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Mixing standard medicine with exotic practices, Dr. Lino cures what ails you, the tribune’s Laurie Goering finds...
Chicago Tribune, April 27, 2001 |
HAVANA – Dr. Lino has me in a headlock. With a lightning movement of one beefy hand, he twists my head to one side, popping the vertebrae in a long, crunching craack. Then I’m hefted off the ground, his hands wrapped around my solar plexus, and given a good shake. “The road is Taol Axel” grunts Dr. Lino, using an Afro-Caribean term for power. “I am powerful! My life force is very strong!” I don’t doubt Dr. Lino’s Tomasen life force. What I’m hoping is that I’ll escape from his linebecker’s grip with my own faculties intact. By profession, Lino Tomasen is an internist. He is also a second-degree black belt in karate, a multidisciplinary spiritualist, a channeler of several African shamans, two Chinnese healers and one Franciscan monk—and Havana’s most popular phisician. Six day a week, Cubans suffering infirmities of the body and mind who haven’t found a cure in the country’s socialized medical system make their way to his clinic in his home on the decrepit 400 block of Concordia Street in Central Havana. By 9:00 a.m. most days, more than 30 people jam the old chairs that line both sides of the front room and hallway of Tomasen’s house. In a typical day, he will see 90 to 120 people, in a tiny consultation room just past the laundry line and the black water tank marked “Dr. Lino—Welcome”. “Most of these people try regular doctors first. I’m the last stop”, he says, sprawled in a black vinyl chair in is office. Festooned in gold jewelry, with a fat cigar in hand and a black felt fedora on his head, he looks like a Santero priest gone to the dark side with a Las Vegas showman’s flair. “My patients love me”, he notes. “I travel astrally in dreams to search for information on theirs problems. A lot of them come from past lives”. His consulting room attests to his diverse inspirations. A large print of Jesus fills one wall. Along another slouches an ancient mirrored bureau filled with a dark jar of honey, a red satin headband sewn with African trade shells, a well-used machete, various dried-up Santeria offerings and a dusty bottle of dark rum. These are photos of a once-svelte Dr. Lino airborne in karate moves and, at his side, a golden cigarette lighter, sunglasses and a mostly empty glass of coffee. “My syncretism is very strong”, he says. “I don’t have the Internet yet, but I want to use that too”. Tomasen’s treatment method, which involves shiftings energy and transferring heat, is about the same for any ailment—cancer, hepatitis, impotence, psoriasis, neurosis, arthritis, colon polyps or voodoo afflictions—and resembles a combination of African percussion and vertical chiropractic. The patient stands in the center of the tiny office while Dr. Lino warms up by drumming his hands roughly over her head, shoulders, back and chest, working his way up to the shoulder grab, neck twist and, for those not too fragile or too heavy, a lift into the air to the staccato crack of repositioning vertebrae. “I put my life, heart and soul into this”, he says, squeezing one wide-eyed young woman. With his arm around her shoulder, he quotes Cuban poet-hero Jose Marti, then launches into a stream of what sounds like Chinese as she dangles with her feet off the ground. “Dont worry! I’ll cure you!” He promises. The woman, a first-time patient, looks doubtful but admits afterward that her lower back feels a lot better. “That’s my force, the understanding of the infinite,” says the 39-year-old doctor, lapsing into repose in his chair. “I have so muchin my head that you can’t explain it scientifically.” His patients say that for all the grunting and talk about magnetism and chakras and astral planes, his methods work. One rolls up her pants legs to show that a lifelong affliction with psoriasis has disappeared, in about seven sessions. Another says his liver functions better, and another reports real improvement in her arthritis. Pilar Rojo, 63, says she could walk only with the aid of crutches when she first come to the doctor with chonic back and foot problems. After two sessions, she says, she threw away one crutch, and by the fourth session had thrown away the other. “I have a lot of faith in this”, she said while waiting to see the doctor for a tune-up, a gift bouquet of flowers on het lap. “I think he has a lot of positive energy”. Pedro Vila, 30, another patient in line, explain how his wife, Emilka, was stricken with a voodo curse until she visited Dr. Lino. After one treatment, she regurgitated a number of worms, he said, and since has seen an improvement in her asthma as well. “People come here with bone problems, intestinal problems, infertile problems, and the energy cures them,. Vila said: “They walk out with big smiles”. His patients claim Dr. Lino methods work even by long distance. By looking at a photo of her father and then blowing cigar smoke in the sign of a cross over it, said Greder Rojas, Dr. Lino was able to diagnosis her father problem—an aortic aneurism later confirmed by his doctors in Miami—and eventually cure it, she said. “I have no idea what the explanation is, but it’s real”, she said. “He’s wonderful.” |
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