Vietnamese Man Uses Hands to Administer Energy Healing
Many traditional healing arts are remarkably effective. Though the US often boosts of its technological advances in medicine, our country lacks research into healing folk arts which have been around for millenia. As a Korean American, I know that the folk healers have a special touch of groundedness that professional doctors of Western medicine do not. I know that faith in one's healer has much to do with the health outcomes. Trust and love can be healing in of themselves. Anyways, Can who has been doing some energy healing with his hands passed on this article to me.
Vietnamese Man Uses Hands to Administer Energy Healing.
URL: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-8408987_ITM
COPYRIGHT 2001 San Jose Mercury News
Byline: Elsa C. Arnett
HANOI _ He isn't listed in any doctors' directory.
But hundreds of people will attest to his remarkable healing powers.
Dung Tran uses only one medical tool: his hands. The fingers are bony, the skin at the knuckles have wizened, the fingertips are stained a faint copper from years of potent Singapore cigarettes. Overall, they seem pretty ordinary for a 75-year-old.
Until you touch them. Tran's hands are toasty, almost bordering on hot, as if he just lifted them from the sides of a steaming bowl of noodle soup.
Tran uses his hands, and their heat, to administer an ancient form of Asian medicine known in Vietnam as nhan dien, or ''energy healing.''
For centuries, folk remedies such as energy healing, crushed tiger bone and extracted bear bile were all that Vietnamese people had to treat ailments from a sore back to a stroke. Not any longer. These days, Western medicine abounds in Vietnam. Hospitals have high-tech diagnostic devices; pharmacy shelves are stocked with drugs from the United States, France and Germany.
Yet many Vietnamese still cling to the familiar. They continue to rub a pungent homespun alcohol on an arthritic back. They continue to stroke a coin vigorously into their skin to ease a bad cold. They continue to make a bitter, black brew from dried plants to settle an upset stomach.
They continue to line up at Tran's doorstep so his fingertips can try to soothe their ulcers, slow their cancers and quell their seizures.
For many Vietnamese, a cure lies not in a pre-processed tablet, but from the harmony between their bodies, their minds and the natural world. For them, the latest advances in modern medicine cannot compete with the time-tested remedies passed down over several thousand years.
''Nature influences many things that go on in us,'' said Tran, who spent most of his life as a philosophy and foreign language professor in Hanoi. ''People get migraines during thunderstorms, people feel energetic in sunlight. It only makes sense that if nature can harm us, it can also help us.''
Energy healing hails from China and India as far back as 4,000 years and is practiced by millions of people throughout Asia. The theory requires one person _ Tran, for example _ to become a giant heat magnet and absorb energy from nature and transfer it to another person.
In Asian medicine, the human body is all about balance and the smooth flow of energy through the veins and organs. The infusion of added energy from healer to patient is supposed to open whatever clog has developed to block that smooth flow, restoring equilibrium.
In the United States, energy healing is one of the many alternative therapies that are only grudgingly gaining the respect of mainstream medicine. American researchers are working on experiments to figure out why energy healing, herbs, deep breathing and even laughter seem to boost people's health.
Until they find a scientific explanation, many of these therapies remain on the fringes. Health insurance companies won't cover them. People who seek them do so at their own risk, and expense.
''The medical community is still keeping alternative medicine at arms length,'' said Dr. John Wahdud Laird, director of the Jaffe Institute of Spiritual and Medical Healing, an energy healing school in California's Napa Valley. ''But there is a much more open attitude towards these things than there was five or 10 years ago.''
Immigrants have helped to popularize energy healing in the Bay Area, where it has become a fixture in the world of alternative medicine.
It's hard to know how many in Vietnam rely on energy healing. The Vietnamese government does not keep track of healers like Tran; it wouldn't be easy even if they tried. Most of these healers take classes from various healing masters, but they aren't certified. Most work out of their living rooms. Most are as mysterious as the healing they practice.
Tran doesn't advertise. He doesn't charge, either. His skills, he says, were given to him by God. Comfortably retired, he would not sully them by taking money.
Many who arrive at Tran's doorstep come after everything else has failed. They hear about him by word-of-mouth: so-and-so's mother who knows so-and-so's brother went to Tran and was cured, they say. Next thing, Tran has a new patient.
That's how Phuong Nguyen found himself cross-legged on Tran's lacquered wood coffee table that fills one-third of Tran's living room.
Nguyen, 29, was studying design in Montreal. At the start of his second year of classes, he began to feel anxious, restless, sweaty. He stared at the ceiling of his dorm room and couldn't fall asleep.
First, Nguyen went to the clinics at his university, then to specialists. They came up with nothing. They did blood test after blood test. Nothing. They gave him tranquilizers. Still, nothing.
Nguyen became so exhausted, he had to withdraw from school and return to Hanoi. There, he went to an acupuncturist, then to an herbalist. Nothing helped. Desperate, Nguyen took his father's advice and visited Tran.
That first day, he was led through a small, leafy, courtyard and into Tran's living room. Tran told him to slip off his shoes and sit on the table. Nguyen was told to close his eyes, relax his body, and try to clear his mind of thoughts and worries.
Then, Tran stepped up on the table, rubbed his hands together, and maneuvered around Nguyen, pressing his index fingers into various pulse points of Nguyen's temples, cheeks, neck, spine and chest. Then he moved on to his legs, ankles and toes.
Both Nguyen and Tran's minds were deep in concentration. Only the echo of schoolgirls chattering outside or the bang of a hammer from three houses down broke the silence.
About 45 minutes later, Tran was done. At first, Nguyen didn't notice anything. But after visiting Tran for three days, Nguyen fell asleep that night for the first time in months for a solid three hours. By the end of two weeks, he could sleep for six to eight hours. The sweating stopped. So did the jitters. Now, several months later, Nguyen is practicing on his own and is awaiting a visa to return to his studies in Montreal.
How did energy healing help him when nothing else could? Nguyen doesn't know. And he said, ''I don't need to know. I just know I feel so much better. I have my life back again.''
Tran, who has practiced energy healing for about a decade, realizes all this might sound suspicious. He doesn't take it personally. He was dubious, too, once.
He had heard bits and pieces about energy healing for years. But he didn't think much of it until he went to say goodbye to an old school friend who was diagnosed with a late-stage of cancer.
When Tran saw his friend, he saw that he looked remarkably fit, was still able to go out and eat and talk with friends, and ended up living for three years longer than doctors had predicted. The secret, the friend said, was energy healing.
Curious, Tran decided to study with the same teacher who had instructed his friend. Tran hoped it might ease the two ulcers, the erratic heart-beat, the dizzy spells, and the general fatigue that had troubled him all his life.
Three months into his lessons, his stomach felt better, and to his delight, he was well enough to drink beer again. A year later, his heartbeat returned to normal. He felt stronger than he did when he served in the military years ago.
Grateful for this gift, Tran decided to try to help others. Since then, his fingers have worked on hundreds of people. There's the 8-year-old boy with epilepsy, the 42-year-old woman with a bleeding ulcer, the 60-year-old woman with deteriorating eye sight, the 65-year-old woman with breast cancer, and his own wife who had almost lost all use of her left arm.
Tran said that all have improved. Did he, or more precisely, did energy healing make them better? He doesn't profess to be a miracle worker. Tran said he is simply helping people heal naturally, though he admits that there are always a few he cannot help.
Tran could talk a lot more about energy healing, but not today. There is a woman at his gate with her 10-year-old daughter. The little girl has had a sinus infection for two years. Medications haven't helped. Sometimes the pain is so bad she buries her tiny face in her hands. They stand waiting for Tran, their faces anxious and expectant.
Tran jumps up from his chair, rubs his hands together and prepares for the next challenge.
(c) 2001, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).
Visit Mercury Center, the World Wide Web site of the Mercury News, at http://www.sjmercury.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
Vietnamese Man Uses Hands to Administer Energy Healing.
URL: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-8408987_ITM
COPYRIGHT 2001 San Jose Mercury News
Byline: Elsa C. Arnett
HANOI _ He isn't listed in any doctors' directory.
But hundreds of people will attest to his remarkable healing powers.
Dung Tran uses only one medical tool: his hands. The fingers are bony, the skin at the knuckles have wizened, the fingertips are stained a faint copper from years of potent Singapore cigarettes. Overall, they seem pretty ordinary for a 75-year-old.
Until you touch them. Tran's hands are toasty, almost bordering on hot, as if he just lifted them from the sides of a steaming bowl of noodle soup.
Tran uses his hands, and their heat, to administer an ancient form of Asian medicine known in Vietnam as nhan dien, or ''energy healing.''
For centuries, folk remedies such as energy healing, crushed tiger bone and extracted bear bile were all that Vietnamese people had to treat ailments from a sore back to a stroke. Not any longer. These days, Western medicine abounds in Vietnam. Hospitals have high-tech diagnostic devices; pharmacy shelves are stocked with drugs from the United States, France and Germany.
Yet many Vietnamese still cling to the familiar. They continue to rub a pungent homespun alcohol on an arthritic back. They continue to stroke a coin vigorously into their skin to ease a bad cold. They continue to make a bitter, black brew from dried plants to settle an upset stomach.
They continue to line up at Tran's doorstep so his fingertips can try to soothe their ulcers, slow their cancers and quell their seizures.
For many Vietnamese, a cure lies not in a pre-processed tablet, but from the harmony between their bodies, their minds and the natural world. For them, the latest advances in modern medicine cannot compete with the time-tested remedies passed down over several thousand years.
''Nature influences many things that go on in us,'' said Tran, who spent most of his life as a philosophy and foreign language professor in Hanoi. ''People get migraines during thunderstorms, people feel energetic in sunlight. It only makes sense that if nature can harm us, it can also help us.''
Energy healing hails from China and India as far back as 4,000 years and is practiced by millions of people throughout Asia. The theory requires one person _ Tran, for example _ to become a giant heat magnet and absorb energy from nature and transfer it to another person.
In Asian medicine, the human body is all about balance and the smooth flow of energy through the veins and organs. The infusion of added energy from healer to patient is supposed to open whatever clog has developed to block that smooth flow, restoring equilibrium.
In the United States, energy healing is one of the many alternative therapies that are only grudgingly gaining the respect of mainstream medicine. American researchers are working on experiments to figure out why energy healing, herbs, deep breathing and even laughter seem to boost people's health.
Until they find a scientific explanation, many of these therapies remain on the fringes. Health insurance companies won't cover them. People who seek them do so at their own risk, and expense.
''The medical community is still keeping alternative medicine at arms length,'' said Dr. John Wahdud Laird, director of the Jaffe Institute of Spiritual and Medical Healing, an energy healing school in California's Napa Valley. ''But there is a much more open attitude towards these things than there was five or 10 years ago.''
Immigrants have helped to popularize energy healing in the Bay Area, where it has become a fixture in the world of alternative medicine.
It's hard to know how many in Vietnam rely on energy healing. The Vietnamese government does not keep track of healers like Tran; it wouldn't be easy even if they tried. Most of these healers take classes from various healing masters, but they aren't certified. Most work out of their living rooms. Most are as mysterious as the healing they practice.
Tran doesn't advertise. He doesn't charge, either. His skills, he says, were given to him by God. Comfortably retired, he would not sully them by taking money.
Many who arrive at Tran's doorstep come after everything else has failed. They hear about him by word-of-mouth: so-and-so's mother who knows so-and-so's brother went to Tran and was cured, they say. Next thing, Tran has a new patient.
That's how Phuong Nguyen found himself cross-legged on Tran's lacquered wood coffee table that fills one-third of Tran's living room.
Nguyen, 29, was studying design in Montreal. At the start of his second year of classes, he began to feel anxious, restless, sweaty. He stared at the ceiling of his dorm room and couldn't fall asleep.
First, Nguyen went to the clinics at his university, then to specialists. They came up with nothing. They did blood test after blood test. Nothing. They gave him tranquilizers. Still, nothing.
Nguyen became so exhausted, he had to withdraw from school and return to Hanoi. There, he went to an acupuncturist, then to an herbalist. Nothing helped. Desperate, Nguyen took his father's advice and visited Tran.
That first day, he was led through a small, leafy, courtyard and into Tran's living room. Tran told him to slip off his shoes and sit on the table. Nguyen was told to close his eyes, relax his body, and try to clear his mind of thoughts and worries.
Then, Tran stepped up on the table, rubbed his hands together, and maneuvered around Nguyen, pressing his index fingers into various pulse points of Nguyen's temples, cheeks, neck, spine and chest. Then he moved on to his legs, ankles and toes.
Both Nguyen and Tran's minds were deep in concentration. Only the echo of schoolgirls chattering outside or the bang of a hammer from three houses down broke the silence.
About 45 minutes later, Tran was done. At first, Nguyen didn't notice anything. But after visiting Tran for three days, Nguyen fell asleep that night for the first time in months for a solid three hours. By the end of two weeks, he could sleep for six to eight hours. The sweating stopped. So did the jitters. Now, several months later, Nguyen is practicing on his own and is awaiting a visa to return to his studies in Montreal.
How did energy healing help him when nothing else could? Nguyen doesn't know. And he said, ''I don't need to know. I just know I feel so much better. I have my life back again.''
Tran, who has practiced energy healing for about a decade, realizes all this might sound suspicious. He doesn't take it personally. He was dubious, too, once.
He had heard bits and pieces about energy healing for years. But he didn't think much of it until he went to say goodbye to an old school friend who was diagnosed with a late-stage of cancer.
When Tran saw his friend, he saw that he looked remarkably fit, was still able to go out and eat and talk with friends, and ended up living for three years longer than doctors had predicted. The secret, the friend said, was energy healing.
Curious, Tran decided to study with the same teacher who had instructed his friend. Tran hoped it might ease the two ulcers, the erratic heart-beat, the dizzy spells, and the general fatigue that had troubled him all his life.
Three months into his lessons, his stomach felt better, and to his delight, he was well enough to drink beer again. A year later, his heartbeat returned to normal. He felt stronger than he did when he served in the military years ago.
Grateful for this gift, Tran decided to try to help others. Since then, his fingers have worked on hundreds of people. There's the 8-year-old boy with epilepsy, the 42-year-old woman with a bleeding ulcer, the 60-year-old woman with deteriorating eye sight, the 65-year-old woman with breast cancer, and his own wife who had almost lost all use of her left arm.
Tran said that all have improved. Did he, or more precisely, did energy healing make them better? He doesn't profess to be a miracle worker. Tran said he is simply helping people heal naturally, though he admits that there are always a few he cannot help.
Tran could talk a lot more about energy healing, but not today. There is a woman at his gate with her 10-year-old daughter. The little girl has had a sinus infection for two years. Medications haven't helped. Sometimes the pain is so bad she buries her tiny face in her hands. They stand waiting for Tran, their faces anxious and expectant.
Tran jumps up from his chair, rubs his hands together and prepares for the next challenge.
(c) 2001, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).
Visit Mercury Center, the World Wide Web site of the Mercury News, at http://www.sjmercury.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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