Healing and Self-Healing: Inside Out
It’s amazing when you think about it. We now know how to prevent most of the illnesses that cause premature death and suffering. Many forms of cancer, heart disease, and even AIDS can be prevented by changes in lifestyle. Globally, there’s enough food to feed the malnourished. Public health measures could easily eradicate infant mortality from fouled water supplies. Yet these enormous problems persist! Are we making any progress? Where do we start?
Close your eyes for a moment. Breathe in and out slowly, a few times. While doing this, just observe your chest. Maybe a little itch or an ache here or there. Just observe what you feel, and return to awareness of your breathing for a few more moments. Feeling relaxed? I hope so.
A few moments like this can help us get in touch with what the yogis call the “witnessing entity” – that part of ourselves which can watch what is going on, but not get “sucked into the drama.” Finding this quiet place inside is a key to becoming a healer or embarking on the path to self-healing. With a relatively quiet mind, we can observe what is really going on, and trust our observations.
A good reason to trust our self-observations is that they’re always right at some level. No doctor can tell you that your headache is not real, or that your fatigue is “all in your head.” A doctor who says that is really saying “this is not something I can help you with.” Just as we’ve got to have confidence in our own abilities to solve and prevent health problems, we’ve got to know the limitations of those who are available to help us.
This means we’ve got to take responsibility for our own judgments and choices, though this may not be easy at times. Maybe, it would seem much simpler to go to the doctor, get a pill (or an operation), and do what you’re told. But true healing, and prevention of future problems, can never take place this way.
A more effective and meaningful strategy is to see health practitioners as facilitators who can provide you with access to a wide range of experiences and skills which will be helpful to you. But you are still the healer.
For me, the most important part of my medical education was my contact with patients. Having seen hundreds of people with asthma, for example, I can share my observations with an asthmatic patient for whom this is all a new (and often distressing) experience. We can put our heads together about possible causes. “Is it worse after visiting Aunt Tilly and her cats? How about rainy days and mold exposures? Is stress a factor?” After evaluating the possibilities, we can come up with a list of probable causes, and map out a plan for confirming or rejecting them.
I take it as an article of faith that no difficulty is inherently “incurable.” It’s ironic that the answer to a long-standing problem may often be so near at hand – by identifying environmental sensitivities, altering lifestyle, or modifying diet. For a complex problem, it may be necessary to systematically catalog all of the possible causes, and evaluate each in turn. All of this does not fit into the traditional Western model of the doctor-patient relationship, in which the practitioner is an objective authority and the patient is a passive recipient of medical care. As we move toward a model in which each individual takes initial responsibility for his or her own healing, we can use professionals as facilitators and advisors. This brings us to the original root meaning of the word doctor, from the Latin docere, meaning “to teach.” The doctor/teacher remains a source of information and emotional support, when needed, but each of us must take ultimate responsibility for getting and staying well.
It follows, then, that individuals must take on the role of students. It’s amazing to me that our society has not prepared us better. Back in the late ‘60’s, when I was in college, I decided to become a vegetarian. Someone asked me what I was going to eat for protein, and I had to stop. I realized that I really didn’t know. Lettuce, carrots? No way. Here I was, a sophomore at Yale, and I didn’t really know the first thing about maintaining my own body.
The outcome of this realization for me was that I began to study nutrition and healing very intensely – and still do. In fact, many people who have not formally entered the health care fields have, over the past 20 years, developed a much higher consciousness and level of sophistication about their health. I suspect that most of the people reading this article have spent some time on developing a healthful diet, integrating exercise into their routines, practicing some form of stress management, getting a massage once in a while, etc.
Along with these advances in popular health awareness and self-care, one might expect that the medical profession has kept pace. The sad truth is that, with a few notable exceptions, it has not. Most physicians spend very little time working with and educating their patients. Physicians are constantly being pressured to fulfill the financial expectations of their role – whether in a Health Maintenance Organization, hospital or group practice – and find themselves unable to develop a meaningful healing alliance with their patients.
Medical education has not made any great strides toward developing a new model for personal health and self-care. This isn’t too surprising, in view of the fact that most medical research is funded by drug companies, and it’s money on which the educational institutions depend. Students are rarely introduced to the concepts of natural healing and preventive medicine. But several schools are starting to introduce survey courses on these topics. Perhaps, as health care consumers and potential future students begin choosing alternative health alliances, pressure will be brought to bear on the established medical systems, and we’ll begin to see more change for the better.
The present wide acceptance of natural childbirth is one of the “notable exceptions” I mentioned earlier. When I was a third year medical student in 1975, the obstetricians in my teaching hospital looked upon natural childbirth with derision, even though studies had already affirmed that it was safer for mother and child than drug and forceps deliveries. (I was pretty shocked, since I had just spent the previous summer studying with lay midwives in Santa Cruz, California.) But within three years, most obstetricians were routinely attending natural childbirths in their hospitals; any obstetricians who refused would be virtually without patients!
It’s refreshing, finally, that we now have a wide variety of health practitioners to choose from, and as consumers, we can “vote with our feet” and go elsewhere. The Pioneer Valley abounds with talented body-workers, herbalists, midwives, acupuncturists, open-minded physicians, nutritionists, chiropractors and other healers. These “teachers” can advise us on our particular and personal path of wellness. Of course, each of the different healing disciplines and practitioners have their own specific strengths, and may be more effective in specific circumstances.
Once again, each individual should work toward understanding his/her own body, gaining perspectives and opinions from whichever therapies s/he finds potentially valuable. Often, the best referrals come from friends or family. And another practitioner can help in choosing complementary healing strategies. No one can be all things to all people, and the willingness to make appropriate referrals is one of the most important qualities a healer can have. Health professionals can work together as a team – providing the patient is the captain!
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