Thriving in 'A Healing Place'

Dodging rebels in Nepal or creating a sanctuary in Brampton, these MDs spread the message of truth and tolerance

By Wendy Banks

Dr Lopita Banerjee sits back on a low couch covered with an elaborately embroidered throw in a bright, high-ceilinged and sparsely furnished sitting room. As her seven-month-old daughter Omiya squirms in her arms, Dr Banerjee thinks back to her honeymoon.

"We were in the Himalayas trekking for 10 days. We were with an organization called Earthwatch, and we were supposed to be looking for snow leopards," she recalls, laughing. "It was my first time camping, and my first time hiking. The first day was eight hours of hard walking, all uphill, and I thought, 'What am I doing? This is my honeymoon!'" By the end of the trip, though, she loved it. "They broke our group into two sections, one to go further and the other to go back; we were chosen for the first group. We thrived, I guess."

Somehow, that's not hard to imagine. Dressed in basic black, her long, straight hair hanging loose, she's a picture of poise and confidence. We're in the sunny second floor sitting room of A Healing Place, the three-story Victorian house in Brampton, Ontario that she and her husband, Dr Sanjeev Goel, have transformed into a health centre with a difference. In addition to the two of them, both GPs, the centre employs a psychiatrist, a chiropractor, a social worker and a nutritionist. They also offer alternative therapies like acupuncture, chelation therapy, naturopathy and meditation classes led by Dr Goel himself. "We want to integrate everything, because that's what I think medicine should be. Not just 'this is Western medicine, and that's it' ? there are other things out there. I grew up in a family that uses homeopathy, and I thought that was completely normal until I went to medical school."

Dr Banerjee doesn't come from a medical family ? her mother's a writer, and her father's an engineer and former Olympic athlete ? and for her parents, who are from India, alternative medicine was a way of life. India is also where the travel bug first bit Dr Banerjee. She was born in Toronto, but some of her fondest childhood memories are of family vacations to the old country. "I loved it," she says, her eyes lighting up. "Whenever we'd go back there, we were surrounded by grandparents and cousins. And hearing all these incredible stories, the mythology of India, and then going to visit places where these events were supposed to have taken place ? it was magical."

Her fascination with travel and ancient history has stayed with her ever since, and it's one of the many things she and her husband have in common. Together, they've been all over ? from Cappadocia in Turkey to Macchu Picchu in Peru.

HOGTOWN TO KATMANDU
It's not all tourism, though. Dr Banerjee has also worked in clinics in Nepal and Calcutta. Nepal made a particular impression; she and Dr Goel arrived in the middle of a takeover by Maoist insurgents. "We were supposed to do medical work for a few weeks, and then go trekking. The medical part turned out to be only five or six days, because the Maoists were in control of territories where the clinics were being run. There was a curfew on at night, streets were shut down, and you couldn't go into certain areas. There were barricades, guards with guns, the whole bit."

On the occasions when they were able to work, it was frustrating. "We'd get there in the morning and there'd be a crowd of people waiting. The organization had limited funds, so they had to draw some guidelines to say, 'Sorry, this is all we can do.'" Dr Banerjee remembers one woman who presented with a large, solid abdominal mass; she was sure it was cancer, but she was helpless. "We were able to arrange a specialist, but she needed surgery, and she didn't have enough money." Her organization couldn't help either. "It broke my heart to let her go. That happened a lot."

They didn't leave those experiences behind when they left Nepal; their travels have profoundly influenced their lives back home, and influenced the way they set up their Brampton practice, as well as their extracurricular activities. "Seeing the way things were in other parts of the world made us realize we had to do something locally," says Dr Goel, who's pulled up a plastic lawn chair to join us. He has to raise his low voice a little to be heard over Omiya, who's burbling happily in his lap.

The room we're sitting in is one of the fruits of that realization. Books with titles like The Bre-X Fraud and Gotcha! How the Media Distort the News are stacked knee-high in the corners under the bay windows. Dr Banerjee explains enthusiastically that they're planning to turn the room into a community library as an initiative of the Free-Thinking Collective ? a loose affiliation of friends and colleagues she started to get people together to discuss ideas and organize local activist events. "We're hoping that this will be a sort of community area, where people will come in, borrow books, get into discussions."

INSPIRED BY GANDHI
Another arena for discussion is their website, www.truthforce.ca ? the name is an English translation of 'Satyagraha,' the term coined by Mahatma Gandhi for the campaign of non-violent resistance to British rule in India. The website started as a response to the war in Iraq, Dr Banerjee says. The couple was leery of mainstream news coverage, and decided that an alternative forum was needed. "And we thought, well, why just limit it to Iraq? Why not get people from all sorts of backgrounds to discuss anything? The idea was that the art of conversation doesn't really exist anymore, and this is one way to revive it." They've got several members who contribute regularly to their message forums on topics as wide-ranging as safe drinking water, road rage, and the politics of war and terrorism.

Naturally, the couple believes strongly in the principle of free speech, and sometimes values can get challenged when you're dealing with an open forum like their website. They've made a conscious decision not to eject members whose beliefs don't jive with their own. Recently a right-winger has joined the forum and frequently posts islamophobic messages on Truth Force's message boards. Instead of banning him, Drs Banerjee and Goel have decided to engage him and challenge his views ? one message at a time.

In addition to travel, work, activism and parenthood, Dr Goel is a candidate for the local Green party and a budding filmmaker. Dr Banerjee is on maternity leave for a few more months, but even so she's involved in a new initiative to educate doctors in her region about wife abuse. I ask how they manage to stay on top of it all. "The Mac!" they both exclaim, and burst out laughing. It's a high-tech household ? they keep their laptop calendars up to date and sync them up several times a day to keep in touch.

It also helps that they resist the pressure to take on more patients than they can handle. "It's important to be well-rounded," says Dr Goel. Dr Banerjee agrees. "I think that in the end we want to be able to say that, yeah, we worked, but we also did other stuff."