Wellness lectures
Continuing Medical Education credits are available for Dr. David Shlim's presentation as well as that of Dr. Stan Block.
· Stan Block
Sunday, 9 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
Location: Limelight Room
"Bridging For Life: A Proven Prescription for Wellness."
· David Shlim
Sunday, 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Sawtooth Room
"Medicine and Compassion."
In Buddhism, "compassion" is the intention to alleviate suffering in the world. Compassion is one of the two fundamental aspects of Buddhahood, the other being wisdom.
In Western medicine, "First, do no harm"—while not part of the Hippocratic Oath as is widely believed—is the first precept taught to first-year medical students.
Alleviating suffering and doing no harm are necessary states of mind for anyone involved in healing, but they are not quite the same thing.
Dr. David Shlim will speak about these and other related matters as part of the Sun Valley Wellness Festival.
Shlim is the co-author, with his Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Choki Nyima Rinpoche, of "Medicine and Compassion," which is described as "...a Tibetan lama's compassionate advice to harried caregivers. If you ever dreamed of being more compassionate more of the time, with less effort, you should read this book." Choki Nyima is Abbott of one of the largest Tibetan monasteries in Nepal, home to 250 monks. He fled Tibet at the age of 8 because of China's military occupation, and has worked tirelessly to bring Tibetan Buddhism to the West, through, among other things, 35 books he has authored or co-authored.
"Medicine and Compassion" reinforces the benefits of compassion, but as Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche says in the book:
"The point of this book is not merely to stress the importance of compassion. I think you sense this already or else you wouldn't be reading what I have to say. What we need to find out is how to actually be more compassionate. We know that compassion is important, but how do we actually make it more readily available?"
Shlim is also head of The Medicine and Compassion Project, an effort to encourage health professionals to be more focused on the benefits of compassion. He says of the book and the project, "The book makes a pretty compelling argument that compassion is a quality that can be expanded and stabilized through practice. The problem for me has been that the training in compassion takes some time, and requires some expert teaching at the beginning. Even for health care professionals who really want to expand their compassion it's not easy to find the right kind of instruction. I'm working to create longer seminars of 1-2 days that could help get someone started in a personal practice that would help them expand their compassion and make it more effortless."
The New Oxford Dictionary of English defines compassion as "sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others."
According to Shlim, compassion in Buddhism includes but is something more than this definition. Compassion is inherent in the human condition and can be taught and developed in a person like any other skill or knowledge, and it is an essential quality for any successful healer. That is, compassion is a quality of the completely attentive mind in action, not just a feeling of pity or concern.
"When you go to a doctor something is wrong with you and you want that doctor's complete attention to your problem," Shlim says. "That's compassion."
Shlim lives in Kelly, Wyo., north of Jackson, with his wife and two children. He has many friends in the Sun Valley area and makes at least one skiing trip to Bald Mountain every winter. He is well known in the world mountaineering community.
He was the medical director of the CIWEC Clinic Travel Medical Center in Kathmandu, Nepal, from 1983 to 1998. He is internationally renown for his research and teaching in travel and wilderness medicine, and was recently listed by Conde Nast Traveler as one of the top travel medicine experts in the United States.
