Rabbi greets Life with smile

Asher Leeder tends to body, mind, spirit

By Gloria Negri, Globe Staff, 10/24/99

In his mission to ease his patients' aching backs, straighten their spines, cure their migraines, and teach them to breathe properly, Asher Leeder wears several hats.

One of them is a yarmulke.

Ordained rabbi, chiropractic physician, a black belt in karate, Leeder is all these things. He says he draws from them to give his patients everything he feels the three disciplines have given him in life.

Chiefly, those are good health, happiness, and a positive attitude. "I was born with a smile on my face," Leeder said last week at his office, Commonwealth Chiropractic on Commonwealth Avenue, "and in Hebrew, 'Asher' means 'content.'"

His wife, Shira, the mother of their five children and his office manager, confirmed it. "It's a lot of pressure," she said, "because I always have to be happy, too."

At 48, Leeder, who lives in Newton and practices in Boston, said he can still do a karate chop through a stack of cement blocks with his bare hands just by using the correct breathing skills.

"In life," he said, "breathing is everything. There is a correct way and an incorrect way. Proper breathing and relaxation can clear your mind."

He gives his patients instruction in breathing, meditation, and relaxation, along with chiropractic treatments. He also teaches them to compartmentalize their problems, "to keep them from affecting them physically."

This summer, he launched a campaign with the Boston Public schools and others in backpack safety for youngsters, and hopes to launch another one in the workplace to prevent repetitive stress syndrome injuries.

In its conservative approach and modern equipment, Leeder's office is a far cry from the old image of the chiropractor treating a problem with a twist of the neck.

His bright, spacious quarters have X-ray machines as well as a bilateral weight scale that records the body's balance. When needed, patients are sent out for MRIs. His work is covered by most health insurance companies.

"We never take on a patient without a full medical checkup," Leeder said, "and we often take referrals from neurologists and orthopedists. We find out what's going on first, and then we determine whether a patient falls within the scope of chiropractic treatment."

Chiropractics is a therapeutic system based primarily on the interaction of the spine and the nervous system.

"It's not the answer to everything," Leeder said. "It's another approach." He may also prescribe a nutrition regime and use acupressure.

Stress, he said, "plays a role" in human aches and pains and exercises in breathing, meditation, and relaxation "help people reduce their stress so they can go out and deal with their life's activities without it affecting them physically."

With migraines, he said, "First, we find out what's causing them. If it's muscle tightness, tension, or loss of the normal curve of your neck, we adjust the curve, thereby increasing the blood flow to the area."

Breathing techniques, also, can reduce migraines, he said. Martial arts taught him "the secret of breathing to increase the blood flow and the energy flow in the body." He will talk about that in a book he is writing, "Breathing for the Health of It," having already written a martial arts scene for someone else's novel.

Of the yarmulke he always wears in his office, Leeder said, it is "a reminder that there is a creator above us at all times. It kind of keeps you in line. But I don't put my religion in my practice."

He, of course, wears the yarmulke to Temple Beth El in Newton, where he often fills in for the regular rabbi, though his main profession for 20 years has been in chiropractics.

"I do have patients who ask me to 'put on my other hat' for them," Leeder said.

"I tell them it's only by understanding the body and how important it is to care for it that you can try to achieve any spiritual level. If you're in pain, you're not going to be very spiritually oriented. In fact, under rabbinical law, you're not allowed to give the priestly blessing if you're sad."

This summer, Leeder started a new crusade. After watching his son, Judah, 12, and his classmates staggering under the weight of their backpacks, Leeder felt he had to alert parents and teachers to the problem.

"Judah's backpack weighs 40 pounds, but he's a big kid. Yet, I see kids in his class who weigh 100 pounds with a 40-pound backpack. It may be 'cool' to carry it over one shoulder, but it causes a lot of stress on one side of the body.

"Last year," Leeder said, "the Consumer Products Safety Commission reported that 3,000 kids nationwide ended up in the emergency room because of backpack injuries. They pull muscles, get sprains, and topple over from the weight.

"Back pain in kids is on the rise," he said. "More than 5 million adults are sidelined from work each year due to chronic back pain. How many of these problems started in youth?"

To properly carry a backpack, he said, "both hands must be in the straps and it must fit snugly. Maximum weight should be 15 percent of the body weight."

Leeder is already an adviser with a national group that works with airlines on seating that is safe for people's backs.

How people sit and for how long, he said, affects how they feel.

"If you have leg pain," he said, "it's not necessarily from the leg but could be from the back. It could involve pressure on the spine. When you sit, the pressure is II times greater than it is than when you're lying down.

"That means that when you sit for 12,15 or 20 hours a day, you're putting tremendous pressure on your spine. Think of a sponge you put a heavy weight on. The longer you keep that weight on, the harder it is for the sponge to rebound."

He said X-rays done on Ouagadougou tribesmen in the Upper Volta, who squat rather than sit, proved that.

"They found 70-year-olds with the spines of 20-year-olds," he said.

To Leeder, jogging is anathema, something he tries to get his associate, Tamara Truchon, to stop doing.

"It's too traumatic on the body," he said.

Among his patients, there are as many professionals, stressed out from high-pressure jobs, as there are joggers and athletes. Many, Leeder said, come with no complaints but to have their body fine tuned.

"Because you have no complaints," he said, "doesn't mean your body is functioning at full potential."

In age, his patients range from babies to 90-year-olds.

"An irritated muscle may be impeding the drainage of a baby's ear," Leeder said. "We reposition the muscle and all of a sudden, the antibiotics work. We also treat colicky babies. If there's a problem with bed-wetting, the nerve from the spine to the bladder may be irritated. So, we take the pressure off the nerve."

His most dramatic patient improvement, Leeder said, is a 92-year-old woman, "bent over at a 90-degree angle" for 11 years from arthritis. "By increasing her blood flow, her flexibility and mobility, we've straightened her to a 45-degree angle."

Leeder was born in Malden and graduated from Maimonides High School in Brookline. In his dual careers, he followed the footsteps of his late father, a medical doctor and a rabbi.

Now, his own daughter, Leah, is a chiropractor in Israel. The Leeders' other children are Danny, an office manager for a New York brokerage firm, and Avrum and Sun, at Yeshiva University, their father's alma mater.

Leeder got his bachelor's degree there in biology and chemistry and went to rabbinical studies at its Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. He was ordained in 1976. That same year, he also got his master's degree in education from Yeshiva and earned his black belt from a Hebrew studies instructor.

For a time, while teaching at Yeshiva's Hebrew Day School, Leeder assisted as rabbi, but, he said with a chuckle, "I realized that a rabbi's 48-hour-day was not the job for a nice Jewish boy."

He decided to become a chiropractor.

"I thought: drugless medicine, a way to help people without surgery," he recalled. "That sounds exciting. I visited some chiropractic offices and one of the patients was a nurse. I asked her how come she was there. She said, 'I work in a hospital, I don't want to end up in one.'"

In 1980, after four years of study, Leeder graduated as a chiropractic physician from the New York Chiropractic College.

He practiced briefly at a holistic center in New York, but returned to Massachusetts, a state where chiropractors were not licensed until 1966.

"I remember my mother asking me if it was legal," he said.

Things have changed a lot since, he said, noting that a number of Boston hospitals now have alternative medicine departments.

"There is also more money for research," he said, "because of federal studies that show manipulation is one of the most effective ways of dealing with acute low-back pain. Part of it, too, is that people want to avoid surgery."

All of this energizes Leeder.

"Seeing people come into the office in pain and leave smiling, that energizes me," he said. "Life is wonderful and powerful, if you look for it."