In Praise of Slow
Page 13
At the end of our interview, Hutchins guides me into his studio for a SuperSlow workout. Cool, silent and sterile, the room is as welcoming as a silicon chip factory. Clipboard and stopwatch in hand, Hutchins directs me to a leg press machine. He comes down on my first attempt at chitchat like a ton of bricks. “We’re not here to socialize,” he snaps. “All you need to say is yes or no to my questions.” I clam up and start pushing. At first, the weight seems light enough, but as the set drags on, it begins to feel unbearably heavy. Halfway through the second rep, my thighs are trembling, the muscles burning like never before. My instinct is to speed up, to get it over with, but Hutchins is having none of that. “Slow down,” he scolds. “Don’t get excited. Stay calm and keep breathing. It gets easier when you stay focused.” After six reps, my thigh muscles are utterly spent. The next three machines mete out the same punishment to my biceps, calves and pectorals. Then it is over. “That took fifteen minutes and thirty seconds,” says Hutchins, clicking his stopwatch. “How do you feel?” Shattered. Wiped out. Take your pick. My legs are jelly, my throat parched. But it is a novel kind of post-workout fatigue—not panting or breathless. I am not even sweating. A few minutes later, I am heading back to the car with a spring in my step.
As I drive away, I ask myself: Would I want to do it again? The honest answer has to be no. The results may be amazing, but it all feels so—let’s use Hutchins’ own word—clinical. I have read, however, that other SuperSlow trainers take a more relaxed approach. Curious, I hop on a plane to check out a thriving SuperSlow studio in New York.
Nestled seven floors above Madison Avenue, in midtown Manhattan, the Ultimate Training Centre looks much more like a conventional gym: mirrors on the walls, music on the sound system, banter in the air. The owner, Lou Abato, has a ponytail and a ready smile. A photograph of him meeting Arnold Schwarzenegger occupies pride of place on the windowsill by the reception desk, just past the shelves piled high with muscle magazines. Abato has a superhero physique and competes in bodybuilding competitions, yet his training regime is minimalism itself: one SuperSlow workout every week—and nothing else. “People find it hard to believe, but it’s all you need,” he tells me.
Ultimate Training, however, is not a mecca for musclemen. Almost all Abato’s clients are Manhattan professionals. First up, at 8:30 A.M., is a middle-aged construction lawyer and three-year veteran of SuperSlow named Jack Osborn. He emerges from the locker room in a white tank top and blue shorts. Apart from a slight paunch, he looks fit. Abato straps him into the same type of leg press machine I tried with Hutchins, and the session begins. Osborn grunts and grimaces his way through the reps. His breathing quickens, his eyes bulge, his limbs quiver. I feel his pain. Abato reminds him not to seek refuge in speed: “Slow now, slow it right down. Don’t rush it.” And so it goes on. Around twenty minutes later, Osborn is back in his charcoal suit, telling me how SuperSlow has helped him shed 10 pounds and conquer chronic back pain, and given him deep reserves of energy. “I feel like I have a completely new body,” he says. On a hunch, I ask him if lifting weights very slowly also pays psychological dividends. Has it taught him to tackle the New York rat race with a Slow frame of mind? His face lights up. “It’s not the reason I started SuperSlow, but it’s definitely one of the benefits,” he says. “I get a kind of meditative calmness here that carries over through the day. If I have a major meeting or court date, I make sure I still work out with SuperSlow, so that I go in focused, with a clear mind and in control.” Osborn recently excelled in a very tricky case, and gives at least some of the credit to lifting weights slowly. “Even when things got crazy, as they tend to do during trial, I felt centred and calm. I was able to manage the client, the judge and the other attorneys on the case,” he says. “As well as the physical benefits, SuperSlow has helped to make me more successful in court.”
That is quite an endorsement. Could Abato’s other clients possibly be as gung-ho? Yes, it turns out. After Osborn heads back to the office, Mike Marino, a fifty-one-year-old management consultant, tells me how nine months of SuperSlow have helped slash his body fat by nearly 50%. Tall, trim and tanned, he seems to have stepped from the pages of a men’s clothing catalogue. Like Osborn, he sees SuperSlow as a vaccine against the New Yorker’s natural urge to rush everything. “It has definitely taken some of the edge off my hurried lifestyle,” he says. “If I had a big problem in life, my instinct was always to try to go fast, to get it over with as soon as possible. Now I approach things in a much more meditative way, which helps in consulting work.”
Client after client tells the same tale of stronger, tauter, pain-free bodies—and many credit SuperSlow with giving them the inner calm to keep their heads in the Manhattan melee. SuperSlow turns out to be Slow in every sense of the word.
After thanking Abato for his help, I take the elevator back down to the street. Outside, on the sidewalk, a chic young woman with expensively coiffured hair is raving about SuperSlow into her cellphone. I pretend to rifle through my bag in order to eavesdrop. “Trust me, you’ll love it,” she coos into the handset. “Slow is the new fast.”
CHAPTER SIX
MEDICINE: DOCTORS AND PATIENCE
Time is a great healer.
—ENGLISH PROVERB, FOURTEENTH CENTURY
WE ARE NOW IN A WAITING ROOM at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London. I have come to see a specialist about a nagging pain in my lower right leg. Even after months of swelling and discomfort, my spirits are high. The hospital has good associations for me—both my children were born here—and the orthopaedic department is among the best in Britain.
The waiting room is packed. People limp on crutches from the toilet to the magazine stand and back. They move warily in their seats. Several are confined to wheelchairs. Above the door leading into the ward, an electronic notice board informs us that the clinic is running forty-five minutes behind schedule. Engrossed in an old copy of Cosmopolitan, I am vaguely aware of patients coming and going.
When my name is called, an orderly steers me into the examination room, where a young consultant is waiting at a desk. My heart sinks. Everything, including the coffee stain on his tie, says: Hurry up! After a mumbled greeting, he launches straight into a breathless interrogation. Where is the pain? When did it start? When does it hurt? He wants quick, concise answers. When I try to elaborate, he cuts me short, repeating his question more firmly. We are at loggerheads. I want to build a complete picture of the injury—changes in my sports routine, how the pain has evolved, the impact of painkillers and stretching, the effect on my posture—but Dr. Hurry wants to tick a few boxes and finish his shift. During the brief physical examination, he glances at his watch—twice. Unable to identify the cause of the pain, he tells me to continue popping painkillers and puts me down for an MRI scan and a blood test. I have more questions, but my time is up. I leave the surgery nursing a bad case of consultation interruptus.
Many of you will know the feeling. In hospitals and clinics across the world, doctors are under pressure to deal with patients quickly. In Britain’s overburdened National Health Service, the average GP visit lasts around six minutes. Even in well-funded private hospitals, doctors are prey to the hurry bug. Pagers keep them constantly on their toes, practising what some call “beeper medicine.” The result is a medical culture built on the quick fix. Rather than take the time to listen to patients, to probe all aspects of their health, state of mind and lifestyle, the conventional doctor tends to home in on the symptoms. Often, the next step is to reach for technology—scans, medication, surgery. It is all about fast results on a tight schedule, and patients collude in the hurry. In a world where every second counts, we all want—no, we expect—to be diagnosed, treated and cured as quickly as possible.
Of course, speed is often crucial in medicine. We’ve all watched ER. If you don’t remove a diseased appendix, or staunch a bullet wound, or administer an insulin injection in time, the patient will die. But in medicine, as in so many other walks of life, fast
er is not always better. As many doctors and patients are realizing, it often pays to be Slow.
The backlash against Fast medicine is gaining momentum. Doctors everywhere are pushing for more time with their patients. Medical schools are putting a greater emphasis on talking and listening as tools of diagnosis. A mounting body of research shows that patience is often the best policy. Take infertility. Doctors usually recommend in vitro fertilization, with all its risks, if a woman fails to conceive after one year of trying. But a 2002 study in seven European cities found that one year is simply not enough. Given an extra twelve months, most healthy females will conceive. Indeed, the study found that over 90% of women in their late thirties became pregnant within two years if their partner was also under forty.
Disillusioned with conventional health care, millions of people are turning to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), which draws on the unhurried, holistic healing traditions that still hold sway in much of the developing world. CAM is a broad movement that includes medical philosophies ranging from traditional Chinese and Indian Ayurveda to Arabic Unani. Among the better-known alternative treatments are homeopathy, herbalism, aromatherapy, acupuncture, massage and energy healing. Osteopaths and chiropractors are also classified as CAM practitioners.
To what extent alternative medicine works remains the subject of fierce debate. Scientific proof of its safety and efficacy is hard to come by. Skeptics, and they are legion, dismiss CAM as quackery dolled up with candles and crystals. If it works at all, they say, it is only as a placebo: people believe they will be cured, so they are. Nevertheless, the medical establishment is paying more attention to CAM than ever before. Conventional hospitals and research institutes across the globe are putting traditional therapies through rigorous trials. And though the jury is still out, preliminary evidence suggests that some CAM really does work. For example, many doctors accept that acupuncture can relieve pain and nausea, even though they are not sure how to explain it.
While the experts hunt for scientific proof in the lab, people are voting with their feet. The global market for CAM tops US$60 billion a year. About half the population of North America now seeks care outside the mainstream health system. Nearly 80% of pain clinics in Germany, where CAM is widespread, offer acupuncture. In Britain, complementary practitioners now outnumber GPs. Unable to find what they want at home, Westerners are flocking to China and other countries known for traditional medicine. In Beijing, one hospital now runs a separate ward for foreigners. Others offer all-inclusive tour packages—visit the Great Wall and a Chinese herbalist!
Yet even the most zealous fans of CAM do not think that it can—or should—completely replace the Western tradition. There are certain conditions, such as infections and trauma, that conventional medicine will always be better at treating. Even in China you don’t find herbalists rushing to treat the victims of car accidents. Its supporters claim that where CAM can help most is precisely where Western medicine fails: in the handling of chronic illnesses ranging from asthma and heart disease to back pain and depression. Right now, the trend is to pair up the most effective Western and CAM treatments to create an entirely new tradition of “integrative medicine.” CAM courses are already multiplying in conventional medical schools across the developed world, and centres for integrative medicine have sprung up in blue-chip US universities such as Harvard, Columbia and Duke. In 2002, the World Health Organization launched a global campaign to blend the best of CAM into mainstream medicine.
One of Europe’s leading providers of integrative medicine is the Hale Clinic, which occupies four floors of a Regency terrace in central London. When it opened in 1987, the clinic was seen as a haven for New Agers. Today, all kinds of people, from company directors to chemistry teachers, come here for acupuncture, aromatherapy or to have their chakras balanced. Customers young and old browse in the basement bookshop, or line up for herbal and homeopathic remedies in the dispensary. “When we started, complementary medicine was seen as strange and revolutionary, something for rebels to try,” says Teresa Hale, the clinic’s founder. “Now it is accepted in the mainstream. We even have hospitals referring patients to us.” Among its staff of a hundred, the Hale Clinic has several conventionally trained doctors, including a couple of GPs. In 2003, a London hospital invited one of the clinic’s healers to work with its cancer patients.
Part of the attraction of complementary medicine is that it eschews the quick fix, and treats patients as people, rather than as a sack of symptoms. Most CAM therapies are by nature Slow. They work in harmony with the body and mind, coaxing rather than coercing the patient into healing. Relaxation, which lowers blood pressure and reduces pain, anxiety and depression, is often at the core of the treatment, as is urging people to live at a balanced pace. At the Hale Clinic, practitioners from all disciplines encourage their patients to be Slow—to work less, to eat in a more leisurely fashion, to meditate, to spend more time with family and friends, to take up contemplative hobbies, or simply to find a moment each day to walk in the park.
By and large, CAM practitioners take much more time than their mainstream rivals can afford. A homeopath will spend up to two hours with a patient, building rapport, listening attentively, sifting through the answers to tease out the root cause of the ailment. Massage and acupuncture sessions usually last an hour, during which the practitioner talks to and touches the patient. It may sound trite, but in a world where everyone is constantly dashing around, and real connections between people are few and far between, a little tender loving care goes a long way. It may even trigger healing mechanisms in the body. In the words of Ingrid Collins, a British consultant psychologist, “When you give patients time and attention, they can relax into healing.”
Research seems to bear this out. In one American study, a psychotherapist worked alongside a GP, lending a sympathetic ear during consultations. He asked questions that went far beyond the usual symptoms checklist. What are your feelings about the illness? How has it affected the people around you? Patients loved the attention, and some went on to recover from long-term conditions. This brings us back to the link between mind and body. In the last chapter, we saw how slower forms of exercise lead to what the Romans called mens sana in corpore sano. Now, the medical world is coming round to the holistic idea that people’s mental state can affect their physical well-being. And once you accept that a patient is a person with moods, hang-ups and a story to tell, it is no longer enough to run through a checklist of symptoms and reach for the prescription pad. You have to take the time to listen. You have to make a connection.
Mainstream medicine is making room for Slowness in many ways. One is in the growing willingness to use relaxation in healing. To help patients unwind, more and more hospitals steer them towards soothing activities such as gardening, painting, making music, knitting and spending time with pets. Another trend is to recognize the healing effects of Mother Nature. A recent study at Texas A&M University found that having a view of green spaces from the bedside window helped patients recover from surgery more quickly and with fewer painkillers. So hospitals are installing outdoor gardens, revamping wards to provide more sunlight, plants and green views and broadcasting footage of dolphins swimming in the sea or streams gurgling through sun-dappled forests on in-house TV channels.
Conventional doctors are embracing Slow-style therapies in growing numbers. Some use meditation, yoga and Chi Kung to treat cancer, carpal tunnel syndrome, osteoarthritis, diabetes, hypertension, asthma and epilepsy, as well as mental health problems. Others use SuperSlow weightlifting to rehabilitate patients with cardiac problems and osteoporosis. Many GPs now refer their patients to chiropractors, acupuncturists, osteopaths, herbalists and homeopaths. And although CAM treatments usually take longer to work, sometimes the Slow approach brings faster results. Consider two rival methods of treating the pain caused by a pinched nerve along the spine. A Western doctor would probably dash off a prescription for anti-inflammatory drugs, which would take time to kick in
. An Ayurvedic practitioner, however, could zap the pain immediately with a Marma massage, which focuses on special sites where flesh, veins and bones meet up.
Some mainstream doctors are going one step further by retraining in CAM therapies. Take Catherine Watson. She used to work as a research technician for a major pharmaceutical company, developing drugs to treat the immune system. After years in the lab, however, she grew disenchanted with the sledgehammer approach of conventional medicine. Western drugs often blitz the symptoms of a disease, without curing the underlying problem. And many cause collateral damage—side effects that require even more drugs. “I just felt there had to be another way,” says Watson. In 1999, she left her well-paid job at the pharmaceutical company to study Western herbalism. Her background gave her a head start, since many modern drugs are derived from natural herbs. Watson now runs a thriving herbalism practice at her home in Hertfordshire, just outside London. Her speciality is treating skin and digestive problems. Sometimes her herbal concoctions work alone, but for other conditions, such as asthma, they act in tandem with conventional medicine. With every patient, though, Watson takes a Slow approach. She usually devotes at least an hour to the initial consultation, and makes it clear that her remedies take time. “Sometimes you get a quick result, but usually herbalism works gradually, by chipping away at a condition,” she says. “It is normally slower than conventional medicine, but in the end the results are more effective than people imagine, and without the side effects I saw all too often in the pharmaceutical industry.”