Ancient art of healing

ABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAN ISRAEL21C

Haifa native Roni Sapir was studying geography and computers in college when a segment of the Israeli TV program Innovations and Inventions caught his interest. It showed a Chinese man having open-heart surgery with no anesthetic.

“The patient was completely awake and conversing calmly while the doctors dug in his chest,” he recalled of his amazement. The show explained that the man was feeling no pain because he had undergone the Chinese needle technique called acupuncture.

Two years after seeing that TV program, Sapir noticed a headline announcing the opening of a school of Chinese medicine in Tel Aviv. When he called to inquire, he learned that it was established by two Israelis who had studied the healing art in California. The classes were to be given on Tuesdays – coincidentally, the one free day in Sapir’s schedule.

In three years of Tuesday classes, he learned the basics of what is known as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), whose practices include herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage therapy and dietary therapy. As well, Sapir was drawn to learning more about classical Chinese medicine (CCM), grounded in the original spiritual underpinnings of the practice, such as the forces of yin and yang and the five elements of earth, fire, wood, metal and water.

The idea is to support, not supplant, traditional medical approaches to everything from oncology to pediatrics to pain, Sapir stressed. No countries outside of Asia regulate Chinese medicine, however, and Sapir, along with a group of others, brought this to the attention of the Knesset in 1997, so far without any concrete results. Therefore, Sapir advises potential patients to seek treatment at clinics at schools or institutions that have established reputations and “academics behind it,” he said.

While TCM “talks more to the Western mentality” by translating knowledge into action, he explained, “in CCM you ‘forget’ your knowledge and absorb the patient at a point of emptiness, and then only later bring your knowledge into it.”

CCM practitioners treat the patient rather than the disease, taking into account factors such as the climate in which the patient lives and the time of day at which the patient arrives for treatment. Differences in the proportion of humidity and dryness, light and darkness are believed to affect how the body functions and reacts.

Because CCM and its practitioners were banned from China after the 1949 communist revolution, Sapir discovered that the best school for CCM was in England. “I didn’t know a word of English, but they took me on trial,” Sapir said in his now excellent English. He studied there from 1984 to 1992, earning an advanced degree and becoming a clinician and teacher at the school. Eventually, he was running five clinics.

And then, something told him to go home. Sapir packed enough for a week’s visit and, while at his parents’ house in Haifa, he waited for the next “sign.” Inspiration came on a visit to the TCM school in Tel Aviv to meet a friend for lunch. While there, he ran into the director of the school, who asked him to open another Chinese medicine school in Israel. A month later, Sapir was back in Israel to stay.

Next, he became medical adviser to a complementary-medicine spa at the northern tip of the Dead Sea. He also began to teach there, but when this area changed to Palestinian Authority-rule following the 1993 Oslo Accords, the school closed. Since then, Sapir has spent a great deal of time in Beijing, forming connections with the Chinese Health Ministry, facilitated by the Chinese embassy in Israel, after CCM began regaining favor in the land of its origin. His connections there got him “meetings with the directors of all Chinese medicine programs there, and we started working together to help me open the best school for classical Chinese medicine,” he said.

Today, the 50-year-old Sapir is dean of East-West: The Israeli Centre of Classic Chinese Medicine in Raanana, the school he established in 1999. His wife, Keren, also a CCM practitioner, serves as the centre’s director.

Sapir teaches practitioners in Israel and China, sees patients internationally and is director of the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies, a body that oversees 174 associations in nearly 80 countries. He also serves as vice-president of the new International Red Cross Hospital in Hunan, China. Now one of the world’s foremost authorities on the ancient medical art, Sapir originally intended to be a marine photographer with a backup in computer science.

The four-year East-West curriculum, which will also be given in English starting in the fall of 2011, provides 5,000 academic hours of instruction in areas such as herbal medicine, Tuina touch therapy, lifestyle and nutrition advice, and exercise. Sapir also takes fourth-year students for a month of training at a Beijing hospital.

In an effort to bring CCM to the attention of a larger population, the Sapirs recently moved East-West into the new Amal Basharon Centre, which is run by the Amal Group health-care network. “This cooperation will make us more available and accessible to everyone who needs us, and we can work in all of its centres throughout Israel,” he said.

Sapir still travels widely, lecturing and teaching primarily in China. He also continues to see patients in England, Scandinavia and Switzerland. His international reputation solidified, he helped to produce the International Standard of Chinese-English Terminology of Chinese Medicine, which was published in 2009. Before then, “everyone translated the Chinese terms differently and this caused a lot of confusion,” Sapir explained. “I couldn’t talk to a practitioner in New York because we spoke a different language.” Not that languages are a hurdle for Sapir, whose leisure-time reading is spent mostly in Chinese thought, culture and philosophy. And interest in China is a family affair in the Sapir household; the couple’s two children, now 10 and 14, went on a month-long tour of China in 2009.

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