can never get away from quantitative, you're always dealing with something in terms of amount, degree, what have you- you're always measuring something.

and they might not be used to developing skills to doing these things. they come from programs in which they're not adequately prepared. granted, it is traditional that in the old days medical schools drew people from all disciplines because they wanted the well rounded mind. because that was a time that you could practice medicine with a well rounded mind. you weren't a scientist. you weren't a physiologist. things are different today. you really do have to know your body processes. so if you were a major in greek literature, it would be a tough go. even though you might be extremely knowledgeable about wisdom, it doesn't do you any good when you're learning about the physiology of the kidney, for example. so those people have a harder time.

there are also those people who have just a native intelligence. those are the kind of people that can do anything they want. they can major in literature, or be in sales for 15 years, and they'll come into the program and they'll do great. so there's no easy formulation for estimating this. we're always up against the problem of what type of students are going to succeed here. i'm tied closely with admissions- we're constantly faced with "who are your best calls for admitting?", and there's no good formula for that. and the people who do well here do so because they're just simply capable. a lot of people have come from pre med programs and they've already tested their knowledge and skill in anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, etc. and they discover they're OK at it, and they can pass well and they figure they can do the rest.

the one thing that does pop up, though, that we have noticed over the years, is that there is a loose inverse relationship here: people who do well in basic sciences are generally not the better clinicians, and the people who aren't as good in the basic sciences make better clinicians. perhaps there's that artistic, greek literature mind, maybe that is better in the long haul- to become someone who's a more compassionate physician, who sits back and looks at you and understands you from that perspective. a more phenomenological approach in a way.