Medicine Man

East meets West in his healing hands

An acupuncturist and Eastern-medicine healer, Ethan Borg ’94 says his “goal is to put myself out of business.”

To that end, he has invented a revolutionary form of what he calls “intuitive” medicine. Ordinary people can use it, he says, to treat hundreds of health complaints with just a few
minutes of training, which he offers for free.

His approach, called “EM,” is a type of “energy medicine” that combines ancient Chinese systems, including feng shui, with modern knowledge of anatomy and physics. According to Borg, EM allows practitioners to
diagnose and treat people over long distances, using “nontouch healing techniques.”

His journey began at Swarthmore when Western treatments failed to relieve his chronic fatigue syndrome.

“Eastern medicine was the one approach that had a truly beneficial impact on my well-being when I was sick,” he says.

After graduation, he worked in the tech industry, but couldn’t resist exploring his passion. Borg went to a top acupuncture school and, for the past 13 years, has run a thriving alternative-medicine practice, currently located in Rochester, N.Y.

In addition to seeing patients in person, he can also deliver what he calls “broadcast energy treatments” to people anywhere in the world.

If you’re skeptical, Borg understands.

“From a Western perspective,” he says, “it is a huge leap of faith to try alternative medicine.”

Even so, he has gained the confidence of Western practitioners. He gets many referrals of patients with Lyme disease, and earlier in his career he helped scores of couples overcome fertility problems that resisted conventional treatment.

His own father, a radiologist, sees the benefit of Borg’s work. “Both my parents would prefer I were a Western-medicine doctor,” he says, but they have made their peace with his choice—both come to him as acupuncture patients.

6 Comments

Jaclyn Richard on April 13, 2016

He is an amazing ,kind & effective in his treatment. I always feel in alignment after a treatment hour with Ethan

Benjamin Mazer on April 18, 2016

I'd like to respectfully take issue with the publication of this article. To put it simply, Swarthmore is lending its good name to what can reasonably be described as fraud. I'm aware that this is an alumni magazine and not a hard-hitting investigative newspaper. However, that is no excuse for educated writers to credulously promote this nonsense to its educated readership. We are more than capable of utilizing the balance and critical thinking taught to us at Swarthmore.

I am completing medical school in Rochester, N.Y., so I have been a first-hand witness to Rochester-area patients who have been scammed by so-called "alternative medicine" procedures. (Let me be clear that I have no first-hand knowledge of Mr. Borg's practices or patients.) I have seen patients forgo proven beneficial medical treatments in pursuit of therapies such as "energy medicine" described above, which have no evidence of benefit and can be rather expensive. All the while, their diseases remain unmanaged and damage accrues.

Swarthmore should not be promoting "leaps of faith" when it comes to medicine and health. While you are not physicians, I'd encourage you to none the less heed Hippocrates and consider whether or not you are "first doing no harm" by promoting quackery. People's lives are on the line.

This article should be retracted or substantially amended due to the potential harm it may cause patients.

Thank you,
Benjamin Mazer
Swarthmore Class of 2010

Ethan Borg on April 29, 2016

I want to thank the Swarthmore Bulletin for writing a story about me and my work. Of course, I feel it is important to respond to my geographical albeit not philosophical neighbour, Benjamin Mazer '10, who wrote a message above disparaging my vocation and shaking an angry finger at the Bulletin for giving my work attention. One of the great things about Swarthmore is its encouragement of dialogue and its respectful openness to the ideas of all of its community members. There clearly is a large divide in Dr Mazer's mind between Eastern and Western ideas of health and healthcare. I do not feel this divide is universally accepted among all people and not even among all practitioners of Western medicine, who, like Dr. Mazer, also no doubt interface with patients on a regular basis engaging in non-Western methodologies for their healing. There is actually no more highly studied alternative medicine than Chinese medicine and specifically acupuncture by Western researchers. For instance, here is an article publicized just this week about Western inquiries into Eastern successes (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24961568). In this study, the success of acupuncture itself was not questioned, instead, the question before the researchers was "how exactly does acupuncture work?" This is one of hundreds of articles published every year by the National Institutes of Health, which, along with the WHO, have recognized Chinese medicine and acupuncture as being scientifically proven beneficial for a wide host of issues. My personal methodology highlighted in this article is based on a practice known as Medical Qi Gong which has been used for well over 3000 years on a daily basis across a landmass far larger than the United States. So, while Dr. Mazer may hurl insults at my trade, instead of hurling insults back, I would strongly encourage him and anyone else who agreed with him to load up Pubmed and read the wide array of Western studies on Eastern practices. I, for one, applaud the Bulletin for doing something that is difficult -- shining light on something that is esoteric in a world that mostly highlights round pegs that fit in round holes. Nonetheless, there are many Swarthmore alumni who are practitioners of Chinese medicine and far more alumni who seek it out for their own personal supplementary care. I would also like to point out to Dr Mazer that I too am a Swarthmore alumnus. I work hard every day like all Swatties I know, trying to do good in this world. I am as passionate, concerned, and considerate about my work as I imagine he is about his. So thank you Swarthmore College for giving me and my work a moment. I cannot tell you in words how much I truly appreciate it. If it does nothing but increase the dialogue between East and West, then I have served my class of '94 well, as that was how my first year started -- with messages plastered all along Parrish Hall between people expressing their opinions across what appeared to be a vast political divide. The type of wall may have changed, but here I am once again plastering my feelings on this wall hoping only for this one thing, that someone on the other side of the divide will listen to it respectfully.

cayxaden on July 23, 2017

thank you

Benjamin Mazer on May 1, 2016

Acupuncture has indeed been studied extensively. In nearly every study it has been found to be ineffective. Given simple probability and poor study design, even an ineffective treatment can appear effective in isolated studies. Acupuncture is nothing more than placebo, as described in this excellent article: http://www.dcscience.net/Colquhoun-Novella-A&A-2013.pdf. (Placebos can also be very effective, after all.) Yet despite all these primarily negative studies, acupuncture is still widely practiced. This is further proof that alternative practitioners operate mainly on faith rather than evidence. And while some alternative practices are quite old and quite popular, I have no doubt that humans are capable of holding onto a bad idea for over 3000 years. Physicians have cast aside hundreds of treatments later shown to be ineffective or replaced by better methods. Alternative practitioners never seem to give up on any idea, no matter how bad it is.
Patients should ask whether alternative practitioners completed 4 years of rigorous medical school, followed by a mandatory 3-8 years of 80 hour per week of residency training. Patients should ask whether the practitioner is obligated to follow the AMA Code of Medical Ethics or undergo oversight by a state medical board. They should ask whether their practitioner carries millions of dollars of medical malpractice insurance, as all physicians do, so that if a patient is harmed by negligence he may at least recoup his losses.
Physicians are not perfect. We could all stand to be more evidence-based in our practices. But we are bound by complex ethical and legal doctrines that place the patient’s health as our first priority. Alternative practitioners practice largely outside of this protective framework, despite the non-rigorous "licenses" and "degrees" that some now possess in order to bestow an air of legitimacy.
This is why I describe the health advice in this article as fraud. Alternative practitioners are not bound to evidence-based treatments and informed consent as physicians are. I hope most people can see this exemplified in ideas such as "broadcast energy treatments" promoted in the article, which are absurd and violate our fundamental knowledge of physics and biology. (At least according to the science courses I took at Swarthmore.)
Benjamin Mazer, Swarthmore Class of 2010.

Karman Mak on May 4, 2016

Thank you, Swarthmore Bulletin, for publishing this article on alternative healing. As a consumer of both Western and Eastern healing modalities, I reply on both systems to maintain my health. If it were not for Western medicine, I would not be alive today (I have a pacemaker.) If it not for acupuncture, herbs, meditation, and my yoga practice, I might be taking much more prescription medications and be much less happy and healthy. I appreciate that the Swarthmore Bulletin is bringing in alternative perspectives that might help us embrace whole-heartedness, non-dualism, and openness.
—Karman Mak, Class of 2000

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