The Willow Glen Resident

Photograph by Skye Dunlap

Rubbing The Right Way: Massage helps heal ailments such as chest congestion, says massage therapist Mark Saia, who adds that it can relieve the symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome in one session.

Glen center treats body and soul with ancient medicine

Besides emotions, eyes also reveal illness, iridologist believes

By Rebecca Wallace

A giant eye appears on the computer screen. After a quick glance at the iris, Rick Bernard says, "Kidney weakness." Pointing to a white area in the computerized image of the eye, which belongs to one of his patients, he clarifies, "White in the eye always means irritation, inflammation. This white shows kidney weakness; once I saw this, the whole way we treated her changed."

He smiles confidently. "The eyes are incredible."

Compared to the venerable holistic healing practices of acupuncture and herbology, used for at least 5,000 years, iridology is a relative baby at about 150, Bernard says. And although it has yet to be accepted by Western medicine, he is confident that it will be widely accepted as a diagnostic tool.

In the soothingly lit rooms of the International Center for Integrated Medicine upstairs at 1314 Lincoln Ave., Bernard diagnoses what he calls his patients' "inherited weaknesses" by examining the irises (iridology) or whites of their eyes (sclerology).

Each location in the eye in which a mark is found corresponds to an organ. For example, a mark on the right side of the right iris could mean future thyroid trouble.

At the center, which opened in 1995, people can receive traditional, Eastern and alternative treatments for medical problems, including acupuncture, massage, tai chi and herbal medicine. All have physical, mental, emotional and spiritual balance as a goal.

"We like to dabble in a bit of everything," says Mark Saia, the on-site massage director who also teaches tai chi and is Bernard's partner in running the center. Other staff members include massage therapist Sandra Haines and Jamie Gutheil, doctor of chiropractic.

An antique reddish wood Victrola stands in the corner of one of the center's rooms, near an arc-shaped piece of furniture that one can bend over for a spine massage. Distant seagulls cry from an invisible stereo.

Saia, who has a background in martial arts, says he began to focus on the healing arts, such as tai chi meditative exercises, when his master told him that he had started learning martial arts to hurt--but to be great he would have to learn to heal.

In a tai chi videotape, Saia wears a white robe with a yin-yang symbol over the heart and stretches into fluid movements with names like "embracing the moon." The tape's box describes chi as "a strong life force mak[ing] a human being totally alive, alert and 'present.' "

"You can get a stagnation somewhere, illness in an organ," Saia says. "Tai chi clears that."

Debra Peterson, a massage therapist who takes tai chi classes from Saia, says tai chi helps her maintain high energy and suppresses her appetite. Acupuncture points can be used in martial arts to disable or in acupuncture to heal, Saia says. For example, he says, touching this reporter somewhere near the shoulder, "This could deaden your arm. Or it could heal you."

Massage helps heal ailments such as chest congestion, he says: "Hippocrates wrote that physicians should be skilled not only in science but the laying on of the hands."

"All my life I've been giving massages," he says, beaming. "I have a big Italian family, and at every function I was massaging shoulders for quarters."

But before the healing can begin, the problem needs to be identified.

A former employee of Hewlett-Packard, Rick Bernard left his MBA program to work with alternative medicine after acupuncture cured his back problems. But what really impressed him was the way the acupuncturist could identify his medical problems.

"The first time I went to him, he looked at my ear and asked me when my knee surgery was," Bernard says.

Because X-ray machines didn't exist thousands of years ago, practitioners of Eastern medicine found different ways of diagnosing problems, which Bernard and Saia say they like because they are noninvasive and accurate.

Besides looking in the eyes and ears, holistic healers check the tongue and pulse, Saia says. All these methods diagnose problems and warn of future ones, making them useful preventive health-care tools, Bernard says.

Many Eastern health ideas are becoming accepted in this country, Bernard says. He recently began treating patients with acupuncture at Kaiser Permanente.

"Insurance companies are covering it now," he says. "It's new for HMOs to have alternative healing. They haven't gotten to iridology yet, but someday it'll be used."

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