Healing and Being Healed

In our past articles we have talked about healing but we have yet to really define what healing is nor how it fits in either ancient or modern medicine. It would be simple to say that healing is one of the oldest professions on earth. Yet, for many people, including the Western medical establishment and even some alternative practitioners, along with their patients there is a good deal of confusion over what healing is and who is a healer. This is one of those situations where a word or action may mean so many different things to so many different people that it can ultimately have little meaning.

Had we lived 200 years or more in the past, the concept of who and what the healer was might have been considerably simpler. In ancient times there were two types of healers, those that lived with and were part of a community and those who traveled from community to community. It was often clear to the local residents of a community who was and was not a healer and how a specific healer worked and what he or she did to create healing. When these healers, men or women, lived and worked within the community, they tended the ill, often sat on the tribal counsel, did surgery, delivered babies, and tended to the work and war injuries of the members of the tribe, group or village. They were known entities. As people they stood out. They often were greatly respected and everyone knew and trusted them. As practitioners they had their secret ways of healing which was rarely divulged to others. They had their own formulary of herbal and root medications, and they used combinations of medications which were known to no more then a very few others. In these ways they were not so very different from today’s modern physician. In our studies of Hawaiian medicine, a “primitive form of healing” this was incredibly clear as the healing discipline was known as Hunã, which translated from Hawaiian into English as the “secret.” The knowledge of the Hunã master, the kahuna or “keeper of the secret” was so powerful that it had to be guarded as it could be used both for good, to heal and for evil, to kill.

Today, healing is still secret, not because of the good or welfare of the community, but for three reasons: 1) medical and alternative practitioners often believe the community is not smart enough to understand what they do and how to they do it, and 2) because these professions often believe that they need to maintain their treatments as “secrets” so they are not misused by non-physicians, or by people who do not have licences to practice medicine. 3) Unfortunately, the also keep secrets because someplace within them they believe that if the tell or teach people to help and heal themselves, they would be out of a job.  

The goal of government and the medical profession while outwardly pure, ends up as both “protecting the uneducated public” from charlatans as well as protecting their licensees from losing their income. These last belief are both faulty as they also acts to cut the consumer, the sick or well person, out of taking any real responsibility for their own health care. It also creates another big problem in that while most physician may understand medicine, few of them, end up knowing much, if anything and often nothing, about healing. Therefore, how can we as physicians and practitioners either talk about or teach that which we do not know or understand?

What Then is Healing?

Today, one of the most common ways we think about healing, is when we think about treating the sick. We think about it as actions we take or the ritual we use on those who are sick. Our goal is to help them become well again. While we generally would like to think of healing as having a relationship to the medical profession, it is clear that the current day medical profession only considers healing in relation to use of drugs, surgery and medical treatments, few of which are truly healing in any way. When an individual who is sick goes to their doctor and they are given medication or a surgical treatment is performed, we often believe that these were necessary to return them to a state of  “wellness.” As we will see, this can be very misleading, for as we suggested earlier, the end result depends on what your definition of healing is and whether this definition is narrow or broad.

In ancient times the healer was often a shaman or medicine man or woman. In order to heal, they also used drugs, generally in the form of herbs, roots or foods, they performed some types of surgeries, and even used physical therapy. But they also went a step or two further as they might also enter into a trance and then go into the spirit world to obtain information regarding the nature of their client/patient’s  illness. The shaman would then return to this realm and prescribe herbs, potions, use of amulets or other treatments that would expel a foreign spirit or cure the illness. A healer might also work with symptoms or signs as provided by their patient/client or through some other source such as bones, chicken entrails, tea leaves, Tarot cards, astrology or bumps on the face, head or body of the individual. Today the medical profession and most people in our society see this as hocus pocus, magic or just plain chicanery, trickery or dishonesty. Yet, was it really?  Could it have been that these “healers” had added another dimension to healing that today, we have lost? Could it be that they somehow, using the concept of spirits or throwing bones, tapped into their deeper understanding and knowledge of what caused illness and possibly their professional intuition to reach out and understand that illness is much more complex then simply being a deficiency of one or another drug or medication? We will return to this topic in a later article.

Healing versus Treating

For many people in our current day society, the concept of shamanism sounds not just primitive, but “unscientific” as one person at a lecture suggested. Today, we want to think that healing should be a scientific process, one performed by trained, responsible physicians, under sterile conditions and with modern procedures, techniques and instruments. The fact is, modern medicine, is not really about healing nor even about curing. Rather it is designed to treat in order to control or manage symptoms. This is done so that the “patient” can be made comfortable, and be taken out of danger to their life and well-being. All certainly commendable, but not really about healing, rather about treating. While some illnesses are “cured,” and “cure” is often the stated goal, the fact is the medical profession rarely cures anyone, in fact, cures are not very common.

Cure performed by the medical profession most commonly occurs when the illnesses is minor and will respond to medical treatment. They may also occur with surgical problems such as acute appendicitis, sometimes with complex conditions such as cancer, but for most other medical conditions cures are rare and symptom control is much more common. In most cases only conditions that usually considered to be self-limiting are “cured” and this is because they ultimately heal themselves. Generally, what most medical treatment programs offer, is more time and increased comfort during which the sick person’s body heals itself.

There are many conditions however, such as diabetes, heart disease, atherosclerosis, autoimmune diseases, many types of cancers and arthritis where medical treatment at best can only help to slow down the disease process, make the individual more comfortable, and prolong life, while the disease process continues to progress or goes into remission. The process may be slowed down, but the sick person is not cured. In many situations all that medicine does for these patients is to make sure that thec are controlled while the illness process still persists and gradually moves toward chronic disease and even death. In situations such as these, the individual cannot be said to be either cured nor healed, merely held static, improved, symptoms controlled, made comfortable, that is until it reach its final levels where it progresses to a state of  chronic disease or  death.

In those situations where the illness persists but is contained, this too often leaves the door open for the symptoms to relapse or even return in a form worse than the original condition. When this happens the individual may require the use of more potent drugs to control symptoms and contain the illness. These new medications and medical treatments often act as cellular poisons, further injuring the tissues and leading to side effects and new iatrogenic (physician-caused) illnesses. When this process occurs cellular chemistry is altered, significant side effects can occur, even with the risk of secondary chronic diseases or death unrelated to the original condition. In some cases the consequences of these medications are worse than the original disease process itself.