MIDDLETOWN, NY — From Friday, Oct. 7, to Sunday on the 9th, a group of renowned plastic surgeons and other medical professionals, as well as local mayor Joseph DeStefano, gathered in Middletown, New York for a medical symposium hosted by the Northern Medical Center.
This inaugural event featured a departure from conventional cosmetic medicinal thinking, looking beyond a patient’s physical features and employing a more holistic approach to health and beauty.
The Northern Medical Center employs only board certified doctors and practices numerous specialities, including primary care pediatrics, sports medicine, physical therapy, acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine, cosmetic beauty services, and more.
The center is located in Middletown and serves residents of Orange County and the greater New York area.
Dr. Jingduan Yang, the CEO of the Northern Medical Center (NMC) and a doctor spoke with Vision Times about the center’s vision and supply some insight into what he calls “an incredible journey.”
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“We are at a time, people are struggling and people are suffering because our current healthcare system, which really should be called a ‘disease management system’ or ‘crisis system’ have failed to protect the people from getting sick and the people are not getting the information they need,” Yang said.
A new paradigm of cosmetic medicine
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Dr. Yang, who specializes in neurological integrative medicine and is a fifth-generation practitioner of Chinese medicine, spoke about SY Aesthetics, a new cosmetic health center to be built at NMC.
He envisions SY Aesthetics as a “unique cosmetic medicine center that will change the entire healthcare industry,” he said.
The symposium’s keynote speaker, Jeffery Yager, told the audience that his ultimate goal as a plastic surgeon is to make people happy and, to accomplish that, he looks at the whole person, including their diet and emotional and spiritual needs.
Yager operates a plastic surgery clinic in Manhattan, where he specializes in medical procedures including breast surgery, body contouring, facial rejuvenation, and injectable treatments.
“The physical part — the traditional plastic surgery — is the easiest part of my job,” Yager said, adding that, “But it is more than just the physical, and sometimes the physical isn’t the real problem.”
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“If a patient has a very black, dark energy, plastic surgery is not going to fix it. Whatever you put on the outside is not going to extend to the spirit on the inside. You have to get to the root of the spiritual problem that patient has, and it can be treated in many different ways,” he said.
Prior to opening his own practice, Yager attended medical school at Columbia University and completed a residency at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center.
During his time practicing medicine, Yager grew more and more confident that spirit or energy plays a vital role in obtaining true beauty; however, he found that whenever he brought up this aspect of a person’s wellbeing with other medical practitioners they tended to roll their eyes at the idea.
“In the hospitals, people become institutionalized, which means you work in an institution for a certain period of time, you put yourself in so deep that it’s not worth trying to back out and going to different tracks,” he said.
Yager was pleased to find like-minded professionals at the NMC.
“This is the opportunity that I was looking for to change the paradigm globally for what cosmetic plastic surgery is. I feel like I’m starting my whole practice over again, after 25 years, more excited than ever with the chance to affect so many more lives not just using surgery, but training others to have a more complete care,” he said.
‘Four-dimensional’ health
Discussing NMC’s vision for healthcare, Dr. Yang explained that disease can be structural, chemical, or energetic, and a focus on the latter, a human’s energy, is where the NMC differs from other facilities that provide medical care.
He said the NMC practices medicine with a focus on the “four dimensional health” model.
“A human being is far more complicated than a single cell or tissues, or one problem or the other. A human being can have a problem in a very complex manner. It can be structural, it can be chemical, it can be energetic, it can be spiritual. And if you don’t understand a human being from all four dimensions you’re not going to be able to help them the best you can,” he said adding that, “So this facility applies this four dimensional health and the medicine model to take care of our patients.”
He explained, “the body can have the same structure and the same chemistry and [yet] be dead. What differentiates people between dead and alive is what we call human energies and human energy in Chinese medicine is called qi.”
According to traditional Chinese medicine, qi or “energy” is what gives the body temperature, makes our heart beat, helps lungs breath and provides bowel movements, muscle contractions, our feelings and thoughts, he explained.
“I, even right now, as I am speaking to you, the voice is a result of those energies,” he said.
“Modern medicine doesn’t quite understand how human energy works, and they can measure the phenomena but they don’t know how to take care of it because the human energetic system is as invisible as the energy itself,” he said, further illustrating his point by comparing the energy in a human system to the air around us.
“We don’t see the air but air does exist,” he said adding that, “However, traditional Chinese medicine was able to visualize it [qi], was able to describe it, and was able to give us complete insights into human energetic. That’s why acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine, sometimes can do things [our] chemical treatments cannot do.”
SY Aesthetics
SY Aesthetics aims to help patients achieve their cosmetic goals by addressing four dimensions of health including physical, biochemical, energetic and spiritual, Damon Noto, a back and joint pain specialist at NMC, said at the symposium.
“Everybody has on the outside surface of you — a structural surface. But underneath that, you also have what we call a biochemical level: hormones, nutrients, neurotransmitters,” Noto said.
“And if you look at the older, more classical traditional healing methods, such as traditional Chinese medicine, they knew energy is the driving factor in one’s health. The fourth dimension we talked about is your thoughts. Are they positive thoughts? Are they negative thoughts?” Noto said, adding that when you take a holistic approach such as this it creates powerful results.
The symposium was held over three days and featured numerous medical professionals, including Paul Dreschneck, plastic surgeon and four-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee; Francesco Gargano, MD and plastic surgeon; MDs Jessica Russo and David Cordeno; and Dr. Yang, who is the founder and Medical Director of the Yang institute of Integrative Medicine and the Tao Clinic of Acupuncture.
