tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13338655746849774722024-03-13T12:18:49.893+00:00Healing This Wounded Earthwith Compassion, Spirit and Ripples of HopeEleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.comBlogger601125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-6813835370840565322016-02-01T13:21:00.000+00:002016-02-02T10:05:52.008+00:00Compassion and MigrantsCompassion - and healing - that's what we need in bucket-loads in this damaged, wounded and suffering world.<br />
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There was a very good <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/faith/article4677754.ece" target="_blank">article</a> in last Saturday's <i>Times</i> newspaper entitled <b>"Think Carefully before joining the back lash on migrants."</b><br />
Written by the Right Reverend Graham Tomlin, Bishop of Kensington, and addressing the fears of many of us about being "overrun" by migrants from different cultures, it persuasively argues the point that<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">"the basis of a cohesive society is neither ethnic uniformity nor ethnic diversity for its own sake."</span> <span style="font-size: large;">Rather, <b>society is held together by compassion for our fellow beings,</b> regardless of their backgrounds.</span> There is a great deal of very real suffering out there which should appall us and it calls for a great deal of compassion. Our fears must not override that compassion, he argues, and that compassion, when shown to the defenceless is a <b><span style="font-size: large;">"barometer of the moral health of a society."</span></b><br />
Hear hear. This is why I wrote <i>Healing This Wounded Earth: with Compassion, Spirit and the Power of Hope,</i> arguing for and showing the means of achieving such change in our society in all walks of life, Never has the message been more relevant than now.<br />
It's really worth reading what Graham Tomlin has to say if you have access to the full article.<br />
And of course it's worth reading my own book!Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-3902831969593999842015-12-22T14:53:00.002+00:002015-12-22T14:53:41.269+00:00Henri Nouwen Wounded HealerI enjoy reading <b><i>Sojourners</i></b>, it's stated mission: <i>"to inspire hope and action by articulating the biblical call to racial and social justice, life and peace, and environmental stewardship."</i><br />
Even though I live in the UK I find much of the magazine just as relevant here as it is across the Atlantic.<br />
Each month editor-in-chief <b>Jim Wallis</b> writes a feature under the heading "Hearts and Minds." Real change in the world requires changes in our hearts and minds, something I have written about quite a bit over the years here and in my books. I therefore particularly appreciated Jim's article in the January 2016 edition which I have just received: Lessons from a <b>Wounded Healer</b>. And the <b>Wounded Healer</b> is of course the late <b>Henri Nouwen</b>, that great Catholic spiritual writer who became such a best seller with his wonderful book of the same name: <b>The Wounded Healer</b>.<br />
As Jim points out, Henri certainly didn't have his life sorted. He had a history of spiritual struggle, which has been used to inspire us all in the rich legacy of his books. A very thoughtful article from Jim concludes that:<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Henri Nouwen's life was </b></span><b><span style="font-size: large;">an example for us all in how to encounter and incorporate both spirituality and social justice into our lives and work.</span> </b><br />
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In fact it was reading a biography of <b>Henri Nouwen</b> while I was on holiday a few years back which inspired me to research the concept of the <b>Wounded Healer</b> in greater depth and to try to consider how we might apply the archetype to all aspects of our daily lives, whether in <b>our economy or our healthcare, our environmental issues or our creativity, our worship or our communities</b>.<br />
It took a very long time to research and write. I may not have got it all right, but it has certainly hit the right spot with many. And at the same time it was a cathartic experience, knowing that like me Henri had struggled with his own mental and spiritual condition - and his books were extremely helpful to me.<br />
In a world of doom and gloom where there seem to be so many intractable problems I believe there is great hope to be found in applying the principles of the empathy and spirituality and humility of the <b>wounded healer </b>into our lives, whoever we are, whatever we do in our work and leisure lives. Thank you <b>Jim Wallis</b> and <b><i>Sojourners</i></b> for bringing this to the forefront of our minds again.<br />
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<a href="https://sojo.net/" target="_blank"><i>Sojourners</i></a><br />
<a href="http://authl.it/B004SCBKP0" target="_blank"><i>Healing This Wounded Earth</i> </a>- inspired by <b>Henri Nouwen</b> and the <b>Wounded Healer</b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnQ6I0Q-vbGfW7zrQH-Huu7EJ-IGQvGTpP3tdiIpcCkEhegwdPWAHagXgYNOc0Nh-TzUlP0-UNUdzAOHcOzpZql7YWRp5qXjcEwXASUmlTht7LKpob14X94aVRAMJr3l_d-zsrG6GcqOU/s1600/P1090718.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnQ6I0Q-vbGfW7zrQH-Huu7EJ-IGQvGTpP3tdiIpcCkEhegwdPWAHagXgYNOc0Nh-TzUlP0-UNUdzAOHcOzpZql7YWRp5qXjcEwXASUmlTht7LKpob14X94aVRAMJr3l_d-zsrG6GcqOU/s200/P1090718.JPG" width="200" /></a></div>
<b>The iconic monolithic rock hewn church of Bet Giyorgis (St George) visited on my recent memorable trip to the wonderful Ethiopia - written about in detail in my other blog <a href="http://wisdomoftolerance.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">Ethiopia - in search of the Ark of the Covenant</a></b><br />
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<br />Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-41210732214514181282015-05-29T15:40:00.001+01:002015-05-29T15:49:24.090+01:00The Power of Money can Rescue our PlanetReading the <i><a href="http://standardonline.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx" target="_blank">London Evening Standard</a></i> a couple of nights ago - I saw a comment by <b>David Nussbaum</b> UK Chief Executive of <a href="http://www.wwf.org.uk/about_wwf/press_centre/spokespeople/david_nussbaum/" target="_blank">World Wildlife Fund</a> -<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Power of Money can Rescue the Planet</span> </b><br />
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"London uniquely placed," he writes, "to tackle climate change and not cause it." And he urges Londoners to all do their bit by considering their own investments, how their pensions and savings are deployed, and this responsibility extends, he says, to businesses, charities, educational institutions and so on. Now isn't that just what I wrote about in <i>Healing this Wounded Earth</i> - but we are seemingly just not ready yet for that message <b>Mr Nussbaum</b>.<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Yes we have so much power in the way we spend our money. </span></div>
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But as Upton Sinclair once said,<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”</span></h1>
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<span style="font-size: small;">(Just a note to my readers - if you have a Kindle this book, together with Why Religions Work, will be at the special promo price of just £0.99 or $ equivalent for the month of June only.) </span></div>
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<br />Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-19037423803817434902015-02-14T11:32:00.000+00:002015-02-14T11:32:31.141+00:00The Serenity Prayer, the Beatitudes and Healing This Wounded Earth<i>"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, </i><br />
<i>The courage to change the things I can, </i><br />
<i>And the wisdom to know the difference." </i><br />
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The 9/11 atrocity changed our world for ever, and it seems an even more dangerous place today, with no apparent let up in the dreadful acts of barbarism, cruelty and depravity we witness with a frightening immediacy and in so much detail through our media.<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">Man's inhumanity to man seems to know no bounds. </span></b><br />
Do you want to cry when you witness or hear stories of wrongdoing and suffering in the world around you?
In its written form the above "serenity prayer" is widely attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian. Only later was it adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve step programmes, for its powerful message of serenity, courage and wisdom.<br />
But is this serenity prayer to some extent a cop-out? Yes it is true that it can often take courage to change things for the better, to take a stand, to be a whistle-blower. I can relate to that. But how easy it can be to shrug our shoulders, leaning on the first line of that prayer, and say to ourselves that some things we just have to accept, while having a nagging doubt in our hearts that perhaps we could do something. No, it is all too difficult. We won't upset the status quo. It's easier just to get on with our own lives.
But as the American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead once said: "Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world – indeed it’s the only thing that ever has."<br />
Matthew tells us in his Gospel that Jesus had travelled throughout Galilee, teaching in the synagogues, performing healing miracles and telling his audience of the good news of the kingdom. The crowds came from far and wide, from Galilee, Jerusalem, Judea and from lands east of the Jordan river. Seeing those crowds, Jesus climbed the mountain side, sat down and proceeded to teach his disciples who had followed him there, starting with the <b>Beatitudes</b>, (or what Billy Graham once called the Beautiful Attitudes.)<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">These do not make for comfortable reading, in that to receive our blessings there seem to be some pretty harsh conditions, and the blessings themselves are a little hard to grasp</span>. What is clear is that Jesus is telling his followers what he is expecting of them, what it means to follow him, and therefore it is imperative for Christians or Jesus followers to listen that message and try to understand it.
Luke tells a slightly different story, in what is known by many as the Sermon on the Plain, where Jesus teaches four blessings and four woes. These seem to be less well known and make for even more uncomfortable reading for Christians.<br />
The combined <b>Beatitudes</b> and the Woes from both Gospels challenge us to examine our lives and behaviours and they teach us some tough lessons. In our material world full of self help guides we are encouraged to pursue our happiness through wealth, status, power, consumption and material comforts. But this type of happiness is insecure and fleeting.
The <b>Beatitudes</b> are all broadly rooted in love and humility, mercy, spirituality and compassion. Billy Graham called them the Beautiful Attitudes. They paradoxically tell us that true happiness or blessing is found through being poor in spirit, meek, merciful, hungry, thirsty, and so on, values which often seem alien to our 21st century world. These are tough lessons, but the Woes are even more difficult to accept into our lives. Perhaps this is why they are often neglected.<br />
Some years ago I felt inspired by world events to explore the many areas of our lives where perhaps we could introduce more <b>compassion, spirituality and healing</b> for the benefit of all; where we could change things, however hard that might be. I set out these ideas in my first book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Healing-This-Wounded-Earth-Compassion-ebook/dp/B004SCBKP0/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1&qid=1418129826" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Healing This Wounded Earth.</a></i> This was an ambitious project, and is uncomfortable and challenging reading for many. I meant it to be.<br />
Now I have come to see that those <span style="font-size: large;">Beatitudes</span> and Woes which Jesus taught his disciples in those Sermons (on the Mount and the Plain) form the very backbone of many of the ideas I set out in <i>Healing This Wounded Earth</i>, inspired by what I saw as a spiritual poverty and lack of compassion in so much of the world around us.<br />
So take a fresh and very critical look at the Beatitudes, why don't you, in the context of the really hard hitting and challenging views I expressed in <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Healing-This-Wounded-Earth-Compassion-ebook/dp/B004SCBKP0/ref=sr_1_2_twi_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1423912911&sr=1-2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Healing This Wounded Earth</a></i>.<br />
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Which by the way is available for just £1.99/$3 on Kindle for February only (with a free Kindle app available if you do not have a Kindle).<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Healing-This-Wounded-Earth-Compassion-ebook/dp/B004SCBKP0/ref=sr_1_2_twi_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1423912911&sr=1-2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">UK Amazon </a><br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Healing-This-Wounded-Earth-Compassion-ebook/dp/B004SCBKP0/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1&qid=1418129826" target="_blank">US Amazon</a>Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-69096048335414470572014-12-12T20:21:00.001+00:002014-12-12T20:21:23.569+00:00World War 1 football match - the Christmas TruceMuch has been made in the UK media this week of the football match which is said to have been played between German and British troops at the first Christmas in the trenches of the <b>First World War</b>; the <b>Christmas Truce</b>. Even warring factions can forget their differences in some circumstances. The said troops were understood to exchange small gifts, and sing carols, as well as playing football together, much to the consternation of their senior officers.<br />
But this is not the first record of a temporary truce from hostilities. In the Crimean War, British, French and Russian troops at quiet times gathered around the same fire, smoking and drinking. In the <b>American Civil War </b>Yankees and rebels traded tobacco, coffee and newspapers, fished peacefully on opposite sides of the same stream and even collected wild blackberries together.<br />
On 29 July 2007 millions of Iraqis, Shia, Sunni, Kurd and Christian, became united for a brief interlude to rejoice over their football victory against Saudi Arabia in the Asian Cup Final. Shots were fired in the air in jubilant celebration rather than for political squabbling and killing. Iraq had been momentarily unified by eleven footballers. But the euphoria was short lived. In no time the city had reverted to its politically fueled bombings and shootings.<br />
The truce in war has a long tradition and is surely a sign of hope for this world? Are things so very different now? If in dire warring circumstances we can all unite for sport and in No Man's Land, why can we not work together peaceably now for our own futures when the stakes are so very much higher than they were in 1914- 1918?<br />
I have written about this <a href="http://musings-ems.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/spirit-of-community-survival-empathy.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">before</a> in this blog and it is also discussed in my first book, <i>Healing this Wounded Earth, </i>in Chapter 3, The Hope of Faith.<br />
Thomas Merton wrote in his lovely book <i>New Seeds of Contemplation</i>:<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">"If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things <i>in yourself,</i> his italics, not mine) not in another."</span></b>Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-12399620952007634642014-11-14T07:18:00.002+00:002014-11-15T07:06:21.847+00:00Relationship and community - indigenous and ancient wisdom<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWBFF6EGOYhnSCUcQQN5vVxfhuJCP2rNzVUG68xgqFhRb6hqihq1gVqJdwB9jgSi1ljoi1BBJTxSezNxnDCGN1JpdA3lac9BXvVO-0WtYfQUuFf2mRAcwWBDVcO2Zzbv_3m2PBKwNHS9c/s1600/P1040176.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWBFF6EGOYhnSCUcQQN5vVxfhuJCP2rNzVUG68xgqFhRb6hqihq1gVqJdwB9jgSi1ljoi1BBJTxSezNxnDCGN1JpdA3lac9BXvVO-0WtYfQUuFf2mRAcwWBDVcO2Zzbv_3m2PBKwNHS9c/s1600/P1040176.JPG" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Now couldn't that be what we all need in the world today?</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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I spotted this in the Australian<b> Aboriginal</b> Cultures Gallery, spread over two levels, in the <b>South Australian Museum Adelaide</b> North Terrace. This is said to be the most comprehensive<b> Aboriginal</b> Cultural Gallery in the world, and I found it a wonderfully fascinating experience. <br />
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I explore the issue of <b>relationship</b> and indeed <b>relatedness </b>in the context of <b>community </b>in my book <i>Healing This Wounded Earth,</i>
devoting a whole chapter to this very important healing
influence...explaining why it is so important and what we can do to
promote real healing community.<br />
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So often I find evidence that the world's<b> indigenous </b>tribes carry much wisdom that we would do well to heed. We ignore the <b>ancient wisdoms </b>at our peril. We may think we know best but we surely do not. <br />
And by one of those happy coincidences which are surely meant to happen, I just heard news of "The <b><a href="http://2014.indigenouswisdomsummit.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Global Indigenous Wisdom Summit</a> </b>being organised by the <b>Shift Network</b>. Here is a free online gathering of some of the best the world can offer of <b>indigenous wisdom</b> - running from 18th to 20th November 2014. Please follow the link to see what will be covered and to sign up if you are interested.<br />
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<br />Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-60313805393454788832014-07-31T14:14:00.000+01:002014-07-31T14:14:01.169+01:00Startling New Thinking? Epigenetics and Social HealingWaiting for my car to be fixed and browsing last weekend's papers, a review in <i>The Times</i> caught my eye by <b>David Aaronovitch</b> of the recent book <i><b>At the Edge of Uncertainty: 11 Discoveries Taking Science by Surprise</b></i><b> </b>by <b>Michael Brooks</b>. Actually it was the headline "Feeling Sick? Blame it on the Ancestors" that caught my attention with the promise of "startling new thinking" and the apparent revelation that events in our past could affect the way genes behave and our present day circumstances; our physical or mental health for example.<br />
This field of "<b>epigenetics</b>" is far from simple or straightforward, and of course our understanding of such things continues to develop as I write. But this is not such a new idea as to warrant the label "startling new thinking."
Whatever the exact mechanism involved, we have known for some time that who we are and how we behave as adults is not only a combination of our inherited gene and possibly also our meme makeup, but we are also affected by subsequent influences in our upbringing and our experiences as we develop through childhood and beyond. This is at least part of what is meant when we talk about ‘nature versus nurture’.<br />
I became interested in this subject when I started research for my first book, <i>Healing This Wounded Earth</i>, and found the article by Judith Thompson and James O’Dea in <i>Shift,</i> the magazine of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, or IONS, in Issue 7, May 2005: ‘<b>Social Healing for a Fractured World;</b> a Summary Report to the Fetzer Institute.’ This is a very important document in the context of how we address and transform the collective wounds of the world's population and the implications for <b>social healing</b>, and it was a huge influence and encouragement for me in drawing together the chapters for my own book, endorsing my own thinking.
As the authors pointed out, we do indeed pick up mental wounds from the collective experiences of our ancestors, as well as our inherited physical characteristics, and the unhealed wounds of mankind inflicted through millennia of evolution by strife and violence and disaster mean that hundreds of millions of people are psychologically, emotionally and physically scarred and wounded and in need of healing. It has even been suggested by some psychologists, they go on to say, that ‘<b><span style="font-size: large;">human culture as a whole has been saturated by unhealed wounding, which, if unchecked, will continue on a downward spiral toward inevitable disintegration.</span></b>’ Now that is a frightening thought, and we need some healing on a huge scale. And day by day as more and more horrors of war and strife unfold on our screens the wounds in that pool of humanity multiply relentlessly.<br />
I havn't read <b>Brooks</b>' book yet, but <b>Aaronovitch'</b>s review implies that <b>epigenetics</b> is only referred to in a fun and fascinating context, linking place of birth with health risks for example. I am far more fascinated in the implications of all of this to our behavioral patterns and how they impact the future of our world; the world that our children and grandchildren will inherit. Because it is clear that wounds manifest themselves in many different and undesirable personality and behavioral traits. We see greed and envy, craving for love and attention, consumerism, lust for power, superiority, violence, overspending, addictions to work and substances, depression, cynicism, despair.
As Thompson and O'Dea conclude, "transitioning from violence and massive social wounding to building peaceful and just futures is no easy journey; the complexity lies in finding the balance between truth, justice, peace, and mercy. All of these
are necessities for healing and none can be ignored."
Definitely!
Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-91744848763613130712014-07-30T21:35:00.000+01:002014-07-31T13:03:59.156+01:00What we need now is a spiritual hunger for justice This morning we remembered in our church service the life of <b>William Wilberforce</b>, British politician and leader of the movement to abolish the <b>slave trade</b>, who died on July 29th in 1833.<br />
And that reminded me of the piece I wrote in <i><b>Healing this Wounded Earth</b></i> about what we could all learn from the slavery abolitionists who hungered for justice in the world and thereby became catalysts for sweeping changes. Here is an excerpt:<br />
On 30 July 2008, the <b>United States House of Representatives</b> passed a resolution apologizing for <b>American slavery</b> and for the subsequent <b>‘Jim Crow’ discriminatory laws</b>. In the previous year the Virginia General Assembly had acknowledged ‘with profound regret the involuntary servitude of Africans and the exploitation of Native Americans,’(<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/25/AR2007022500470.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Larry O'Dell Washington Post 2007</a>) and called for reconciliation among all Virginians. Virginia became the first of the 50 United States to recognize through their governing body the state's negative involvement in slavery.<br />
In that same year the UK celebrated the 200-year anniversary of the abolition of the Slave Trade. The Church of England have since offered a full apology for profiting from the slave trade, and Prime Minister <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6185176.stm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tony Blair</a> offered deep sorrow ‘that it could ever have happened’ and said that we could ‘rejoice at the better times we live in today.’<br />
Among the media attention in both the United States and the United Kingdom, much was made of whether we should now be apologizing at all for what our ancestors did all that time ago, and whether any compensation was due.<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">Rather less publicity or thought was given to the feelings of those in the original abolition movement. What motivated them?</span></b><br />
The prominent American abolitionist <b>William Lloyd Garrison</b> said in a <a href="http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/rbaapc:@field(DOCID+@lit(rbaapc11000div2))" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">talk</a> delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, 14 February 1854:
I am a believer in that portion of the <b>Declaration of American Independence</b> in which it is set forth, as among self-evident truths, ‘that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable social rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ Hence, I am an Abolitionist. Hence, I cannot but regard oppression in every form, and most of all, that which turns a man into a thing, with indignation and abhorrence. Not to cherish these feelings would be recreancy to principle. They who desire me to be dumb on the subject of Slavery, unless I will open my mouth in its defense, ask me to give the lie to my professions, to degrade my manhood, and to stain my soul.<br />
In the UK, a group known as the Clapham Sect drove the abolition movement. Taking their name from the Surrey village where they mostly lived and held their meetings, this group of evangelical Christians saw the treatment of slaves as an affront to their own dignity.<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">It was the overwhelming spiritual hunger for justice that drove these and other abolitionists, often among controversy and even violence, to strive towards making a real and permanent difference to the lives of so many. </span></b><br />
Sadly there is still slavery in today’s world, alongside so many other inequalities and human suffering, even in so-called ‘civilized’ Western societies such as ours.<br />
<b>So how can we make a difference today to alleviate the many injustices in the world?</b><br />
As it was then, so it needs to be now if there is to be any real change in the lives of so many who still suffer. <b><span style="font-size: large;">We need to feel again that degradation of humanity, the affront to our dignity, that staining of our souls.</span></b><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwpk-dxlSDtjEJArJbXnacXnGCXyx1gQusURKamEeZkFSttVWKG2ntxbSuxFMlZyUxtPt6ol2U867LubduENQHrcuEofYR7erB2x5GPmvjQbAOfQp9NLItE5Z2WpwJ4zYInAbsjfkXAvo/s1600/DSCN5418.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwpk-dxlSDtjEJArJbXnacXnGCXyx1gQusURKamEeZkFSttVWKG2ntxbSuxFMlZyUxtPt6ol2U867LubduENQHrcuEofYR7erB2x5GPmvjQbAOfQp9NLItE5Z2WpwJ4zYInAbsjfkXAvo/s1600/DSCN5418.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Inside the Mount of Beatitudes church<br />
commemorating the Sermon on the Mount<br />
overlooking the Sea of Galilee</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
We need to find again that hunger for justice that the abolitionists felt.
In the <b>Beatitudes</b> that Jesus preached to his followers in the Sermon on the Mount, He spoke of the happiness and joy, or blessedness, that would be felt if we ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness.’(The Gospel of St Matthew chapter 5 verse 6)<br />
The then Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams in his <a href="http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1450/new-year-message-2007-hunger-for-justice-will-change-the-world." rel="nofollow" target="_blank">New Year message for 2007</a> spoke of the need for us to feed our own spiritual hunger. For real change to be made, to put right the injustices of the world, we have to follow, he says, the example of the Clapham Sect. We must realize that such issues are indeed an affront to our own dignity. In some way they make each of us less of a person. We will be fed and nourished spiritually only when we really and honestly wake up to the needs of our fellow human beings, learning together to reach out to them, to heal, feed, and befriend those less fortunate than ourselves. <b><span style="font-size: large;">Then we will discover what it really means to be truly human.
</span></b><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
From <i>Healing This Wounded Earth: with Compassion, Spirit and the Power of Hope </i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Chapter 4<i> </i>Hope For Our Destiny</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">A New Era of Responsibility<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-73469296713281759042014-02-20T15:46:00.000+00:002014-02-20T15:46:06.459+00:00Healthcare and the incredible reinvention of medicine In these musings of mine around the subject of <b>healthcare</b> we must not forget to give proper credit for the many wonderful advances that are being made in medical science; the technological achievements, the surgical and clinical skills, the development of ever more efficacious drugs and the efforts of the very many health care professionals working competently and tirelessly using best knowledge, experience and facilities for the benefit of the patient.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxN0G5y60krWCTBCZ76i-WDxktZCo7K8_dw41mDbIoX2qoXrrGfV5_BZCKi8ObFS6K_IQF5HNPJrZpVh1S7_upTEEA66KqcrlanPXc0EVUXBtdXd8N-6AJtryKGnCItkny0sATwZyYwbw/s1600/WP_20140204_084.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxN0G5y60krWCTBCZ76i-WDxktZCo7K8_dw41mDbIoX2qoXrrGfV5_BZCKi8ObFS6K_IQF5HNPJrZpVh1S7_upTEEA66KqcrlanPXc0EVUXBtdXd8N-6AJtryKGnCItkny0sATwZyYwbw/s1600/WP_20140204_084.jpg" height="400" width="313" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lyme Regis February 2014</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Perhaps more doctors than we realize do understand and practice the philosophy of <b>holistic health care,</b> with due regard to the full impact of body, mind and spirit in considering the ‘wellness’ of the person. Even so it is unlikely that this can often be realistically achieved within the normal time constraints of a busy practice. Nevertheless there is an opportunity here that should not be ignored; indeed we may not be able to ignore it for much longer, given the escalating costs of traditional <b>healthcare</b>.<br />
<br />
Several years ago I picked up in our local library a very battered secondhand copy of <i>Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine </i>by Larry Dossey. I hadn't heard of Dossey at that time, and I was intrigued by the book’s title. Now I realize that Dossey has been in the vanguard of <b>mind body healing</b> for some time and is even sometimes credited with being the father of this genre of medicine with which so many are still uncomfortable. His influence was perhaps first felt in the 1990s with <i>Healing Words</i>. Upon reading further, I was immediately fascinated by Dossey’s division of the history of medicine, from when it first became scientific in the mid 1800s, into three Eras.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaQeHawkmNFg92FlnaeGYyFSB3WuqCV1irulDjzblsFzPSMqdX8SLBicTwCYEhdZ8Q_OEZNHDPvJOl9GHerdlx-mhZgpChvBMrrUpUysQdivz98gS-3A_m6ZxkWbrRx2nyfkaTd4s6NEA/s1600/WP_20140119_027.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaQeHawkmNFg92FlnaeGYyFSB3WuqCV1irulDjzblsFzPSMqdX8SLBicTwCYEhdZ8Q_OEZNHDPvJOl9GHerdlx-mhZgpChvBMrrUpUysQdivz98gS-3A_m6ZxkWbrRx2nyfkaTd4s6NEA/s1600/WP_20140119_027.jpg" height="221" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Studland Bay January 2014</td></tr>
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The first 100 years or so from around the time of the American Civil War of Independence up until around 1950 he calls Era I, the rise of ‘mechanical medicine’, because, he says, ‘of its adherence to classical, mechanical physics.’ Era II from then until the first publication of his book in 1993 and still developing to this day he described as the age of mind/body medicine. During that period there was an increasing recognition that the state of a person’s mind, their thoughts and emotions can affect the physical body and cause what is usually described as psychosomatic illness. Such illnesses are often unfairly misrepresented, by being thought of as imaginary, or ‘all in the mind’, a misnomer that is unhelpful to the further study of this important phenomenon. Dossey now says that he prefers to look at this concept the other way around: that it is better to show how positive feelings keep us healthy, or whole.<br />
<br />
Both Era I and Era II medicine remain, he says, ‘wholly devoted to the tenets of classical science as an explanation for all events, including the actions of the mind.’
Dossey also talks of an Era III, the era of non-local mind medicine. But that is for a later post…<br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;"><i>If you are finding this series of blogs interesting, I have treated other vital aspects of our
lives to a similar analysis - always urging spirit over matter - spirituality
and healing over materialism and curing, bringing a more holistic lens to our
economy, creativity, creation, pastoral issues, and so on… </i></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;"><i>All in Healing This Wounded Earth: with Compassion, Spirit and the Power of Hope.</i></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="textstyle3" style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 18pt; font-weight: bold;">What readers are saying about </span><span class="textstyle9" style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 18pt; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Healing This Wounded Earth:<br /></span><span class="textstyle3" style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 18pt; font-weight: bold;">"Within a few pages ... I was making a mental list of all the friends and colleagues I wanted to give or lend this book to. I loved reading this book and am sure will turn to it again in the future."<br /></span><span class="textstyle4" style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14pt;">From review by Dr </span><span class="textstyle5" style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14pt; font-weight: bold;">Yvonneke Roe</span><span class="textstyle4" style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14pt;"> GP in London, in</span><span class="textstyle10" style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic;"> Network Review</span><span class="textstyle4" style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14pt;">, Journal of the <span style="color: #400000;">Scientific and Medical Network</span> </span></span>Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-84810634703386338692014-02-01T12:19:00.000+00:002014-02-02T07:23:57.415+00:00Mindfulness and Mental HealthI wrote in this series on 31 December last year, perhaps a little optimistically, that we are seeing the dawning of a new paradigm in the history of medicine, entering an era where the spiritual healing needs of the patient can be met alongside both alternative and complementary therapies and the very best of the latest clinical medicine. I said that there are certainly pockets of excellence across the healthcare establishments, for example the Integrative Medical Clinic, of Santa Rosa, California, at the very forefront of this exciting new world of enlightened healthcare.<br />
But this dawning is truly only a glimmer at the moment.<br />
As in so many fields the UK will in due course follow the lead of America in the full recognition of truly holistic healthcare that is available for all.<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">But a great deal of work needs to be done</span><br />
on both sides of the Atlantic.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht1Pi_BAt4kdwMzUjbnEv17itTnZ_xUlxVu2NktsVnhSABCJvQW5vn_zSj2XxsU4Gy_gBPMOEL-LItjoIjIEFMUJ1ZWtEnbbHvQXrTSttGHOHDKYVdomQDRpTjVh6DLBl9nfTYh6lOuEE/s1600/DSCN5485.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht1Pi_BAt4kdwMzUjbnEv17itTnZ_xUlxVu2NktsVnhSABCJvQW5vn_zSj2XxsU4Gy_gBPMOEL-LItjoIjIEFMUJ1ZWtEnbbHvQXrTSttGHOHDKYVdomQDRpTjVh6DLBl9nfTYh6lOuEE/s1600/DSCN5485.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
This is made very clear as far as the UK is concerned in an interesting <a href="http://bidushi.com/mindfulness-mental-health-snails-pace-provisioning-nhs/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">recent post</a> in the Webzine <i><b>Bidushi,</b></i> <i>"<b>Mindfulness</b> for mental health: snail’s pace provisioning in the NHS."</i>
This article emphasizes just how poor the provisioning still is for <b>mindfulness</b>-based therapies for mental health in the UK, in spite of the recognition of its benefits by many, including many doctors, and in spite of its recommendation by <b>NICE</b>, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
"On 20th January the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg gave a speech to launch the government’s “<b>Mental Health Action Plan</b>”, a speech that makes no secret of how<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">the importance of mental health has been consistently marginalised in society, policy and National Health Service</span> <span style="font-size: large;">(NHS) provisioning</span><br />
till now."<br />
The article in<b> Bidushi</b> makes particular reference to <b>Mindfulness</b> Based Cognitive Therapy <b>MBCT</b>, acknowledged to be extremely effective for the treatment and cure of <b>depression</b> and <b>anxiety</b>, yet still woefully unavailable for most patients. Instead antidepressants and other drugs are doled out time and time again, drugs with known and indeed unknown side effects,<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">drugs which cost far more than the cost of <b>MBCT</b> sessions</span>,<br />
and drugs which effect no cure, only mask the symptoms.
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJKY2YQMgmwM67ah2bi3jF7V13hlu98DYA6jKupEmJwZc-Mms_smREMe-4q65PVNUbTE8oV9dBzH3v3RIN8TIdScSQO7WyBN8_ExA_88Ymem-UbUBh9wZT2O-uJ5t1HElnTgyHkFZ9Wg4/s1600/DSCN5484.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJKY2YQMgmwM67ah2bi3jF7V13hlu98DYA6jKupEmJwZc-Mms_smREMe-4q65PVNUbTE8oV9dBzH3v3RIN8TIdScSQO7WyBN8_ExA_88Ymem-UbUBh9wZT2O-uJ5t1HElnTgyHkFZ9Wg4/s1600/DSCN5484.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a>The article has some fascinating statistics about the disparities in mindfulness availability across the country and in the understanding among health care professionals of both its effectiveness and availability. It also highlights the tireless efforts being made by <b>John Kapp</b> who for 4 years now has been campaigning for much greater access to <b>mindfulness</b> techniques in his own Brighton and Hove health area.<br />
Why does our healthcare system seem so reluctant to extend the availability of <b>mindfulness</b> based treatments for sufferers of <b>depression</b> and <b>anxiety</b>: when we know these treatments work and when so much money could be saved by the cash strapped NHS? Could there be vested interests at play here, from "Big Pharma," the pharmacological companies who have so much to lose from the drop in sales of antidepressants and other drugs to treat <b>depression</b> and <b>anxiety</b>?<br />
<br />
<br />Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-1317127245942062882014-01-28T17:17:00.000+00:002014-01-28T17:17:00.623+00:00Michael Mayne on Holistic Medicine<b>Michael Mayne</b>, busy parish priest who subsequently became Dean of Westminster Abbey within the Anglican Communion, was well qualified to write about the patient’s perception of healthcare. In his book <i><b>A Year Lost and Found</b></i> he describes his experiences and struggle with a debilitating episode of ME, or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, the post-viral fatigue syndrome. Of all the various treatments and advice he received for a condition that is still very little understood, he significantly gives special credit to a certain Dr D, whose particular efficacy in helping him cope with his condition is attributed to
his grasp of the inter-relatedness of body and spirit:<br />
<br />
"…he talked and he tested or massaged parts of my body. Sometimes he just talked. He had the great gift of encouragement. He understood that the question ‘How are you?’ is at root a metaphysical question, which is not sufficiently answered with clinical lists and data …but goes to the deepest part of ourselves as the complex and uniquely precious beings we are." (1)<br />
<br />
<b>Mayne</b> tragically died from cancer in 2006, but not before heroically putting the finishing touches to his final book <i><b>The Enduring Melody</b></i>. This started as a meditation of his life, but when the cancer struck it became his daily meditations interwoven into an autobiography of his final year. The book is a brave and very thoughtful journal through those last ten months. It culminates in a reflective essay on illness and healing, and the need for a holistic approach:<br />
<br />
"To treat a disease," he said: "is to inhibit it and hopefully help the body to destroy it or control it: to treat a patient is to observe, foster, nurture and listen to a life...<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">In an ideal [health service] it would be good if every doctor and nurse in training would reflect on the mystery of the human being with both the learning of the scientist and the observation and sympathy of the novelist or the poet.</span></b>" (2)<br />
<br />
Mayne was writing of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service but his thoughts are equally relevant in the United States, which is actually ahead of the UK in recognizing the importance of spirituality in healthcare.
<b>Mayne</b> understood only too well that chasm that is so often evident between what the patient actually receives from a short medical consultation and what he is really looking for.
<br />
<br />
(1) <span style="font-size: 12pt;">Michael Mayne, </span><i style="text-indent: -36pt;"><b>A Year Lost and Found</b>, </i><st1:place style="text-indent: -36pt;" w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city></st1:place><span style="text-indent: -36pt;">: Darton Longman and Todd, 1987, p.
22. </span><br />
<span style="text-indent: -36pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: -36pt;">(2) Michael </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Mayne, </span><i style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>The
Enduring Melody</b>, </i><st1:place style="font-size: 12pt;" w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city></st1:place><span style="font-size: 12pt;">:
Darton Longman and Todd, 2006, pp. 13.<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhypRvhFhHfsCu1v67WLhhyxWrSN30oXXRqmEJTwIAFhwittqimtsJlGqbS2m4a1348DnqFkOx27jSOSZVG9YRipaMapGJK8Y29yiS0y5EAz3n4JAKbobIqWPfSuAPwNQBXoTBa3AJi0yM/s1600/WP_20140120_015.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhypRvhFhHfsCu1v67WLhhyxWrSN30oXXRqmEJTwIAFhwittqimtsJlGqbS2m4a1348DnqFkOx27jSOSZVG9YRipaMapGJK8Y29yiS0y5EAz3n4JAKbobIqWPfSuAPwNQBXoTBa3AJi0yM/s1600/WP_20140120_015.jpg" height="223" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Studland Bay in January</td></tr>
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</span><br />
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<br />Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-14876485578306293912014-01-25T11:29:00.000+00:002014-01-25T11:29:41.720+00:00Biological repair men or healers? Our over burdened doctors<b><i>"Doctors are not merely biological repair men, people who know how we work and people who can twiddle knobs or replace faulty parts when they threaten to go wrong. A doctor must be a healer in the fullest, most spiritual sense, someone who accepts that human beings are congenitally lonely and dissatisfied but who may be able to reconcile them to the difficulties of their condition...to share the journey [of pain or anxiety or grief] with the patient."</i></b> (1)<br />
<br />
The renowned Austrian Psychiatrist Viktor E Frankl survived four different concentration camps, including Auschwitz, during the holocaust. ‘Man lives in three dimensions,’ he wrote, ‘the somatic, the mental and the spiritual. <span style="font-size: large;"><b>The spiritual dimension cannot be ignored, for it is what makes us human</b>.</span>’ (2)<br />
<br />
The early links between spirituality and healthcare in the history of American medicine were just about abandoned entirely with the Flexner Report of 1910. It was not until the 1960s that any links between spirituality, religion and healthcare began to re-emerge, primarily it would seem driven by the charismatic movement and the neo Pentecostalism churches.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSNhZG0Edu_FZ-r90GEjBJ1XgKbH7dOG0m4VFFbYgm9af70byVuAB8UChMy2sbjpYhbgMMoOfvhkzX1sBxYLpRcdBpTstaKGBXSmpI56vRaVsNXUPTms4mS3CxTfPKrrGYfW-w0qH5IL0/s1600/WP_20140108_003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSNhZG0Edu_FZ-r90GEjBJ1XgKbH7dOG0m4VFFbYgm9af70byVuAB8UChMy2sbjpYhbgMMoOfvhkzX1sBxYLpRcdBpTstaKGBXSmpI56vRaVsNXUPTms4mS3CxTfPKrrGYfW-w0qH5IL0/s1600/WP_20140108_003.jpg" height="178" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">the chapel at the Burrswood Christian Healing Hospital</td></tr>
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<br />
But the movement to bring the soul back into medicine had started in the 1950s with psychiatrists such as Jung and Rogers, together with the work of Methodist Minister Leslie Weatherhead.
Real growth in this field, however, really only came about in the late 1980s and the 1990s and started with what is probably the most famous experiment of all on the healing power of prayer. In 1988 Byrd, a cardiologist at the San Francisco General Hospital and also a devout Christian was struck by a conversation with a colleague about a terminally ill cancer patient. All medical avenues had been exhausted and the physicians really did not know what else they could do for the patient. We could try prayer, said Byrd (3). Thus began the prayer study that has inspired so many subsequent experiments into non -local healing phenomena, but at the same time has been ridiculed by many. The scientifically designed and double blind trials produced more positive responses in those groups of patients who were prayed for, when compared with the control groups. Although the sample was small and the statistical interpretation of the results controversial, there have been many more studies since then that have corroborated in different ways the principal of that pioneer experiment; non local intervention such as prayer can give a positive outcome. Byrd’s work certainly proved to be a catalyst for physicians such as Dossey who was interested in exploring the spiritual questions of medicine within wider parameters beyond the known interaction of mind and body.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlTUSxqYf1_1epo4YpJ3T0d8MFSswbD_LU9FF_12oLhBCxkFSOdueNdrJkwekITMUgjcQjozj6xuumw3uib4DhFbsZFcy0PuqPRmPXm044MuSNc3-J16IqgeN74S_Ov4tcBtrSqFn5Kgo/s1600/WP_20140108_006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlTUSxqYf1_1epo4YpJ3T0d8MFSswbD_LU9FF_12oLhBCxkFSOdueNdrJkwekITMUgjcQjozj6xuumw3uib4DhFbsZFcy0PuqPRmPXm044MuSNc3-J16IqgeN74S_Ov4tcBtrSqFn5Kgo/s1600/WP_20140108_006.jpg" height="177" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Burrswood Christian Healing Hospital </td></tr>
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<br />
In a paper published by the Fetzer Institute in 1993 David Aldridge noted the need to ‘recognize that <b><span style="font-size: large;">patience, grace, prayer, meditation, hope, forgiveness and fellowship are as important to many of our health initiatives as medication, hospitalization, incarceration or surgery.</span></b>' (4)<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">As I look around and see our overburdened health services and our seeming reliance on drugs and new technology, have we made very much progress in 2014? </span></b><br />
<br />
<br />
References:<br />
(1) from Kaptchuk, Ted and Michael Croucher, <i>The Healing Arts</i>, BBC Publications, 1986, pp. 26, 37, cited in Michael Mayne, <i>A Year Lost and Found</i>, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1987, p. 38.<br />
<br />
(2) Viktor Frankl, (1905 to 1997), 1973, p.16, latest edition, Souvenir Press Ltd (April 19, 2004). A 2008 Kindle edition is also available.<br />
<br />
(3) Story related by Larry Dossey, in his <i>Reinventing Medicine: Beyond Mind-Body to a New Era of Healing</i>, Shaftesbury, Dorset, Boston, Massachusetts: Element Books, 2000, p. 53 et. seq. followed by his critical analysis of non local studies and positive responses obtained from non local prayer and healing intentions.<br />
<br />
(4) Aldridge, David, Is There Evidence for Spiritual Healing? <i>Advances</i> 9(4): 4(1993) cited in Michael Lerner, <i>Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer</i>, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 1996, Chapter 9 p. 135:
an excellent and comprehensive textbook in this field.
Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-31477863476341645312014-01-20T10:50:00.001+00:002014-01-20T10:50:41.930+00:00Where is medicine's soul?<b>For far too many of us, the soul is nowhere to be found in the clinical medicine setting.</b><br />
The modern physician is able to draw upon a vast wealth of advanced techniques that may be available, whether drugs or surgery or radiation or other interventions that he deems to be suitable from his scientific knowledge, training and experience. With the amazing march of scientific progress and the significant development of clinical medicine, physicians have welcomed the predictability and precision provided by these advances. They have become increasingly trained and skilled in clinical excellence, curing disease, with some wonderful achievements to record.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGk4AVm59GDIrqapufhUDc-5d3Jt8Ldbna5OwAVcLihnZ-D_l3SO4-P1I1YmJI9zMehaav85ezMCn-P27rpcSIKRXHIoQD-gKHmPUe25-feyQ960QWhpmW1SfzAtvuZdDSTH6txSxuYbc/s1600/WP_20140108_003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGk4AVm59GDIrqapufhUDc-5d3Jt8Ldbna5OwAVcLihnZ-D_l3SO4-P1I1YmJI9zMehaav85ezMCn-P27rpcSIKRXHIoQD-gKHmPUe25-feyQ960QWhpmW1SfzAtvuZdDSTH6txSxuYbc/s1600/WP_20140108_003.jpg" height="179" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chapel at Burrswood Christian Healing Hospital</td></tr>
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With the increasing demands of the twenty first century, the work related stress, the bombardment with bad news, relationship problems, even chemical imbalances in the brain, the patient often presents himself at the surgery with mind related disorders. These may include mental disturbances or psychosomatic illness or simply an indefinable need, perhaps even subconscious, to be made whole in some intangible way.<br />
The physician is often not prepared or adequately trained for this modern need.
We may be cured clinically, as far as is possible within the capacity of the available treatments; but what have we cured, the illness or the disease? Are we healed?<br />
<b>There can be a mismatch between what the doctor offers and what the patient needs.</b><br />
It is often said that the physician used to be able to cure rarely but care always. Now it seems that the reverse is the case: he can cure very often but somehow it seems that there is often little room for the caring and the healing.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioALQD3csr0y54sD4LRRMUUuBicjHdKfcla46wl-tA9Pps15CZ23R54B4RLlejyASVGafkdQgQCyRlzMzNTOE38aDXaAzUGVRALOPej7olyypZmLXvIfUZjby9HfLMDoUPvDd1zz49Lks/s1600/WP_20140108_006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioALQD3csr0y54sD4LRRMUUuBicjHdKfcla46wl-tA9Pps15CZ23R54B4RLlejyASVGafkdQgQCyRlzMzNTOE38aDXaAzUGVRALOPej7olyypZmLXvIfUZjby9HfLMDoUPvDd1zz49Lks/s1600/WP_20140108_006.jpg" height="179" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Burrswood Healing Hospital</td></tr>
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<b>The fact is that millions of times a day our health professionals in our surgeries and hospitals come face to face with patients in search of curing, but in need of healing.</b> And that basic need is so often not being met.
The physician can feel frustrated and wounded, even sense that in some way he has failed his patient. There is often an equally frustrated patient who remains wounded and who is likely to be back before too long with another physical complaint requiring some ‘listening’ treatment. Although the patient may not fully comprehend his own need to achieve wholeness, to be healed, he certainly recognizes that the consultation has been unsatisfactory in some way.<br />
It is surely because so many of us do not receive the healing for which we yearn on the visit to the physician that we join the ever increasing number of people who seek complementary and alternative therapies (CAMs) elsewhere, often without our physician’s knowledge and with varying degrees of success. It is no coincidence that the number of practitioners trained in such therapies has mushroomed. This is also one of the reasons for the increasing interest in faiths and religions.<br />
Doctors have even sometimes been deserted in favor of spiritual retreats and similar events, but the help that these can offer may often be limited by time constraints and lack of suitable training. Pastoral Counselors are another important resource but of course they do not have the clinical medical training.
Because our woundedness remains, we may even resort to dealing with those wounds in other ways, through retail therapy, with drug abuse (including alcoholism) and with smoking. These habits may alleviate our problems in the short term but at the same time are harmful to ourselves, to the environment, or indeed to both.
This all raises a serious and fundamental question.<br />
<b>Should healthcare be seen as a problem of cost, or an opportunity for growth?</b><br />
It should be neither! It should be a dynamic and readily affordable system that continually strives to integrate its conventional allopathic disciplines with the various and increasingly popular complementary and alternative medicines, including spiritual and religious healing methods. These should all work alongside one another in a spirit of full cooperation and mutual respect. This is truly integrated medicine at its very best.Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-30840628852409042742014-01-08T03:00:00.000+00:002014-01-08T03:00:00.855+00:00Visions of a better healthcare contd.This series of blog posts on healthcare is really about the healing of suffering. It is about healing the individual, healing the medical profession and about the contribution that the healthcare profession can make towards healing the world.<br />
<br />
It is also about finding the Wounded Healer in our healthcare system; and about infusing that healthcare with spirit. Indeed an understanding of the former should assist a greater appreciation of the latter.<br />
<br />
There is a new era of spiritual awakening in the context of pastoral care, which I have written about elsewhere. Medicine is also at the dawn of a new understanding of consciousness. While such changes are for the moment only evident in a few pockets of holistic excellence across America, even less in the UK, progress in this interesting and exciting field is being fuelled by the much more rapid dissemination of information now possible through that most wonderful of tools when used responsibly and with selective discernment, the worldwide web!<br />
<br />
Sadly these exciting developments in holistic medicine are yet to be embraced universally in spite of the growing mass of empirical evidence in their support. I also understand that some may find it difficult to share this excitement when tens of millions of American do not have access to free basic healthcare, when so many physicians are disillusioned with their work and when morale within the profession is probably at an all time low. When people are preoccupied not with the state of medical advances but with how they can possibly afford to pay for even basic treatment, perhaps urgent treatment for a sick child, it may seem hopelessly inappropriate to suggest that existing healthcare needs to regain its soul, to suggest that a new spirituality needs to infuse the healthcare profession.<br />
<br />
Now I know I am touching on a controversial topic here, but as I watched President Obama make his inaugural speech to the American nation early in 2009, I was concerned. ‘We will restore science to its rightful place,’ he said, ‘and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its costs.’
With the emphasis on technology there was no recognition of the need to support an integrated healthcare. Perhaps that was neither the appropriate time nor occasion to raise such issues. But it may be that Obama’s two aims for healthcare are incompatible. Ever more complex drug regimes and technological advances are alone unlikely to lower the costs of healthcare. Also hurling more money at the present healthcare system seems to me like handing out more pills to deal with the side effect of a prescribed drug, rather than looking for a more appropriate initial treatment without that unwanted reaction.<br />
<br />
Let me stress, by contrast, that the healing power of the spirit is free and wholesome, with no unwanted side effects. And healthcare is certainly not a commodity to take or leave. The quality of its provision should not depend on the wealth of an individual.<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-size: large;">It is a matter of religious compassion and social justice that a basic healthcare should be freely available for all as a human right, not only for fellow citizens but also for all populations across the world.</span></b><br />
<br />
As we work towards a more integrated and less expensive health system, is it too much to hope that the money saved could be redirected to help to provide basic medical needs across the globe in the fight to combat malaria, AIDS and the other crippling health concerns of so many who are very much less fortunate than ourselves?Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-82583632405586935672014-01-06T21:46:00.000+00:002014-01-06T21:46:15.667+00:00Is holistic healthcare our future?<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">"Future generations, looking back, will regard conventional medicine during the twentieth century as being as limited as five-finger arithmetic. A new medicine is arising; one which embraces spirituality and consciousness as emphatically as conventional medicine has dismissed them."</span></b></i> (Larry Dossey, M.D (1) <br />
<br />
Is it?<br />
Is conventional medicine now looking so outdated?<br />
Is Larry Dossey right or do we still have a long way to go?<br />
<br />
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The future of an integrated healthcare looks considerably more certain than it did only a few years ago. By integrated healthcare I mean <b>a system that considers not only the interaction of the mind and body, but also the influence of the soul and spirit, in a holistic approach to healing.</b>
But there are still many who are not ready to accept such developments into their lives. This is in spite of the increasing evidence and support for the power of unseen forces within the holistic healing experience. Some even become aggressive in their denial of any hint of such spirituality, soul, Higher Being, or God. That is their great loss. But it is also a loss to the world.<br />
<br />
I believe that only by experiencing the transcendent in our lives, submitting ourselves to this new consciousness and spirituality that is all around us, infusing our lives with spirit, will we achieve a personal level of real health, wholeness and well-being never before seen in the history of scientific clinical medicine. <span style="font-size: large;"><b>Not only that, but I think the social significance of some of these changes could be immense.</b></span> This fractured world would be healed in so many ways, with increased potential for us all to enjoy a life of well-being, global justice, love and peace. The cost savings could also be significant, relieving the healthcare profession from its present almost unbelievable financial burden. Indeed medicine could be leading the way for us all in this spiritual journey if we only had the will.<br />
<br />
‘To be a good doctor you have to be a compassionate chameleon, a shape shifter, a shaman.’ So wrote Cecil Helman, family doctor, medical anthropologist, poet, traveler and observer of health systems worldwide, in his book <i>Suburban Shaman</i> (2). From fascinating anecdotes of consultations with traditional South African shamans or Sangomas to the curative trance dances in the Brazilian favelas, he reflected on how western Doctors can learn much from the folk wisdom and shrewd knowledge of human nature as demonstrated by these indigenous Wounded Healers.
In the midst of the poverty, illiteracy and appalling living conditions of the shanty - towns of Southern Brazil, a Brazilian doctor, Carlos Grossman, has developed an innovative Community Health Program. The ‘social doctors’ who work in such areas not only provide the primary health care for their patients but also devote as much as half of their time to community development, to health education, to campaigning for improved conditions and generally engaging with the underlying social conditions of those patients in their care. This, says Helman, is ‘real’ medicine.
The shantytown conditions of Brazil or the indigenous medicine man may seem far removed both culturally and geographically from our own Western experience. But the healing methods of indigenous tribes are found in the culture of the Native Americans, in the Ayurveda of native Indian, in Chinese Oriental medicine and in many other cultures worldwide. These traditions go back thousands of years. I would suggest that the importance of the personal, subjective and social elements of patient care are no less relevant in mainstream healthcare provision in the USA or the UK than they are in the favelas of Brazil.<br />
<br />
The World Health Organization (WHO) first recognized the value of these traditional shamanic healers as long ago as 1978, as being especially relevant in areas where there were few conventional doctors. The shamans, the WHO said, should be allies of conventional healthcare, not opponents, <span style="font-size: large;"><b>as they had the holistic advantage of ‘viewing man in his totality within a wide ecological spectrum, and of emphasizing …that ill health or disease is brought about by an imbalance…of man in his total ecological system…</b></span>’ (3) The shaman could work cooperatively alongside conventional physicians in helping to combat AIDs, to promote family planning, child health and mental illness for example, as ‘social workers.’
Unfortunately the genuine holistic healing skills of the true indigenous shaman are too often today confused with the fads and abuses introduced by some of those unscrupulous ‘medicine men’ and ‘faith healers’ in our twenty first century culture, who are driven more by monetary gain than by any altruistic motive. This insults true shamanism and its origins.<br />
<br />
<b>References:</b><br />
<br />
1. From Larry Dossey front cover endorsement of Shealy, Norman and Dawson Church, <i>Soul Medicine: Awakening your Inner Blueprint for Abundant Health and Energy</i>, Santa Rosa, CA: Energy Psychology Press, 2008.<br />
<br />
2. Cecil Helman, <i>Suburban Shaman: Tales from Medicine’s Frontline</i>, London: Hammersmith Press, 2006, p. 77<br />
<br />
3. World Health Organization, <i>The Promotion and Development of Traditional Medicine</i> (WHO Technical Report Series 622) (Geneva: WHO 1978), cited in Cecil Helman, 2006, p.163.Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-1782528793850938532013-12-31T03:00:00.000+00:002013-12-31T03:00:04.956+00:00Where does Medicine go from here? Are we going holistic?What now?<br />
<br />
‘It’s time we heed the symptoms indicating that our medical system is dangerously out of balance,’ says <b>Joan Borysenko</b>. ‘Modern technology is marvelous and lifesaving, and if we can integrate it with the deep wisdom of the past then we can birth a medicine that exalts and nurtures rather than one that is predicated on the fear of death.’(1)<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I truly hope we are at the dawn of a new paradigm in the history of medicine: that we are entering an era where the spiritual healing needs of the patient can be met alongside both alternative and complementary therapies and the very best of the latest clinical medicine. </span><br />
<br />
There are certainly pockets of excellence across the healthcare establishments, for example the <b>Integrative Medical Clinic of Santa Rosa</b>, California, (2) is at the very forefront of this exciting new world of enlightened healthcare. As in so many fields the UK will in due course follow the lead of America in the full recognition of truly <b>holistic healthcare</b> that is available for all. But much work needs to be done.<br />
<br />
At the beginning of this new millennium the American Association of Medical Colleges challenged all North American medical schools to update the teaching of their clinical medicine curricula (3).
What progress have we seen a decade later? I shall return to this in the New Year…<br />
<br />
References:<br />
<br />
(1) Joan Borysenko, ‘<a href="http://www.soulmedicineinstitute.org/WHR.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Putting the Soul Back in Medicine</a>’ article as chapter 4 in <i>The Health Distinctions of Wealth</i> – compiled by Dawson Church<br />
<br />
(2) <a href="http://www.imcsr.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Integrative Medical Clinic, Santa Rosa</a>.<br />
<br />
(3) <i>McGill in Focus, Medicine Edition</i>, Autumn 2004 Newsletter of McGill University Faculty of Medicine Montreal, article, ‘<a href="http://www.medicine.mcgill.ca/newsletter/autumn-2004.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">A Curriculum for the New Century: Donald Boudreau’s Legacy.</a>’ <br />
<br />
For further reading see David J. Hufford, ‘<i><a href="http://www.metanexus.net/archive/templetonadvancedresearchprogram/pdf/TARP-Hufford.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">An analysis of the field of spirituality, religion and health.</a></i>’ At Founded in 1997, Metanexus “fosters a growing international network of individuals and groups exploring the dynamic interface between cosmos, nature and culture.”
Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-89354491106362928422013-12-29T03:00:00.000+00:002013-12-29T03:00:00.628+00:00History of Western Medicine contd: Soul MedicineThere have been glimmers of hope in the development of what I like to call “<b>soul medicine</b>” but sometimes they seem to be lost from view.<br />
In its 1990 definition of <b>palliative care</b>, the World Health Organization said that the<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">‘control of … psychological, social and spiritual problems is paramount’ in the total care package of those with incurable disease.</span><br />
At the same time, <b>Michael Kearney</b>, clearly not sharing the optimism of <b>Dossey</b> or the <b>W.H.O.</b>, was predicting that the holistic focus in palliative care (let alone in the wider medical field) was in danger of being lost under the weight of the <b>biomedical model of medicine</b> (1) and the narrow mindedness of those who paid attention only to physical symptoms, whom he called ‘<b>symptomologists</b>’. His concerns were justified. Only a few years later in a paper in <i>Progress in Palliative Care</i> a leader in the field, Sam Ahmedzai, wrote in his editorial:
The view now, within palliative medicine, is that it is okay to be <b>symptomologists</b>, and proud of it …Ultimately, suffering from losses, lack of love, existential doubts as well as from poverty and cruelty are not medical issues, and the response to them is not necessarily the responsibility of any healthcare discipline (2).<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Surely those who have argued for the exclusion of psychological concerns from the field of medicine, let alone spiritual elements, must be mistaken? </span><br />
<br />
Many have campaigned over the years for a greater understanding of suffering and holistic healing in a medical context. This first assumed some recognition in the UK within the field of cancer and other terminal illness care, where an understanding was developed within the <b>hospice movement,</b> founded in 1967 on the ideas of Dame Cicely Saunders.
The spiritual theme of medical care is also picked up by <b>Michael Lerner</b> who has a special interest in mind/body health in the care of cancer patients. In his book, <i>Choices in Healing</i>, (3) he explores the very diverse range of mainstream and complementary treatments available to the cancer patient. These include for example the practice of Yoga and the power of prayer, in addition to shamanism, all clearly understanding the importance of the inner life of the mind and spirit to the overall well being of a patient in the context of a terminal illness. Some of this is inevitably out of date in a fast changing world but Lerner’s book is still available as a valuable overview of the wealth of ideas and treatments available. The book is well illustrated from literary sources that delightfully complement the consideration of the technical aspects of treatments.<br />
<br />
<b>Michael Kearney</b>, palliative care consultant and former medical director of palliative care at Our Lady's Hospice in Dublin, Ireland, has also long campaigned for medical practitioners to pay more attention to the interactions of body, mind and spirit in healthcare (4). He writes of the ‘deep’ as well as the ‘surface’ elements of suffering, and the patient’s “soul pain” that must be acknowledged in addition to the physical pain. He suggested that the principles of <b>Asklepian healing</b> should be taught alongside the traditional and well-established <b>Hippocratic</b> style training almost universally taught in medical schools today, so that they can again work together as happened in Hippocrates’ day.<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Healing, he says, needs to be given the environment in which the natural human psyche can be given the space to take over and do its own healing work. </b></span><br />
<br />
The overriding problem in healthcare today seems to be that too often our doctors are ‘Techno-doctors’ (5) and ‘Super Specialists’ in a system that reduces patients to paper statistics and doctors to slaves of machinery, forgetting the importance of the personal, the subjective and the social aspects of care. ‘By their very nature doctors deal with bits and pieces – microbes, hormone deficiencies or tumors – while patients experience illness as the disorders, disruption and possible disintegration of their ordinary lives…Every healing art sees illness in its own terms. Patients need to remember that the illness is theirs and theirs alone.’(6) And perhaps some physicians need to remember this also?<br />
<br />
Apart from the palliative care available for patients at the end of life, it still seems that the different forms of <b>spiritual and religious healthcare </b>(S/RH), <b>complementary and alternative medicine</b> (CAMs) and conventional <b>allopathic clinical practice</b> are not working together as well as they could and should. Many of the CAMs are gaining credibility within mainstream traditional healthcare but the influence of S/RH lags woefully behind.<br />
<br />
To be contd...<br />
<br />
References:<br />
<br />
(1) in Foreword by Balfour Mount p viii to Kearney, Michael, <i>A Place of Healing: Working with Suffering in Living and Dying,</i> Oxford University Press, USA (November 30, 2000), p. 31. Now see Place of Healing: Working With Nature And Soul At The End (Spring Journal paperback, August 27, 2009)<br />
<br />
(2) Sam H.Ahmedzai (1997) ‘Five years: five threads’ (editorial, <i>Progress in Palliative Care,</i> 5(6), 235-7<br />
<br />
(3) Lerner, Michael, <i>Choices in Healing; Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer,</i> Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press paperback edition 1998, p.123.<br />
<br />
(4) This is explored in much more detail in Michael Kearney, <i>A Place of Healing</i>, 2000, foreword by Balfour Mount p. iv. Now see <i>Place of Healing: Working With Nature And Soul At The End</i> (Spring Journal paperback, August 27, 2009)<br />
<br />
(5) Helman, Cecil, <i>Suburban Shaman: Tales from Medicine’s Frontline</i>, London: Hammersmith Press, 2006, pp. 5.<br />
<br />
(6) Ted Kaptchuk and Michael Croucher, 1986, pp. 26, 37, cited in Mayne, Michael, <i>A Year Lost and Found,</i> London: Darton Longman and Todd, 1987, p. 38.
Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-66434610566228118152013-12-27T03:00:00.000+00:002013-12-27T03:00:04.348+00:00History of Medicine contd: Dossey's ERAs of MedicineLast post on this blog I wrote about <b>Eric Cassell </b>and <b>Leslie Weatherhead</b>, both active in the 1900s in trying to educate the medical profession towards a greater “healing” ethos in medical practice.<br />
<br />
When I started researching for my book on the <b>Wounded Healer</b> (<i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Healing-This-Wounded-Earth-Compassion-ebook/dp/B004SCBKP0/ref=sr_1_2_bnp_1_kin?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1387552284&sr=1-2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Healing This Wounded Earth</a></i>) information on <b>Weatherhead</b> was not so easy to come by and I had to satisfy myself with a very old secondhand copy of the revised 1955 version of his thesis, which I treasure as being an important influence from which much of my early research progressed.
It is surely a positive sign of change in our attitudes towards spirituality and a resurgence of interest in the links between spirituality and medicine that <b>Weatherhead</b>’s thesis has been made available again as a reprint in 2008.<br />
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And now, forty years after <b>Weatherhead</b>, we have <b><a href="http://www.dosseydossey.com/larry/default.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Larry Dossey</a></b> who has looked back on what he saw as a new era in medicine from the 1950s, but said that the then prevailing study of the mind/body question within medicine would be more accurately described as the brain/body question to reflect the widespread scientific attitude of the time. This was the medicine of physicians such as <b>Eric Cassell</b>, a phase that <b>Dossey</b> calls <b>ERA II</b> in the development of medicine to follow on from the first 100 years or so of what he called mechanical medicine which he identified as <b>ERA I</b>.<br />
<br />
Like Weatherhead,<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Dossey foresaw and hoped for the start of a new era, <b>ERA III</b>, when the importance of the soul would properly be recognized and even the field of ‘non local’ approaches to healing, such as prayer, would also be seen as a respectable further therapy within mainstream medicine </span>(1)<br />
<b>Dossey</b> of course continues to expand on and develop this theme to this day although there is a long way to go in gaining wider acceptance of these views.<br />
<b>Weatherhead</b> was not only a renowned preacher who regularly packed the church with up to 1000 people who came just to hear him. He was also a true visionary, with ideas ahead of his time, exploring as he did the mind/body aspects of healthcare within the spiritual paradigm.
At the time those who supported such ideas must have felt like voices lost in the wilderness of the inexorable march of scientific progress and medical positivism. To an extent we still do!!<br />
<br />
References:<br />
<br />
(1) Dossey, Larry, Healing Words - The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine New York: Harper Collins Publishers 1993, p. xv Preface and p.44. This is one of his early books.Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-83804774999344218442013-12-23T03:00:00.000+00:002013-12-23T03:00:03.626+00:00Healing and Curing: Eric Cassell and Leslie WeatherheadA brief recap on posts to date may be a good idea here: I am fascinated by the movement to bring the treatment of the mind, soul and spirit back into mainstream Western medicine. I yearn for a wider recognition that technology and pharmacology cannot provide all the answers where wellbeing and healthcare are concerned. Over the last week or so and for the next few weeks in this blog I am tracing the history of Western medicine, showing where we lost sight of our souls in our treatments and then offering signs of hope all around us for those who are looking for healing for our dis-ease as well as cures for our illness.<br />
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I really don’t want to imply that during the 1900s there were no physicians who understood the importance in their work of a sympathetic interaction, a sensitivity of feeling between the doctor and the patient.
One notable American physician, <a href="http://ericcassell.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><b>Eric J. Cassell</b></a>, had a mission in the 1970s<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">to help physicians understand the difference between curing and healing in the relief of suffering.</span><br />
<b>Cassell</b> wrote a great deal about the need to combine the practice of medicine as a science with the need to address the overall illness of the patient, the need for the patient to be made whole, the need to address all the other complex interrelated factors affecting the patient’s overall well being and the all important need, the ultimate purpose of all medicine, to relieve the patient’s suffering. He developed this theme in many books throughout his career and by the 1990s was still lamenting that in his view modern medicine was generally still failing to relieve suffering.
Throughout his working life <b>Cassell</b> has emphasized that mind, body and soul or spirit are one and cannot be viewed in isolation.<br />
<br />
Then there was the extremely popular, if sometimes controversial, English Methodist Minister and legendary preacher <b><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Weatherhead" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Leslie D. Weatherhead</a></b> in London in the 1950s, who wrote an important thesis on the links between psychology, religion and healing. This was a subject that had come to intrigue him immensely. In this thesis he wrote eloquently and in detail of<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">a perceived new era in medicine, when faith and soul would again be widely recognized as a vital part of the mainstream medical practice. </span><br />
He saw the limitations of the average medical doctor, in terms of time constraints and training, for healing more than the physiological body. In relation to patients for whom he thought the illness was rooted in the mind or the soul, he wrote:<br />
<br />
‘the ordinary doctor is usually of little use in such cases. He tends to interpret physical symptoms only in terms of physical origins. He works on what I have described as the ‘garage level’. He is skilled to repair the machine. It is no disparagement of the general practitioner to say that he has not the time or, often, the skill, to interpret physical symptoms in terms of psychological, let alone spiritual, disharmony. If he had, in the latter case at least, he usually would not know what to do about it.’(1)<br />
<br />
Seeing the potential for using the combined skills of the psychologist, doctor and pastor in the healing process, by 1935 <b>Weatherhead</b> had established the <b>City Temple Psychological Clinic</b> in the heart of London, where these principles were successfully put into practice (2).
<b>Weatherhead</b> wrote extensively of the spiritual and religious aspects of medicine as foreseen in Jung’s work. Although certainly controversial in his preaching and healing, he was also widely regarded and respected for much of his work and insight. But he was of course trying to reintroduce the soul into mainline medical practice in the broadly secular climate of that time and his work failed to capture the combined and co-operative imaginations of the public, the pastor and the doctor. After his death in 1976 <b>Weatherhead</b> seemed to all but disappear from public awareness and his thesis of the integration of psychology, religion and healing was largely forgotten, or so it seemed, in the continuing inexorable march of scientific knowledge.... to be contd.<br />
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References:<br />
<br />
(1) <b>Weatherhead</b>, Leslie D, <i>Psychology Religion and Healing</i>, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1951, reprinted with further revision 1955, p. 482. There is a new edition published by Stewart Press: 2008.<br />
<br />
(2) <b>Weatherhead</b> led the <a href="http://www.city-temple.com/why-city-temple/history/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">City Temple church</a> from 1936-1960. There is a <a href="http://www.stmarylebone.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=42:healing-centre" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Healing and Counseling Centre</a> at St Marylebone Parish Church opened 1987 combining innovative health care through an NHS doctor’s surgery offering many complementary therapiesEleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-29232581632551652452013-12-21T03:00:00.000+00:002013-12-21T03:00:01.739+00:00Wounds as a source of healing in pastoral and medical care<span style="font-size: large;"><b>I love the idea of the Wounded Healer, the concept that a person's own suffering can be a source of healing for others. I believe this has enormous social significance for us all, in many different ways. </b></span><br />
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This idea was reflected in the <b>consolatory ministry</b> with its accompanying literature from Ancient Greece onwards. I'll write more about this consolatory ministry later. Suffice to say here that by the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Western Europe the idea was well established in pastoral healing, mostly among the clergy of the time, but also in use by some physicians. Men such as George Fox, who founded the Society of Friends (or Quakers), George Trosse and Timothy Rogers, both Nonconformist English clergy of the seventeenth century and the English Physician George Cheyne, these and more <b><span style="font-size: large;">used their own personal stories of suffering in their successful healing ministries. They were all reflecting the power of the wounded healer to heal others. </span></b><br />
But it was only with the development of the modern psychological schools of Freud, Adler and Jung, picking up the threads of pre Hippocratic holistic care, that the concept was first articulated, by <b>Carl Gustav Jung</b> (1875 – 1961), as a recognized healing archetype.
Research papers and specialist textbooks on the concept of the <b>Wounded Healer</b> are plentiful, but these are mostly within the realms of analytical psychology. Both <b>Jung</b> and <b>Sigmund Freud</b> (1856 – 1939) were at certain periods of their lives deeply disturbed psychologically. By submitting themselves to their own styles of self-analysis, they both came to understand their own sufferings more clearly and were able to appreciate and treat their patients more effectively.<br />
Jung introduced extensive self-analysis as an essential part of the training of a psychotherapist, to be followed up by continuing clinical supervision, because, he said,<br />
"The patient’s treatment begins with the doctor…in any ongoing analysis the whole personality of both patient and doctor is called into play. There are many cases that the doctor cannot cure without committing himself. When important matters are at stake, it makes all the difference whether the doctor sees himself as a part of the drama, or cloaks himself in his authority. In the great crises of life, in the supreme moments when to be or not to be is the question, little tricks of suggestion do not help. Then the whole being of the doctor is challenged…the Doctor is effective only when he himself is affected…‘the wounded physician heals.’ But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armour, he has no effect." (1)<br />
<br />
Elsewhere <b>Jung</b> wrote:<br />
<br />
"Without too much exaggeration a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor examining himself, for only what he can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient…It is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician." (2)<br />
<br />
<b>Jung</b>’s followers proceeded to give the term special significance in their work and thinking and it was Jungian analysts who apparently started referring to the <b>Wounded Healer</b> Archetype as a recognized tool in the healing process.
<b>Jung</b>’s ideas were specifically developed in the context of the doctor and his patient in psychotherapy, but this wisdom is surely just as relevant today within the context of the general medical practitioner’s relationship with his patient.<br />
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It was the Dutch priest and successful spiritual writer <b>Henri Nouwen</b> who did so much to popularize the use of the term <b>Wounded Healer</b> in his own works in the context of pastoral healing. In the introduction to his book <i><b>The Wounded Healer</b></i> he wrote; ‘nothing can be written about ministry without a deeper understanding of the ways in which the minister can make his own wounds available as a source of healing.’<br />
<br />
Like <b>Carl Jung</b>, <b>Alfred Adler</b> (1870 – 1937), a pioneer Austrian Psychiatrist, was a prominent member of Freud’s psychological group, before they both broke away from Freud to develop their own psychological theories. Jung developed a more analytical psychology, introducing the concept of the introvert and extrovert and the Collective Unconscious, with a description of the various archetypes of man’s basic and inherent psychic nature. Adler on the other hand developed his own ‘individual psychology’ theory, and introduced the concept of the ‘inferiority complex’. ‘The method of Individual Psychology begins and ends with the problem of inferiority,’ he wrote. Adler believed that all human motivation was power induced, for example by the drive to be superior or the drive to control others. Somehow that rings very true in much that we see around us today!<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><span style="font-size: large;">But these psychological theories and the
treatments arising from them were developing apart from rather than in
cooperation with clinical medical practice.</span></b> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Indeed in many medical circles the
new psychologies were viewed with suspicion and regarded as nothing more than
‘quackery’. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Science was coming to be regarded as the supreme truth: that
nothing could be real unless scientifically proven.</span></b> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The scientists thought that
there was no room for an intangible global value to exist alongside the
material and capitalist values that were reigning supreme. Indeed in many
academic circles today the writings of Freud and Jung are still regarded with
scorn, on the basis that their theories are too anecdotal and can therefore be
of little value to any furtherance of understanding of the human condition and
the mind/body problem. </span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">But these ideas should not be dismissed so carelessly. Those of <b>Carl Jung</b> in particular seem to me to be very much in line
with some recent developments in the fields of consciousness and
intuition, ideas which are slowly gaining some credibility
and significance in modern medicine, as I shall explain later on...</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">to be contd......</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="text-indent: -36pt;">(1) Jung, Carl G., </span><i style="text-indent: -36pt;">Memories, Dreams Reflections</i><span style="text-indent: -36pt;"> (London: Fontana
Press, 1995) </span>pp.154-156.</span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">(2) </span>Jung, Carl G., Fundamental Questions of
Psychotherapy, in <i>The Collected Works of C G Jung, </i>1953-1979), vol. 16:
111-25, on p. 116. <br />
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="background: lime; mso-highlight: lime;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-15689185229353488302013-12-19T03:00:00.000+00:002013-12-19T03:00:01.130+00:00How Western Medicine lost its soul... <span style="font-size: 12pt;">I showed in the last post how the possible values
of holistic medicine had been all but lost sight of in the scientific gold
rush following the work of men such as Sydenham and Harvey, and the dualism idea of Rene Descartes. </span><br />
There were many great medical scientists in the following centuries in Western Europe, for example Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister (the fathers of bacteriology and antiseptics respectively), Simpson (anesthetics) and Robert Koch who discovered the Tubercle and Cholera bacilli.<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">The physiology of medicine was being enthusiastically pursued but alas this was largely at the expense of any attention to the health of the mind or soul of patients. </span></b><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_tdG4AQrCF_-1YDBTCY3hyphenhyphenAfSie-qmMk2gkKEMgbN30INeFuGqiNCXMVP2Z8pYzv-YC0AkYZg9pBh4EjUwYdIrcT-d09OsDG0THmR1MmF_adT2-ylJQ9_TxmzjPA01diUfo_-_Ltkc2c/s1600/DSCN5962.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_tdG4AQrCF_-1YDBTCY3hyphenhyphenAfSie-qmMk2gkKEMgbN30INeFuGqiNCXMVP2Z8pYzv-YC0AkYZg9pBh4EjUwYdIrcT-d09OsDG0THmR1MmF_adT2-ylJQ9_TxmzjPA01diUfo_-_Ltkc2c/s320/DSCN5962.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">At Lluc Monastery</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Their bodies came to be regarded simply as a mechanism to be cured, much as a mechanic might fix the engine of a faulty car.</b></span> This attitude was made even worse by the development of cellular biology by the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow, who showed that disease was something that invaded the healthy cell. The physiology of the disease was triumphing over the care of the whole person.
Throughout this period the health of the Western European population was improving dramatically. This however was in spite of rather than because of the dramatic increase of medical knowledge. The reasons were more attributable to the prevention of the main diseases of the day, for which no cures were yet known. Thus for example, smallpox, cholera and tuberculosis were actually eliminated or drastically reduced by the improvements in social conditions such as sanitation, housing and water supplies in the late nineteenth century.
The mid 1800s up to the mid 1950s saw the significant development of clinical medicine, when doctors wanted nothing but the predictability and precision provided by scientific advances. Medicine became wholly science based and drugs, surgical procedures, radiation and other technical treatments were dominant. It was not until the discovery of the sulphonamides in the 1930s that real advances were made in the ability of a physician to cure disease. Ironically the improved health of the British population during the 1939-45 Second World War has been attributed more to the better nutrition of the nation, as a result of shortages of unhealthy sweet products, than to medical advances.<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">What was happening in the more recent history of North American medicine?</span></b><br />
Here spirituality and healthcare had a strong connection from the mid eighteenth century until the late nineteenth century, when the medical profession began to be more formalized. Then in 1910 the Flexner Report was published, requiring the complete overhaul of the profession and suggesting that its medical schools needed organizing on a strictly scientific basis.<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">With these changes any link between medicine and spirituality was largely abandoned, at least for the time being. The soul had been disregarded.
</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b>
<span style="font-size: large;">to be contd...</span>Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-73163347746501917702013-12-17T13:09:00.002+00:002013-12-17T13:09:20.577+00:00The History of Western Medicine: Goodbye to holistic medicine!<b><span style="font-size: large;">Just imagine being told that the cure for your “senile decrepitude” was to share your bed with a “vital young person”! </span></b><br />
This was one of the quainter remedies of a certain English physician <b>Thomas Sydenham</b> who, alongside the French philosopher, Rene <b>Descartes</b>, fuelled the massive advances in medical science from the early 17th century, advances which had been stirred by the work of <b>William Harvey</b>.
<b>Sydenham </b>lived in the latter half of the seventeenth century. During his career he took it upon himself to revive the <b>Hippocratic School </b>by beginning to catalogue all known diseases of man in extreme and objective detail. Throughout this work he stressed the importance of observation rather than theory in clinical medicine. He was not however always respected for his views – perhaps not surprising really!<br />
By the time that <b>Thomas Sydenham</b> had written his <i>Observationes Medicae</i>, the French Philosopher Rene <b>Descartes</b>, usually regarded as the father of Modern Philosophy, had set out his own philosophical theory on the duality of the mind and the body. In his <i>Meditations</i> <b>Descartes</b> developed the basic philosophy of Plato regarding the dual nature of the mind and body, into what has become known as <b>Cartesian dualism</b>. While <b>Descartes</b> saw the brain as the seat of intelligence, he regarded the body and brain together as simply a machine, quite separate from the soul or mind that <b>Descartes</b> saw as non- physical in nature. He did though believe that the body and soul in some way influence one another, in a way not yet understood.<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>This was just the excuse which Western medical scientists had waited for, to divorce themselves totally from the mystic element of the life forces.</b></span><br />
It enabled them to pursue their medical researches in the context of the body alone, aided immeasurably by Harvey’s legacy.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0ADLW6l74LtbmFl1TzgmWowaNDpEknSnqrMQX6bC-xeT5vFSSP5qW1899q4ec5TBTnwBC_hVTfaYC77TKDkl8mA6FX_wWKWlOu0l46Rrs4ViV3yfDZEeqgYkvgeqgKtdHzZZlqS8GJ6c/s1600/DSCN5992.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0ADLW6l74LtbmFl1TzgmWowaNDpEknSnqrMQX6bC-xeT5vFSSP5qW1899q4ec5TBTnwBC_hVTfaYC77TKDkl8mA6FX_wWKWlOu0l46Rrs4ViV3yfDZEeqgYkvgeqgKtdHzZZlqS8GJ6c/s320/DSCN5992.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">pilgrims' lodgings at Lluc Monastery Mallorca</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The mind and soul could now be left entirely to the cure of the church, which was also losing its grip on the healing nature of its ministry.</b></span><br />
The scientific study of medicine was able to advance without having to worry about the possible influences of mind and soul that were intangible and not scientifically measurable. Thus in the excitement of scientific discovery, medicine lost sight of any causal links between mind and body, let alone soul or spirit and any essence of healing, as opposed to caring and curing.<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The possible values of holistic medicine were all but lost sight of in the scientific gold rush.
</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">to be contd...</span>Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-13971544541743584182013-12-15T03:30:00.000+00:002013-12-15T03:30:01.434+00:00The History of Western Medicine: Hippocrates to HarveyI am fascinated by the movement to bring the treatment of the mind, soul and spirit back into mainstream <b>Western medicine</b>. I yearn for a wider mainstream recognition that technology and pharmacology cannot provide all the answers where well-being and healthcare are concerned.<br />
Over the next few weeks in this blog I shall be tracing the history of <b>Western medicine</b>, showing where we lost sight of our souls in our treatments and offering signs of hope all around us for those who are looking for healing for our dis-ease as well as cures for our illness.
So far in the last two posts I’ve brought us from primitive man to Ancient Greece where <b>Hippocrates</b> was born in the 5th century BC and where the <b>Asklepian healing temples</b> lasted through to the 5th century AD.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Walsingham</td></tr>
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There were few changes in the basic practice of <b>Hippocratic</b> medicine until in the second century AD the Greek physician and philosopher <b>Galen </b>came on the scene. <b>Galen</b> developed the theory that the heart generated the heat of the body and that air from the lungs then regulated the body temperature and stopped it overheating. What an amazing thought now, with the benefit of all our scientific techniques for understanding the workings of the human body! <b>Galen</b>’s was a very theoretical physiology, in marked contrast to the objective, factual medicine of <b>Hippocrates</b>. He was however held in very high regard and when he later moved to Rome he was engaged as physician to the Gladiators, a privileged role indeed. His respected theories, born more out of philosophy than from science or theology, served to stifle the further development of medicine as a science for fifteen centuries until the seventeenth century.<br />
We need to bring the early <b>Christian Church</b> into the story here.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">The spread of Christianity with its ministry of healing and compassion was influencing the practice of medicine in the first few centuries AD and was also inhibiting the advance of scientific medicine.</span></b><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX1qOhIH1nV9ozZ2LXbxm8W1TJUBQ7QsddXa5EgJPlQvkpVxg2TTQ5t3mudLgxhQmg-K4NpkXTIi_nuT-UnWsbrUv6e2zS-wxP8U3NQ4IaKCrSU1s87Eqpz1Tb6L-0lknym-orPXqTAWo/s1600/walsingham+018.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX1qOhIH1nV9ozZ2LXbxm8W1TJUBQ7QsddXa5EgJPlQvkpVxg2TTQ5t3mudLgxhQmg-K4NpkXTIi_nuT-UnWsbrUv6e2zS-wxP8U3NQ4IaKCrSU1s87Eqpz1Tb6L-0lknym-orPXqTAWo/s320/walsingham+018.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Walsingham</td></tr>
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Before seeing why this was so, let’s just spend a moment looking at the concept of the <b>Wounded Healer</b>. I love this idea. In our own healing it is possible for us to discover that we are uniquely equipped to understand the healing needs of others, to walk alongside them and assist them in their own healing process. We will feel a profound and healing compassion towards others.
The origins of the concept lie in the Greek myth of <b>Chiron</b> the physician and in the earliest indigenous shamans, or medicine men. But for a Christian Jesus Christ is seen as the greatest <b>Wounded Healer</b> of all time.
Christ’s healing powers were manifest in many stories throughout His ministry and were carried through into the early healing missions of the Christian apostles. The methods they used included prayer, the anointing of Holy Oils and the laying on of hands, methods that are being reintroduced into healing services in the twenty first century. But the influence of these healing powers in the very early Christian church diminished over time. The apostles were not Jesus and they lacked the confidence or faith to impart His very special healing gifts to the afflicted. There was a gradual reversion to the earliest religious beliefs that illness was in some way caused by man’s sins, that it was mostly in his own power to heal his afflictions.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjieLPn5Dp1g8jMb40zIdoOjm1Ei4-hPgmLDSWIIXtCZmWH1-CB-ZG1XI9a8HoLE8t1LvnUYsQMk7ELY7zIovntSj5DFjceBuVBNALNzULkFIQj0ebmimDbzCX5LStE0tjGtKueiY0_ViA/s1600/choir+trip+141.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjieLPn5Dp1g8jMb40zIdoOjm1Ei4-hPgmLDSWIIXtCZmWH1-CB-ZG1XI9a8HoLE8t1LvnUYsQMk7ELY7zIovntSj5DFjceBuVBNALNzULkFIQj0ebmimDbzCX5LStE0tjGtKueiY0_ViA/s320/choir+trip+141.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Reflection in the font at Salisbury Cathedral</td></tr>
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Any possible link between the healing methods of the early church and the clinical methodology of <b>Hippocrates</b> were short lived.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">In 1215 Pope Innocent the Third condemned surgery and all priests who practiced it. </span></b><b><span style="font-size: large;">Then in 1248 the dissection of the human body was declared sacrilegious and anatomy was condemned as a subject of study. </span></b><br />
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A split of medicine away from the healing ministries of the church was inevitable.<br />
Little then changed in the development of <b>Western medicine</b> until 400 years later when in 1628 the English physician <b>William Harvey</b>, after nine years of painstaking research, was able to present his theories on the circulation of the blood. This proved to be the most significant medical event since <b>Galen</b>. It opened the way for massive advances in medical science…but at the expense of healing therapy, as we shall see...Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-20701611452977817632013-12-13T04:00:00.000+00:002013-12-12T19:58:15.511+00:00Hippocrates: the Father of Western Medicine<span style="font-size: large;">Considering that Hippocrates has profoundly influenced the development of <b>Western medicine</b> we rather surprisingly know very little about him!</span><br />
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In my last post I introduced the idea that in the context of medicine I believe we need to de-mechanize our bodies, to consider the healing needs of soul and spirit alongside the modern and often wonderful scientific advances, to develop a truly holistic healing opportunity for the patient.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0RvWD0FIbK2D1XcStJQcuI20HaQm_1M48QDgX2P72gOslQkCNoBLJu03E5VOi_Wqn1NDCAhhx0TMAzg7Wt2_YiVkeGXgfKaI8oYDlVZnbKZ-xv6u0jdGn4CyhITyNIwi5IRba2egGBjo/s1600/DSCN8797.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0RvWD0FIbK2D1XcStJQcuI20HaQm_1M48QDgX2P72gOslQkCNoBLJu03E5VOi_Wqn1NDCAhhx0TMAzg7Wt2_YiVkeGXgfKaI8oYDlVZnbKZ-xv6u0jdGn4CyhITyNIwi5IRba2egGBjo/s320/DSCN8797.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">the Lotus flower - divine symbol in Asian traditions</td></tr>
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Over the next few weeks I shall trace the history of <b>Western Medicine</b>, showing how we lost sight of this important truth and how we are beginning to pick up the traces again.<br />
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We continue the story in Ancient Greece with <b>Hippocrates,</b> widely and popularly regarded as the father of Western medicine as we now know it.
<b>Hippocrates </b>was a Greek physician born in the fifth century BC on the island of Cos. The <b>Hippocratic Oath</b> or a modified version of it is still taken by physicians on first qualification at some Universities. <b>Hippocrates</b> developed and worked with a physical model of the human being, looking for cures to physical conditions and following a rational, evidence based medicine with recourse to external agents to effect the cures, much as science is applied to medicine today.<br />
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His medicine was based on observation and objectivity, placing more emphasis on the body that could be measured and described, rather than on the subjectivity of feelings and senses. The Hippocratic physicians were not very interested in the opinion of the patient and distanced themselves from any of the charms and incantations of the many traditional and ‘unconventional’ healing methods of the time based on magic and religion. This is why Virgil described the medicine of the day as the silent art. Indeed Hippocrates is still sometimes blamed when people today say that doctors do not communicate well with their patients!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzyE0MfyNAjPXSHDQvLHTBKg4Jnxj8RPIk4D20plZqR_oD6zNeDnflr9ZhHQjayRT_Q18XY3aHhRxM9bdaZj6_DXDJmABPQ8FkZSWCd1U4cNuwTNuDsLV9IgdZ4_V8xXpsMn87TSvjnEA/s1600/DSCN8805.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzyE0MfyNAjPXSHDQvLHTBKg4Jnxj8RPIk4D20plZqR_oD6zNeDnflr9ZhHQjayRT_Q18XY3aHhRxM9bdaZj6_DXDJmABPQ8FkZSWCd1U4cNuwTNuDsLV9IgdZ4_V8xXpsMn87TSvjnEA/s320/DSCN8805.JPG" width="320" /></a><b>Hippocrates</b> was however said to be good at diagnosis and prognosis. Perhaps, who knows, he used his intuitive skills, that we now see in the modern day <a href="http://www.medical-intuitives.net/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><b>medical intuitives</b>.</a> The Hippocratic School believed that all disease had its origin in the yellow and black biles, blood and phlegm, which were the four fluids of the body. These fluids were believed to parallel the natural elements of air, earth, fire and water and their varying proportions in the body influenced the emotional or physical attributes of the patient, or their ‘humors’. At that time medicine was by no means the respectable profession that we recognize today.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLwBiGbhAJOEdyt6aGb431eIk2GSvJXEMKSrOy5gW05xV0DiJApnj4kxDR4DT4P0yHS0WQXdaHejzxW_tY8eX8_qG0gfZMSiu4w5fJNQanyOPLnJ9hh7WtvLFFeBbYbGjzmeGSEwSqPQ0/s1600/DSCN8638.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLwBiGbhAJOEdyt6aGb431eIk2GSvJXEMKSrOy5gW05xV0DiJApnj4kxDR4DT4P0yHS0WQXdaHejzxW_tY8eX8_qG0gfZMSiu4w5fJNQanyOPLnJ9hh7WtvLFFeBbYbGjzmeGSEwSqPQ0/s320/DSCN8638.JPG" width="320" /></a> </td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A Buddhist shrine in Bangkok</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Medicine had no status and anyone was able to practice in whatever form they wished.</b></span><br />
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<b>Hippocrates</b> gained respect in this environment with his more detailed methodology. That is not to say that he lost sight of the holistic approach to medicine, which he is said to have still regarded as important in the overall treatment of the person.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">It seems though that he believed in a natural and unknown healing power of the mind rather than a divine or spiritual healing force.</span> </b><br />
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<b>Hippocrates </b>insisted that the body could heal itself naturally and that no treatment should interfere with that healing process.
The predominant philosophy in <b>Hippocrates</b>’ time regarding the relationship of the mind and body was that of Plato, who broadly speaking believed that humans had an external soul, linked to the physical body but existing before and after the life of the material body. Certainly the influences of the mind and emotions on physical health were recognized.<br />
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One of the less conventional methods of healing that was already well established in Greece at that time was to be found in the <b>Asklepian Temples</b>, named after <b>Asklepios</b>, the Greek God of Healing. <b>Hippocrates </b>was said to respect this hugely popular treatment of the day.<br />
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<b>Asklepios </b>was the son of a union between the nymph Coronis and the great Apollo. Because Coronis had been unfaithful to Apollo Apollo’s twin sister Artemis killed her during her pregnancy. The baby <b>Asklepios</b> was removed from his mother’s dead body on the funeral pyre, probably by his father or Hermes, and handed over to <b>Chiron the Wounded Healer</b> to raise him in the art of healing.
<b>Asklepios</b> looked towards psychological and spiritual healing, of the mind and soul, for what were otherwise regarded as incurable and chronic conditions. The Greek view of the day was that such conditions were caused by the gods and needed divine healing and that this had to come from within. The Island of Cos had an important <b>Asklepian healing temple </b>and would be visited by such invalids. The patients would be fasted, rested and cleansed in sacred springs under the supervision of the priests. They would then be left to sleep in special resting places, where they would dream. The essence of the healing was that this process of dreaming worked within the psyche of the patient rather than at his conscious level. In the morning the dreams would be discussed with the temple priests and the patient would then leave an offering before he went on his way.
Snakes played an important role in this healing process in the temples. It is possible that their healing power was attributed to their ability to slough their skins regularly. This would have been seen as rejuvenation, although of course we know now that this is a natural stage of the growth process.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Snakes are still symbolized in the Caduceus, the international medical symbol that shows a serpent en</b></span><b style="font-size: x-large;">twined around Asklepios’ staff. </b><br />
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The <b>Caduceus</b> has also become the popular symbol of the Wounded Healer.
It is known that <b>Hippocrates</b> worked in co-operation with the <b>Asklepians</b> and may have referred some of his patients to the temples. There was clearly some integration of these different schools of healing.
The <b>Asklepian Temples</b> and their healing methods had disappeared by 500 AD although of all the pagan cults of the time these treatments lasted longer than any of the others into the Christian era. This was because they were enormously popular with the ordinary citizens. With the demise of these healing temples the Greek recognition of the influence of mind and spirit in the healing process was lost to Hippocratic medicine. Although aspects of the <b>Asklepian healing </b>method are seen again in some of the complementary and alternative therapies of today, there is widespread resistance to these ‘soft’ therapies among many ‘mainstream’ medical clinicians.
Meanwhile into that ancient Greek culture a new genre of healing literature was appearing. It was being recognized that writing about one’s own afflictions could be a source of comfort for others with similar suffering. This ‘<b>consolatory ministering</b>’ flourished from around the mid fourth century BC to the Renaissance of the fifteenth century.<br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">There were few
changes in the basic practice of Hippocratic medicine until in the second
century AD the Greek physician and philosopher Galen came on the scene. I shall pick up the story with Galen in my next post... </span>Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1333865574684977472.post-23659306578885948902013-12-12T13:28:00.001+00:002013-12-12T19:28:48.252+00:00Where are we going wrong in Western Medicine? Has it lost its soul?I can always rely on the local branches of the <b>Scientific and Medical Network</b> to organize stimulating and refreshingly different meetings which push the boundaries of our understanding of the nature of reality – within their overall mission objective of exploring and expanding the frontiers of science, medicine and spirituality.<br />
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(why not go across to their <a href="https://www.scimednet.org/mission-aims-and-values/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">website</a> to see their mission, aims and values for yourself – it is a very worthy organization for all who think that there must be something beyond the totally materialistic and reductionist world which we have created for ourselves in the West.)<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNNWapu2NBeVZFyKmxVf1ibGMfOusu_owXKYsvxlQA332K-FAgFM6ke2vHz06cE0yWyXwl3xlDiWLNVX3BB1xsKxOotwTfabkZQFDiq8oqVUIlPMsqDOuhmglp98-QcO0ZteRIth8GwtQ/s1600/DSCN5482.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNNWapu2NBeVZFyKmxVf1ibGMfOusu_owXKYsvxlQA332K-FAgFM6ke2vHz06cE0yWyXwl3xlDiWLNVX3BB1xsKxOotwTfabkZQFDiq8oqVUIlPMsqDOuhmglp98-QcO0ZteRIth8GwtQ/s320/DSCN5482.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sea of Galilee</td></tr>
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Last night certainly didn’t disappoint our expectations, as many members and non members gathered to hear the medical anthropologist <b>Dr Natalie Tobert</b> speak to us about <b>Alternative Psychiatry</b>, based on her fieldwork in India on bio-medical, religious and spiritual strategies for mental health. <b>Natalie Tobert</b> is course director of the educational programme, <b>Medicine Beyond Materialism</b>, education director of <a href="http://aethos.org.uk/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Aethos</a> and has run workshops worldwide as well as publishing many articles and two books.<br />
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She showed us how in India there is no dominant medical paradigm for ill health, and the practitioner draws on social factors, cultural and religious beliefs which are all critical determinants of health and well being. The discussion which followed concentrated on how we can bring these ideas into the Western medical health system, not only for the benefit of the ethnic minorities who are quite clearly not well served by our <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allopathic_medicine" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><b>allopathic medicine</b> </a>but also for the benefit of us all.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl6mntuJ6RCCGXxoLMEEMRY1NtLwsQzeWNowEuaQ5hqwd7Y51eFHg7UebWCxvl0iK3s9f3rRcFBBOB5ycDMhol1exEfKINbDvKpApMMmF5U-4yBNnOS4b374GI3x7R7OPh5nyEK1rXWqU/s1600/DSCN8691.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl6mntuJ6RCCGXxoLMEEMRY1NtLwsQzeWNowEuaQ5hqwd7Y51eFHg7UebWCxvl0iK3s9f3rRcFBBOB5ycDMhol1exEfKINbDvKpApMMmF5U-4yBNnOS4b374GI3x7R7OPh5nyEK1rXWqU/s320/DSCN8691.JPG" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bangkok</td></tr>
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Now this is something I have been really interested in promoting for several years.
I believe firmly that in the context of medicine we need to de-mechanize our bodies, to consider the healing needs of soul and spirit alongside the modern and often wonderful scientific advances, to develop a truly holistic healing opportunity for the patient, so I am very much on the same wave length as Natalie here.<br />
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Very early on in its history Western medicine lost its soul to scientific advances and we can learn so much from the Eastern traditions of which Natalie spoke so eloquently. There are glimmers of hope. Slowly but surely we are beginning to realize the importance of the whole person again in our healthcare systems, but progress is slow, although as with many things the USA are ahead of the UK and the rest of Europe in this regard.<br />
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For earliest man physical illness was inextricably linked with the mind, with spirituality and with religion. The original belief was that disease came from the gods as punishment for invoking their displeasure in some way. Amulets found alongside the remains of Paleolithic man were almost certainly used as charms for healing purposes, a recognition at that time of the importance of the mind to the cause of illness, a precursor of modern psychology long before it was known as such!
Later, but still long before the birth of medical science, man called on his religion to heal his pain and suffering. He sought wholeness of the body, a holistic approach to healing.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Now I'm not saying that all of these beliefs stand the test of time and education, but I am saying that we ignore the lessons we can learn from indigenous wisdom at our peril. </b></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs3mMzRZ71zVpvSUAvasQOsglCH50fANEYNL76gwQeww6UEU-68vlZsc-cOhcse1enIdaaLQxCFC_HIwRNTRv0l7hT3lVisHBDjlWSjlYPFKFLQtPaHP4GDT40Ut91h2SexkcWI7Ts-4g/s1600/DSCN8687.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs3mMzRZ71zVpvSUAvasQOsglCH50fANEYNL76gwQeww6UEU-68vlZsc-cOhcse1enIdaaLQxCFC_HIwRNTRv0l7hT3lVisHBDjlWSjlYPFKFLQtPaHP4GDT40Ut91h2SexkcWI7Ts-4g/s320/DSCN8687.JPG" width="320" /></a><b>Western medicine</b> largely lost this holistic wisdom with the advancement of medical science, and it was not to be rediscovered until the second half of the last century. In this new millennium I believe that in time we will come to marvel at how we could have ignored this sense of the soul’s healing significance for so long.
Over the next few weeks I am going to trace the history of <b>Western medicine</b> and see how and why the importance of the soul, spirit and mind was lost sight of in the enthusiasm of technological and pharmacological advance and how we are now beginning to rediscover this vital element in our health and well being. And I will be discussing why I think that this has enormous social consequences for us all.<br />
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Tomorrow I’ll start with <b><span style="font-size: large;">Hippocrates, Asklepios and Galen…
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Thank you Natalie for helping us spread the debate...Eleanor Stonehamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06388151576836128132noreply@blogger.com0