Dr. Mel Borins, Go Away Just for the Health of It

Pushing Boundaries with Dr. Thomas R Verny

My guest today is Dr. Mel Borins who is a Family Physician in private practice, and is on active staff at St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto, Canada. He is a Fellow of the College of Family Physicians of Canada, and Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto.
For over two decades, he has been active and instrumental in training Physicians in Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Counseling and Psychotherapy, Stress Management and Communications.
Dr. Mel Borins is the author of Go Away Just for the Health of It, An Apple a Day: A Holistic Health Primer and A Doctor’s Guide to Alternative Medicine: What Works, What Doesn’t and Why. He has written extensively on stress management, psychotherapy, acupuncture, traditional healing, herbs and complementary medicine.
What is complementary medicine? Dr. Borins says that complementary medicine is really alternative medicine, medicine that's not mainstream in terms of medical training. When he went through medical school, he did his elective in hypnosis. So that was his first exposure to something different than what he learned in medical school. Subsequently, he attended a weekend workshop in Gestalt therapy given by George Rosner, after seeing many videos of watching Fritz Perls.
And then Mel got involved in personal Gestalt work but also in a training group that that met once a week for three hours for about six years. This started the whole interest in psychotherapy and counseling and the impact that the emotions and the mind have on the physical body.
After completing his medical training, Mel and wife went on a world trip for about nine and a half months. They traveled to all kinds of different countries around the world. As a result he was exposed to different kinds of healing by local healers, spiritual healers and herbalists. Mel began to see that there were other approaches in addition to modern medicine. When he got back to Toronto, he did some training in acupuncture, took some courses in spinal manipulation.
We talk about the uses for acupuncture. There's some scientific research that says that it's useful for headaches, it's useful for osteoarthritis of the knee. It's useful for tennis elbow, it's useful for neck pain, it's useful for nausea and vomiting. So there is some scientific randomly assigned double blind controlled trials that show that acupuncture is actually better than sham or placebo in treating some of these conditions.
Music has been a big part of Mel’s life. He has done music videos, DVDs and recorded 200 songs, any of them humorous. Mel kindly sang one for us about gratitude.
What does being human mean to you, I asked.
Being human means to connect to other human beings through the heart, through the Spirit, through love. And being human, I think is the ability to connect and be connected to other human beings.
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