Good morning, the honored guest, Mr. James Earl Jones, Admiral Timothy O. Fanning, members of the Board of Trustees, the University Faculty and Administration, Talat, my wife, and the graduating class, this is an auspicious day for all of us. May I ask you to join me in a few moments of silence before the larger Presence that surrounds and permeates each of us.

We owe this glorious day to you, the twenty-six graduating students of the inaugural class of the Capital University of Integrative Medicine. To your vision. To your courage. To your perserevance. The flame of integrative medicine which you light this morning will long burn with ever-growing brilliance, in this country and beyond. Some out of the University may look at your work simply as adding nutritional medicine to the practice of neurosurgery, or environmental medicine to internal medicine, or neural therapy to the practice of dentistry. Or chiropractors learning chelation therapy. Or nurse practitioners receiving education in homeopathy and acupuncture. All that is true. But you know that is not the core of your chosen life.

The vision at the University is much larger. You did not make an enormous commitment of time, effort, and funds only to add one or more medical disciplines to your existing work. You joined the University for a purpose far greater than that. You came here to evolve into a new breed of physician. In making the commitment to the University, you accepted some extraordinary burdens of that new breed of physician.

You are here at the University because you fully understand the conflict of being an insider versus an outsider. By the insider, I mean someone who is inside the establishment, inside of the prevailing one-disease/one-diagnosis/one-drug mode of thinking. The outsider, of course, is someone who rejects the notion that drugs and surgical scalpels are the only right options for caring for the sick and for alleviating all types of human suffering. You are here at the University because you understand the cost of being an insider as well as that of being an outsider. What are those costs?

Every physician knows the personal perils of being an outsider, in prestige, influence, and financial benefits. That is usually self-evident. But it takes an exceptional physician to see the problems of being an insider. That is not always self-evident. Being an insider gives one a safe harbor for oneself, but how many ships have sailed to new discoveries by remaining in the safe harbors? Doesn't a ship that never leaves the harbor defeats the very purpose for which it was built? Who bears the cost when a physician always insists on being within the safe harbor of the prevailing medical model? The patient, of course. Who pays the cost when a patient's suffering does not fit into some textbook model of illness? Again, it is the patient. An integrative physician knows that. This physician bears seven types of burdens. What are those burdens?

The first burden of the integrative physician is of knowing the essentially unlimited healing capacity of the injured tissues. That calls for courage to defy the limits of established medical knowledge. At the same time, one has to know the essential limitation of one's knowledge. It calls for courage to accept one's own limits. On the surface it may seem simple. But what it really means is venturing outside the safe harbor. It means not hiding behind hollow diagnostic labels nor being subservient to textbook prognostications.

The second burden of the integrative physician is knowing that human biology is an ever-changing kaleidoscope of energetic-molecular mosaics. When one thing changes in one way, everything changes in some way. An integrative physician must be as willing to change as the changing biology of the sick he cares for. No false security of the established diagnostic labels there either.

The third burden is that of being sufficiently knowledgeable about all healing arts to know how to integrate all needed therapies effectively. That requires the labor of learning the physics of health, of the chemistry of nutrition, of the immunology of environmental sensitivities, of the toxicology of pollutants, and of the pathology of disease. Beyond that, it requires a working knowledge of the molecular dynamics that separate the state of health from one of the absence of health.

The fourth burden is that of living with uncertainty. And of treating illnesses that are little understood with therapies that are known even less. An integrative physician understands that the deeper the knowledge of the known, the greater the awareness of the unknown. Empiricism in medicine calls for strong convictions of what is safe and works and what does not. For an integrative physician, there is little security in the putative safety of the "prevailing standards" of multiple drug regimens.

The fifth burden is that of being peer-reviewed by the uninformed and unenlightened peers, which in truth are peers only in perpetuating self-interest. There are peers who practice N2 D 2 medicine, a medicine in which all the struggles of the physician are limited to finding a name of a disease for the sick , then finding the name of a drug for him. Then there are peers who firmly believe:

 Where there is a disease, there is a bug.

Where there is a bug, there is a drug.

 Dealing with those peers is no light burden, since it puts an integrative physician in serious jeopardy, for his integrity, his professional reputation, his license, and his livelihood.

The sixth burden is of supporting the patient when neither the interruptive pharmacologic therapies work nor do the restorative natural remedies. It is the burden of knowing the anguish of those whose illnesses defy all therapies. It is the burden of helping the patient die when the time for that transition arrives. The burden of gently coaxing the dying to gently walk into the loving white light of that larger Presence that surrounds and permeates each of us.

Finally, the seventh burden is of going through one's long day's work without losing focus on what is truly permanent: God, love, truth, beauty, integrity, compassion, and spiritual surrender. Now that may seem simple to a monk meditating in a monastery, but not to a physician who is two hours behind his schedule with a hectic waiting room full of those vying for his attention.

Then there are regulators, insurers, reviewers, and just noise-makers. Love is hard to keep in focus when coping with such entities. Recently, a patient's insurer paid $165,000 for a failed bypass, but adamantly refused to reimburse the patient for $2,700 for a proven, effective heart disease reversal program. It is hard to be compassionate to such perpetrators. It is hard to focus on simplicity when facing indignities thrust on him by ill-informed and unenlightened peers utterly committed to drugs.

Next is the matter of courage. The vision of change, above all, is a matter of courage. What is a physician's calling? To care to the best of his ability for those who trust him with their health and lives. What is his allegiance? To the truth. Who are his true teachers? Those who trust her or him with their health and lives. How does a physician do that as an outsider? Isolated and alienated? More importantly, how does a physician do that as an insider? For that, we ask what is it to be an insider in medicine in time of a significant changes? How far can one push the limit without losing his insider status? How does one manage such risks? The medical establishment--the insiders in the present context--has but one commitment: to maintain status quo. But, what are all those burdens for the integrative physicians if not burdens of passion? It is passion of learning, of caring, and of compassion, of innovation, of thirst of knowledge, no matter how incomplete, of the infinite mystery of the one and only healer. So, with what thoughts do we wish you, the inaugural graduating class of the University , to go out into the real and difficult world? Go out with the same passion with which you came, the passion for truth, simplicity, integrity, and human dignity. It was that passion which pulled you to the University in the first place. It is our hope that your two years at the University have helped you discern those burdens of your passion more clearly than when you arrived here. In its purest form, that's our wish for you: vision of change and the courage of conviction.

So we come back to where we started from: clarity of vision and purity of passion. You are the inaugural graduating class of the University, its ambassadors, as we fondly call you. On this momentous day, on behalf of the entire University community, we express our faith in your continuing commitment to those two elements: our shared vision of the change and the purity of passion. For today and for the years to come, God bless!

Majid Ali, M.D.

****

Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inevitable and silent influence.