Contents:
Well Centre International, Ltd
Sanya’s Bamboo Spirit Integral Health Resort
Being Part of the Solution
Who Are You?
Dispatch from China 7 (2)
Dateline: Sanya/Shanghai March, 2008
“Bending with the wind, the Taoist gathering water in a straw hat.” —Peter Hugo
WELL CENTRE INTERNATIONAL, LTD.
The exploration into Integral Medicine described in the last Dispatch rekindled an old interest. Some of you may remember my previous involvment with the Montreux Integral Resorts. What better time and place to revive the idea.
To proceed we have formed a company, Well Centre International, Ltd. and registered it in Hong Kong.
Well Centre International is a company devoted to envisioning and working toward the Integral Health and Wellness of the planet and its inhabitants.
Our principals have many years experience in: environmental conservation and sustainable development, medical practice and administration, training and educational materials development, and innovative marketing and communications.
Current projects, utilizing “green” technological approaches (both hardware & software) for personal and planetary sustainable living, include:
1) Developing the concept of Integral Health Resorts in China
2) Utilizing the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) process of the
UN Kyoto Protocol to spread clean energy alternatives, innovative
waste treatment. reforestation and green house gas emmissions
throughout China.
Well Centre Principals include:
David B. Sutton, Ph.D., Chief Integrating Officier (CIO)
Alan Mease, MD, Chief Medical Officier(CMO
Tony Lu, MD, Chief of Integrative Medicine
Robert Curtis, Chief of CDM Program
HERE IS A BRIEFING ON THE RESORT
CONFIDENTIAL
竹韵嘉园 Zhu Yun Jia Yuan*
Sanya’s Bamboo Spirit Integral Health Resort
Introduction
This prospectus represents a response to several world-wide trends. With the Sanya Integral Health Resort we are proposing a marriage of the emerging new integrative view of medicine with the ever-growing global movement of medical tourism. We will focus on the health and wellness aspects of this Integral Medicine and tap an underserved niche of the Medical Tourism market. The Clinic’s programs are a direct response to the demands of Integral Health while emphasizing the many strengths of China and Sanya in particular.
A New Vision of Health
“The greatest revolution in our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing their inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” —William James
Wellness is not the absence of illness. Wellness is a dynamic condition of optimum health that encompasses the whole person. The latest scientific findings tell us that our physical bodies are completely interconnected with our emotional and mental wellbeing. A new definition of wellness now includes physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual wellbeing. (1)
* a beautiful garden full of the rhyme,the spirit of bamboo (Working Name for Resort.)
Its central focus is on re-establishing connection with the processes of life, caring and
remembering of inner wisdom. We must trust the natural and evolutionary process that
has brought humankind this far. Through evocation of that inner wisdom, rather than technological manipulation, we can discover paths to true healing and enjoyment of life.
The purpose of integral health programs is to engage the individual in a life-long process of learning and personal growth. Integral Health depends on the expansion and intensification of consciousness—on remembering our connection with nature and the free expression of our joyfulness and love.
Integral Health brings its own assignments unique to each of us. We will each need to assume personal responsibility for remembering that which is in us all and for realizing the relationship between nature and human consciousness. This is the critical step in understanding the “dis-ease” catalyzed when this relationship is ruptured—and the health that arises when it is fully nourished.
Medical Tourism
Medical Tourism is the practice of traveling to a specific destination for health reasons or in order to receive medical attention. Medical tourism is not new, the early Greeks, a thousand years ago, ventured over the Mediterranean to Epidauria on the Saronic Gulf to confere with the healing god Asklepios. For decades pilgrims have journeyed to the healing waters of Lourdres and ‘originating’ glacier of Peru’s Ausangate mountain.
Today it is primarily represented by people travelling to some exotic destination to have elective surgery or a life-saving medical operation at a fraction of the price at home. Cosemtic, plastic surgery, hip replacements, fertility work, cancer treatments and heart surgery are the most frequent procedures. Thanks to internet technology, more affordable international travel and major advances in medical science, medical tourism is becoming a major global trend. (2)
Wellness Tourism
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
An under entertained aspect of this Medical tourism is the vast potential for serving people before they become sick by helping them learn and adopt unversally healthy habits and lifestyles that maintain a state of good health and prevent illness.
Healing comes in many forms. Health care is not just about High-tech repair.
As the new Integral Health model shows us there are many health care modalities that serve to maintain health and wellness. The old addage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” reminds us that preventive measures are the most cost-effective measures we can take in healthcare.
There is a need for places that provide access to these measures serving the hugh untapped wellness market with this learning for healthy living.
A group of Integral Health Professionals have developed the concept of Integral Health Resorts. Through ecologically designed “Integral Living Units” these Resorts model the best sustainable and natural design concepts with all local resources being used with care and economy combined with best conventional, traditional and alternative therapies.
Sustainable Design
四十年来画竹枝，日间挥写夜间思；
冗繁削尽留清瘦，画到生时是熟时。
The Integral Health Resort has been designed to enfold you into a beautiful bamboo environment through elegantly simple, environmentally sensitive design. This has been accomplished architectually by being consciously aware of how interactions with the environment improve our lives. We have chosen bamboo as our primary building material for its superior structural qualities, natural beauty, simple elegance, as well as its mystical and spiritual properites. (3)
We have sought to design our buildings to facilitate a creative, productive and fulfilling stay meeting the visitor’s physical, biological and spiritual needs.. They are meant to be an integral part of the landscape built of local materials, dependent of local energy, food and water, and on-site recycling of waste. We intend to take full advantage of the Clean Development Mechanisms sanctioned by the United Nation’s Kyoto Protocol in the development of on-site solar, wind and waste treatment facilities. By desiging the Resort into a self-contained recycling system, all resources are used with care and economy so that our luxury dwellings become part of the local ecosystem, supporting its health and sustainbility.
Proper siting and building design have been combined with the use of natural ventilation, shade and fans for optimum comfort. Incorporating day-lighting (the use of natural light) into our buildings will also result in significant energy savings and a more pleasant, healthy, illuminated space.
Extensive community involvement will include the use of locally produced and prepared food, purchasing local products and supporting local healers, artists, craftspersons and skilled labor. Also in the planning stages are co-operative community projects to include educational programs, organic gardening, cultivating of traditional Chinese herbs, fishing, indigenous agriculture, natural landscaping and environmental preservation and conservation.
Integral Health in Sanya
The Integral Health Program at the Resort include the best of conventional, traditional and alternative health therapies. In addition, a number of tools and processes have been developed to the inspire the imagination and activate creative energies. The goal of these programs is to provide a place where Integral Health can be experienced, where the wisdom within can be remembered and integrated. In the words of Jean Gebster, a place where “the human personality becomes transparent to itself so the originary presence, the sacred, is directly experienced.”
The Integral Health Resort is a perfect Medical Tourism Destination for repair, recuperation, rejuvenation, revitalization and recreation.
China is the home of some of the most ancient arts of this remembering. For thousands of years, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has included the use of natural elements and subtle energies in its practices. Acupuncture, Qui gong, herbal remedies and many other aspects of TCM are aligned with the ideas of Integral Health and Wellness.
There is an ever-increasing interest world-wide in all aspects of Traditional Chinese Medicine. And there is a hugh untapped market for vacation visitors wanting to experience these ancient arts for the maintenance of health and treatment of chronic and acute ailment.
Sanya is the ideal place to launch a series of on-going activities around these life enhancing propositions. It has long been acknowledged as the healthiest place in China — “The center of Longevity” (average native life-span 80 years old). It’s beautiful natural setting of clean air, healing waters, sunny skies (year-round temperatures average 25 degrees C.) is ideal for this kind of learning and remembering.
This is a proposal to bring international standard healthcare to Sanya. The Clinic at the Integral Health Resort could be a model for the development of other primary care clinics in China.
The Bamboo Spirit Integral Health Resort will encompass modalities well beyond the scope of any other medical facility because we are dealing with a different kind of medicine — Integral Medicine, medicine dealing with the whole person in sickness and in health. With its procedures for maintaining health and preventing illness in an unparalleled natural setting it provides a venue for a special kind of Medical Tourism — The Wellness, Integral Health Retreat Market.
The Integral Health Resort does not neglect the need for primary care, but it is not their focus. Here diagnosis of the current state of health is determined and a treatment plan is developed and begun. The focus will be Wellness not sickness.
While being fully connected to these medical facilities through our telemedicine facilities, we intend to go beyond the best Western practices and move into a new era of medicine, into the realm of Integral Medicine emphasizing diagnosis, evaluation, referral, prevention, rejuvenation and wellness.
“Most resorts, spas and wellness programs offer a predictable fare of exercise, instruction in diet, nutrition and stress reduction. While these components are valuable and necessary, I have felt they are partial and incomplete. We must go farther and reach higher.”
“As a physician, I have always been amazed at the immense capacity of individuals to bring about positive in their lives. If we are to realize this potential, we need two things — a vision of what can be and concrete guidelines on how the vision can be accomplished. That’s what “Integral Health Resorts” are all about — helping people realize their innate potential for creativity, productivity and fulfillment: the full flowering of human life.” —Larry Dossey, M.D. internationally renowned author of the highly acclaimed books, “Space, Time, and Medicine,” (1982), “Beyond Illness” (1984), “Recovering the Soul”(1989), “Meaning and Medicine,” (1992) and “Healing Words” (1993) and is executive editor of the journal, “Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine.”
A complete description of the the Resort’s Integral Health Program and be found in Appendix A.
Notes:
(1) A new model of medicine is emerging to support this concept of wellness. It is being called “Integral Medicine.” Integral medicine embraces “all previous perspectives and approaches to health and healing while simultaneously transcending them in the creation of a fundamentally new vision.” The foundation of this transformation is an expansion of consciousness.
Integral medicine promotes an approach embedded in the scientific dimension that epitomizes the best in modern health care, while equally recognizing that human beings possess emotional, spiritual, and relational dimensions that are essential in the diagnosis and treatment of disease and the cultivation of wellness.
As such it is more a template for the evolution of medical philosophy than a therapeutic approach. This evolution is not only necessary but inevitable and fundamental to solving the conundrum that is our current health care systems. This approach takes “mind-body medicine” to the next level, one that integrates spiritual dimensions fully into our understanding of how the body works in health and illness. Integral medicine reconciles the long-standing split between the noetic (interior) aspects of experience and the physical and objective aspects that characterize science-based medicine.(from, Consciousness and Healing )
(2) The Hospitals and Clinics in such places as Thailand, India, Costa Rica, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia, Turkey and South Africa that cater to the tourist market often are among the best in the world, and many are staffed by physicians trained at the Medical Centers in the United States and Europe.
Bangkok’s Bumrundgrad Hospital, for instance, has more than 200 surgeons who are board-certified in the United States (1), and one of Singapore’s major hospitals is a branch of the prestigious Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In a field where experience is as important as technology, Escorts Heart Institute and Research Center in Delhi and Faridabad, India, performs nearly 15,000 heart operations every year, and the death rate among patients during surgery is only 0.8 percent–less than half that of most major hospitals in the United States.
In many foreign clinics, too, the doctors are supported by more registered nurses per patient than in any Western facility, and some clinics provide single-patient rooms that resemble guestrooms in four-star hotels, with a nurse dedicated to each patient 24 hours a day.
Ten years ago, medical tourism was hardly large enough to be noticed. Today, more than 250,000 patients per year visit Singapore alone–nearly half of them from the Middle East. This year, approximately half a million foreign patients will travel to India for medical care, whereas in 2002, the number was only 150,000, and now it is growing at 30% a year.(2)
In monetary terms, experts estimate that medical tourism could bring India as much as $2.2 billion per year by 2012. Argentina, Costa Rica, Cuba, Jamaica, South Africa, Jordan, Malaysia, Hungary, Latvia and Estonia all have broken into this lucrative market as well, or are trying to do so, and more countries join the list every year.
Some important trends guarantee that the market for medical tourism will continue to expand in the years ahead. By 2015, the health of the vast Baby Boom generation will have begun its slow, final decline, and, with more than 220 million Boomers in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, this represents a significant market for inexpensive, high-quality medical care. There is also a growing interest with these boomers and later generations in optimum health and wellness.
Medical tourism will be particularly attractive in the United States, where an estimated 43 million people are without health insurance and 120 million without dental coverage–numbers that are both likely to grow. Patients in Britain, Canada and other countries with long waiting lists for major surgery will be just as eager to take advantage of foreign health-care options.
3) About Bamboo: Bamboo is versatile with a short growth cycle. It can be harvested in 3-5 years versus 10-50 years for most softwoods and hardwoods. Bamboo is the fastest growing plant on this planet. It grows one third faster than the fastest growing tree. Some species grow as much as four feet a day. Thanks to its rapid growth, the yield (weight per acreage and year) is up to 25 times higher than that of timber.
Bamboo can be harvested and replenished with virtually no impact to the environment. It can be selectively harvested annually and is capable of regeneration without need to replant. There is a 3-5 year return on investment for a new bamboo plantation versus 8-10 years for rattan, and even longer for other timber sources.
Bamboo is a viable replacement for wood. It is one of the strongest building materials, with a tensile strength that rivals steel and weight-to-strength ratio surpassing that of graphite. It withstands up to 52,000 pounds of pressure psi. With a 10-30% annual increase in biomass versus 2-5% for trees, bamboo creates greater yields of raw material for use. One bamboo clump can produce 200 poles in the five years it takes one tree to reach maturity.
Bamboo is a critical element in the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It helps reduce the carbon dioxide gases blamed for global warming. Some bamboo even sequesters up to 12 tons of carbon dioxide from the air per hectare, which makes it an extremely efficient replenished of fresh air. It is the fastest growing canopy for the regreening of degraded areas and generates up to 35% more oxygen than equivalent stand of trees.
Bamboo is a renewable resource for agroforestry production. It is used to produce flooring, wall paneling, pulp for paper, fencing, briquettes for fuel, raw material for housing, and more. In the tropics it is possible to grow your own home. In Costa Rica, 1000 houses of bamboo are built annually with material coming only from a 60 hectare (150 acres) bamboo plantation.
Bamboo is a natural control barrier. Because of its wide spread root system and large canopy, bamboo greatly reduces rain run off, prevents massive soil erosion and keeps twice as much water in the watershed. Bamboo also helps mitigate water pollution due to its high nitrogen consumption, making it the perfect solution for excess nutrient uptake of wastewater from manufacturing, intensive livestock farming, and sewage treatment facilities.
Bamboo is a pioneering plant and can be grown is soil damaged by overgrazing and poor agriculture techniques. Unlike most trees proper harvesting does not kill the bamboo plant so topsoil is held in place. Additionally, because of its dense litter on the forest floor it actually feed the topsoil over time. This will provide healthy agricultural lands for other crops for generations to come.
Current research points to bamboo’s potential in a number of medical uses. Secretion from bamboo is used internally to treat asthma, coughs, and can be used as an aphrodisiac. Ingredients from the root help treat kidney disease. Roots and leaves have also been used to treat venereal disease and cancer. Sap is said to reduce fever, and ash will cure prickly heat. (Taken from [check link] bamboo@bambootechnologies.com)
See also , “Visionary Bamboo Designs for Ecological Living” (Shyam Paudel, David Greenberg and Robert Henrikson, 2007, Hymos Advertising, Beijing.) for beautiful examples of Bamboo structures and dwellings.
Draft, 21 November, 2007 David B, Sutton, Ph.D.
Well Centre International, Ltd.
BEING PART OF THE SOLUTION
The irony is glaring! I spent the majority of my 40 year career as an environmental Sisyphus — pushing on the main stream to obtain higher ground. Everytime I thought I was reaching a new plateau, the weight of special interest pulled us back down into the pool of greed and control… (like the gutting of the Carter National Energy Plan by the newly elected Reagan regime)
It is almost certain that the gravity of special interest will also be enough to soon de-elevate Al Gore’s recent ascent to higher ground in the US.
Now after 35 years of personally preaching the dangers of global warming and the need for the reduction of green house gases (see Ecology: Selected Concepts, 1973), I have finally connected with a REAL opportunity to something about it.
I want to share this with you because I am convinced that it is in China where we can do the most good. As the fastest growing industrial economy in the history of the world, China represents a real opportunity to leap frog the profligate waste and inefficiency of the American “success story.” With its Government’s concern and intention to pursue “scientific development” (read: sustainable development with real efforts at environmental protection), China represents a willing candidate for the growing funds paying for carbon emissions reductions and emission reduction credits as well as other environmental protections.
The 1997 adoption of the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change heralded the prospect of a global market for carbon emission allowances and project-based carbon credits. This in turn spurred the development of several national, regional, and corporate emissions trading schemes as governments and corporations positioned themselves to either regulate the new market or take advantage of new investment opportunities.
The protocol sets legally binding targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions for specific countries (known as Annex I Parties, effectively the ‘developed’ countries). Because only Annex I countries have reduction targets. Annex II countries (the ‘developing’ countries), can set up projects to reduce emissions to sell to Annex I countries to offset against their target. This creates a financial incentive for Annex II nations to pursue projects that are environmentally sustainable and reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
You can get more detailed information from these websites:
[bad link] http://cdm.ccchina.gov.cn/english/
We are now contacting those integrally involved in China with significant carbon emissions (or recapture ) such as reforestation projects, clean energy projects – renewable source power plants (biomass, wind, hydro…etc.), Methane gas projects – coal mine/coal bed methane, animal farms, landfill gas projects, Nitrous Oxide (NO) Hydroflurocarbon (HFC), chloroflurocarbon (CFC) reduction projects, as well as smelter improvements.
We then contact them with proposals for their emission reductions or emission reduction credits and the significant financial benefits that they can accrue from them. I am convinced that this is a REAL opportunity to make a difference. After so many years fighting a losing battle in the US (still the only non-signator, to the UN Kyoto Protocol), it is ironic that I might be able to help here in China.
Wish me luck, I will keep you posted.
WHO ARE YOU?
I have just gone through another interview.
I am always ambivalent about such things, looking forward to seeing the interviewer’s reaction but dreading the outcome.
I never know what side of me to present — Am I the fun-loving bon vivant about town or the misplaced academic with an inquiring mind trying to make sense of living in a totally different culture.
I have learned through the years that most people have difficulty in dealing with multidimensional people. Either you are one thing or you are another, a scientist or an artist, a businessman or an entertainer. Heaven forbid that you could be both.
The truth is we are all multidimensional beings. It is our life-long developmental task to integrate all those disparate pieces of our being into a functional whole.
Unfortunately, the sad fact is that our education and other social conditioning don’t facilitate that; in fact they purposely hinder it. Early on we are all forced to choose one aspect of our being and focus on it, perfect it and define ourselves by it.
That’s how our educational systems work, push people to specialize — to learn more and more about less and less ever further removed from consequence and context. Then once they have defined themselves as the world’s expert on some sub-specialty they can secure a place for themselves in the scheme of things. The very real danger of this is that they have us specialize to a point we think we can control the piece of the universe we know so well. (Never mind that it is connected to a myriad of pieces we know not well.) Our education fuels such hubris, crushing the humility of the devout generalist seeking an integrated gestalt.
From my earliest schooling on I was asked to choose, Did I want to be a scientist (my Dad was) or an artist? Throughout the entire process (even through graduate school) I refused to specialize in either. Consequently, now as a Ph.D. I still am not an expert in anything and I continue to find that there is more and more that I know less and less about.
Our social conditioning also thwarts personal integration. There is little support for the youngster trying to integrate the tough, aggressive masculine with the more sensitive feminine part of their nature. We are all aware of the concern for the girl who has actually come to deal with their masculine (yang) and become a “tom-boy” or a boy presumably too in touch with the yin in him who is overly sensitive and delicate.
Enough, lets leave this for another time.
Back to interview. I have been through these things before here in Shanghai. They are looking to see where you fit — into which category of expat, Missionary, Mercenary or Misfit, you fit. It is immediately obvious that I belong to the “misfit” group for a number of reasons. One is because I do not like to be defined by a job, a title, or what I say. I don’t mind owning up to the totality of what I do. But who’s interested in the totality? My eclectic interests and activities always create a problem. What box do you put me in? and what do you label it?
In the past, the printed profiles have had me dancing around town throwing April Fool’s Parties (see “More than a Dancing Fool” Metrozine, 2004), or as a retired US academic here consulting with an International Wine Company, and co-directing a new English program for business professionals (see. “The Magic of Miraculous English” Shanghai Scene, 2003). It remains to be seen where they will put me this time.
Ok, Friends that’s it for now. Hope this finds you all happy and well.
All My Best,
David, “Leming”