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I found this article about a DO who uses ayurveda, a type of alternative healing. Interesting...
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Jun-17-Thu-2004/living/24039261.html
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Jun-17-Thu-2004/living/24039261.html
ROUNDABOUT ROUTE: Finding His Calling
Osteopathic doctor Bill Celentano didn't come to goal of combining Western and holistic medicine until later in life
By JOAN WHITELY
REVIEW-JOURNAL
Dr. Bill Celentano has turned over more new leaves than some trees have.
He has attended Catholic seminary, worked as an actor, studied ballet and opera, driven a taxi and learned massage, acupressure and chiropractic.
Today, he is an osteopathic doctor at a UMC Primary Care clinic near McCarran International Airport, caring for patients with urgent as well as routine medical needs. He also is founder and director of the Las Vegas Institute of Ayurveda.
"Your dharma is your mission in life," says Celentano, 52. "I like to believe part of my dharma is being here in Las Vegas and developing the institute."
He grew up in Chicago, went to medical school at age 38 and came to Las Vegas to practice medicine in 1997, after completing a residency in family medicine in San Bernardino, Calif.
His long-term goal is to lay a bridge of understanding between Western medicine and holistic medicine, specifically, ayurveda, which is an ancient Indian approach to healing.
"He is very focused, very determined," Las Vegan Abby Geyer says of Celentano. Now 59, Geyer has been using ayurveda to maximize her health since she was diagnosed about five years ago with a serious chronic health condition, which she declines to identify.
She says Celentano helped her devise the regimen she now follows. "He's very upbeat, very encouraging and very sincere."
One strength of Western medicine is the precision of its diagnostic methods, which can pinpoint which organ or system or process of the body is off. It excels in the treatment of acute conditions.
But a strength of ayurveda is that the individual takes responsibility for his or her health and healing, especially in terms of chronic conditions. Ayu is a Sanskrit term that means "life" or "daily living." Veda is Sanskrit for "knowing."
Instead of just popping a pill or submitting to a surgery, a practitioner of ayurveda also takes into account his or her personality type and realizes that life choices in areas such as diet will have consequences. "The body as a whole has its own repair mechanism," Celentano points out.
When thoughts, emotions, digestion and elimination are "all balanced and feeling joyful, that is the definition of health," he says.
At the UMC clinic, Celentano says he uses his standard medical training to diagnose and treat patients. But his holistic bent may subtly surface when he probes a patient's history. Behind the headache or new rash that brings a patient in, may lie a story of tensions or stresses related to relationships with a spouse, significant other, offspring or employer.
"We don't always connect the dots," says Celentano, who personally believes that the spiritual, or nonphysical aspects of living, do influence the physical.
"Spiritual growth takes nurturing, nourishing, fertile ground, a seed to form. It takes time," he says. Perhaps that is why it took Celentano into his 40s, via a circuitous route, to find his present calling.
He doesn't necessarily view the life stations he has passed through as different formats of healing. But he admits all contained emotional avenues that can lead to catharsis, which is a form of healing.
Born in 1951, Celentano found himself interested in books about human anatomy and the body's functioning when he was a child.
He attended high school at a Franciscan seminary in Crystal Lake, Ill., because he was considering the Catholic priesthood.
The school's setting was beautiful, his high school years were rewarding, but Celentano decided to postpone entry into the priesthood. "I decided I should go to college first. Maybe I should get to know women a little more."
He enrolled in 1969 at Loyola University in Chicago and majored in biology. However, the Vietnam War and other social movements of that era also intervened in his life. "Flower power? My thought was the hippie movement actually represented something intellectual, a way of breaking through (spiritually). ... I wanted to find insight to a spiritual path."
After two years at Loyola, Celentano suspended his studies and traveled to Europe. He visited England -- where he became acquainted with guru Maharaj Ji, a 13-year-old spiritual leader -- and eventually made a stop in Israel.
His intended trip of two months stretched to more than a year. When he returned to the United States in 1972, he joined a group of like-minded people, all interested in the study of Indian and Eastern spirituality. He lived with them in a shared house in Chicago.
In addition to his spiritual studies in the 1970s, Celentano started doing massage and naprapathy, which is a healing system based on massage.
He also acted in stage productions in some of the many small professional theatrical groups around Chicago. That spawned a whole host of related activities. He tackled various disciplines that can be useful in theater, including ballet and opera. In addition to driving a taxi, he taught classes in local exercise studios.
One of the high points in Celentano's acting career was playing the lead of a disturbed teen boy in "Equus."
Toward the end of Celentano's acting period, he says he became interested in experimental theater, "getting that catharsis over to the audience, getting some interaction going" between cast and spectators.
Ultimately, though, he decided against acting as a long-term career. "I didn't want to sell soap," he succinctly states. Asked to explain, he says the next step in that career might have called for moving to the West Coast and doing acting in television and commercials.
Instead, he returned to Loyola University in 1982 and graduated with a degree in biology in 1984.
Still interested in healing arts, Celentano enrolled in 1984 in the National College of Chiropractic, near Chicago in Lombard, Ill. He graduated in 1987. He also studied meridian therapy -- the theories behind acupressure and acupuncture -- and in 1988 went on a six-week internship to China, arranged by a school of Chinese medicine in Chicago.
Celentano doesn't view such Eastern approaches to body function as adversarial to the model used in Western medicine. Meridian therapy is one way to explain the bioelectric currents that even Western medicine acknowledges "cause muscular coordination and circulatory movement. There's an amalgam of rhythms throughout the body," he says.
In 1989, Celentanto finally reached the conclusion he should attend medical school. "It popped into my head (while) I was jumping on a minitrampoline," he recalls. Family members and even his principal adviser at Loyola University saw it as an obvious next step for him.
Celentano deliberately chose osteopathic medicine -- which awards a D.O. degree -- over schools of medicine that award an M.D. degree. In addition to being interested in cranial therapy, which is part of osteopathic medicine, he also felt that the process of getting an M.D. degree was "way too ridiculously competitive."
Some of the science students he had met at Loyola University were "pathologically pre-med," he likes to joke. He preferred to hone in on the healing role of medicine rather than the purely scientific. For him, an osteopathic education was more conducive to his goal. Cranial therapy, by the way, is a method of ensuring components in the cranium are properly aligned so they can optimally function.
Celentano attended the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine -- which is now a school within Midwestern University -- from 1990 until he graduated in 1994. In that span, he also took up yoga as a personal outlet. "My first class, I had the same thought I had when I took my first ballet class: `I think I'm going to die.' "
He next moved to California for his residency, which lasted until 1997. During that period, he happened to visit Las Vegas, and remembers thinking, "I see absolutely no reason to ever come back again."
But when he started mulling job offers in 1997 from organizations in Seattle, San Francisco and Las Vegas, he was attracted to the community medicine format of the UMC clinics. In addition, he liked the arrangement of not having to launch a private practice -- he was faced not only with repaying student loans but also supporting two sons from an earlier marriage. Celentano is now single.
After starting yoga, he also began looking into ayurveda, which is sometimes called a sister discipline to yoga.
"Do you practice teeth flossing?" Celentano responds, when asked if ayurveda is useful in his opinion to everyone, or just devotees of Indian spirituality. To him, the discipline is useful helping individuals achieve optimal health and manage certain chronic conditions.
