Over time, medical doctors have played a vital role in the life of a village, a community and in society as a whole. Which approach solves or heals which problems?

While medicine and healing traditions are found everywhere across space and time, the nature of medicine varies dramatically per culture, per historical period and per interpretation of what actually are medicine and healing.

A touch of history and explanation may help.

Western vs. indigenous medicines: drawing a distinction

In the ancient Chinese medical tradition, a doctor’s role wasn’t so much about curing the sick but to see to it that the patient didn’t get sick at all. He was compensated to maintain the health of the patient by preventing illness altogether. If the patient got ill, the doctor failed.

Chinese Medicine is fractal. It is part and parcel of the entirety of cosmology. It draws its healing properties from food, water, breath, meditation, exercise (e.g., Chi-Kung, T’ai-Chi Chuan, Martial Arts), walking in forests, contemplation of Nature, herbs, aroma therapy and acupuncture. It factors in astrological data, animals, music, instruments and tones as well.

Vedic Medicine has many of the same features and largesse of purview, understanding how the Universe impacts our consciousness, hence our bodies. Tibetan Medicine is similar as well.

Native American Medicine recognizes acts of charity, kindness and love as medicine. Smart doctors across all traditions recognize touch and movement, words and language, laughing and smiling, being in service to others, being selfless, are also powerful forms of healing and medicine.

Western Medicine as a whole does not recognize the healing power of touch and word, or acts of kindness or charity. Particular physicians will, based on their own self and nature's will, but not the approach as a codified system with the stamp of the AMA.

But sometimes that’s all the healing needed at a given moment. Sometimes such acts resolve an early trauma which leads to a somatic illness. This relaxation of an otherwise wound up muscle group allows greater blood flow which then begins a new path of healing of other traumatized and damaged areas. All of this from a loving touch in the right place at the right time. A cascade of healing can ensue. Other times, true enough, an emergency surgery is the best option.

Some Western-trained doctors get it right—integrating traditional medical wisdom

Virtually all traditions world-wide acknowledge the healing power of prayer. They each may use different idols, items of worship or none at all, but the healing power of prayer has been a potent part of all traditional medicines globally.

Sounds far-fetched? Really? The work and scientific research of Dr. Larry Dossey has gone far to demonstrate the power of prayer in hundreds of clinical trails, many of which are double-blind trials, and the power of words, or language, in creating deep, emotional and physical healing.

Dr. Deepak Chopra opened this conversation of the diversity of methods and acts of healing back in the 1970’s. Psychoanalyst Franz Alexander articulated the relationship of mind and emotion’s effects on the body in what he called Psychosomatic Medicine in the 1930’s.

In the 1970s, publisher of the Saturday Evening Post, Norman Cousins, wrote a book called Anatomy of an Illness. In it, he proves that laughter (with a sprinkling of Vit. C) is the best medicine or certainly one of them. Science has since proven that it’s a real medicine and even a smile has effects on blood chemistry and hormonal balance.

Long prior to the 20th Century, in the time of Hippocrates, there was a medicine that was natural and by definition holistic. It dealt with mind-body-soul systems. Incubation, Temple Dreaming, the accessing of dreams as a guide to health, happiness and well-being, was standard practice in ancient Greece.

Shamanic medicine used psycho-active plants, which were held sacred, and were central to healing practices going back thousands of years and active to this day.

No tradition that I’ve ever encountered on this planet ever separated man from Nature or mind from body, until the bizarre ideations of Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon, which in turn, eventually influenced what became known as Western, allopathic medicine, now a convention in our society. It is now often simply called “medicine” (as though there aren’t a plethora of others) or “conventional medicine”.

The new kid on the block

Despite its existence for only about 150 years, allopathic medicine has managed to (temporarily) marginalize the wisdom of ancient medical traditions from around the world, often even ridiculing them, despite having been in existence for thousands of years.

The Flexner Report and the role of the Rockefellers helped to eradicate schools of Naturopathy and Homeopathy, just as an initial example. The fuller story is devastating and one sees what was not there originally but emerged as “the economics of medicine”, far more important than the “healing power of medicine”. It’s a story that makes grown men cry and more on that has been referenced in prior articles and more to come.

When I first started acupuncture school, people used to ask “Does that really work?” I would often reply “Are the Chinese as a population still alive?” Somehow, their medicine worked over the course of oh, about 10,000 years? Primitive as it may appear to a westerner who is not well-educated about it, it has performed effectively for a long time. The very posing of this question indicates how poorly educated we tend to be about other cultures and how smug we tend to be about what we think of as the superiority of our own.

The superior perspective runs parallel to colonial thinking that said that Columbus discovered The New World despite whole civilizations living here for thousands of years before his “discovery”.

Arrogance, impunity & ego guide politics, business & medicine

There is supposition that the Western way of practicing medicine (or doing anything!) is somehow superior to others. It’s got a certain impunity to it, a kind of arrogance, which, I suggest, runs parallel to the way Western imperialism has often marched into countries world-wide and well, conquered and taken them over again and again. That colonial mindset deserves its own article beyond a prior one I wrote for Meer some time ago.

It looks like this same colonialist mindset in the West has upsurged in this new Administration and both Greenland and Gaza are in its cross-hairs. At this point, I believe that the Global tide has changed enough to prevent either from happening but only time will tell.

Michael Moore’s brilliant film Where to Invade Next addresses this mindset and comically, satirically shows how barbaric it truly is. If our way of practicing medicine is so darn good even after decades, why would we still call it “practice”? Yes, I am playing, but it does beg a question. No one wants to hear “I’m still practicing” from their surgeon.

Drawing a distinction between western, allopathic medical practice and indigenous, reflects an entire way of being in and seeing the world. The difference in purview is radical but curiously, at their mutual best, can be beneficially complementary.

The standard way of doing business is similar to the standard way of doing medicine

The Western way of doing business is largely extractive, doing harm in every respect to the earth by creating untold amounts of pollution when digging up oil, minerals or diamonds to the people doing the hard-core labor and to the people who live near such a facility where air, water and soil pollution are rampant.

Our way of practicing medicine is also largely extractive. When an organ isn’t functioning properly and doesn’t respond to drugs, it is extracted.

Western, allopathic medicine has nothing to do with prevention whatsoever, except for a bit of lip service, but has everything to do with, after a patient gets a disease, intervening then rather radically with all sorts of drugs, chemotherapy, radiation or surgery, i.e., poisoning and extraction, applied to the environment, to other cultures or to the human body. I call it rope-throwing therapy.

Looked at in the larger context of medicine stretching back thousands of years, is this really medicine at all? Historically, Western Medicine is but a blip on the screen. Their toolbox is rescue practices for sure, and at times, these can be very useful. It’s a little like slash-and-burn. It has a place for sure, but how big? Is there not room, lots of room, for educating someone into a healthy lifestyle, personally-empowering changes that promote vitality and well-being instead of feeling awful and vomitus?

True, if someone is hanging off a cliff and the wind is strong, giving them a rope could save their lives—God knows for that we would all be thankful.

But in light of the shamanic, indigenous traditions, the Vedic, ancient Chinese, Tibetan, Native American, Talmudic traditions of protecting and preserving all life and optimizing it, I’m not sure our rope-throwing methods are superior.

They say that if the patient lives through the therapy, he should be fine. That is, if the patient lives through the poisoning, he may live and possibly thrive for a period of time. This is good.

But instead of “the poisoning method” which is so popular yet has innumerable, toxic and sometimes fatal “side effects” (side?) there are also immune-building methods which improve the patient’s quality of life during ‘the treatment” that has side effects too, though very different: feeling great, stronger and more alive.

This is what has become known as the true traditional, holistic approach. Traditional is defined here as distinct from the ‘Western conventional’ approach. Indigenous medicine is traditional. Western, allopathic medicine is today’s standard, conventional approach. If AI and robotics keep infiltrating our industrial medical complex, soon we may be calling it “Robot medicine”.

Getting down to it: our first human encounter on Earth isn’t with who you would think

You would think that the first person a newborn would meet is its mother. Well, despite that the baby was inside her for a good nine months prior to birth, she is not typically the first person the baby actually meets: it’s the doctor.

In the baby-mind, simply a sponge-in-theta at that point, the doctor’s touch, smell, sound and appearance is immediately imprinted into the little one’s subconscious. As this encounter is typically happening within seconds of birth, this sacred emergence, these sensory impressions are not only wholly programmed into the subconscious but they are also associated with life itself.

My suggestion here is that those initial sensual perceptions, impressions of being touched, held and spanked by a doctor are what largely seals the fate of that relationship for life: the doctor becomes subconsciously associated with life itself.

This visual, auditory, kinesthetic and olfactory, subconscious embedding of the experience of the doctor becomes ground for all else that happens in life in respect to a doctor. Unless this program is made conscious, which can definitely happen—I’m testimony to it—a subconsciously-held belief of “doctor-as-deity” may persist for life.

This accounts for why people are often so obedient to a doctor’s directives. Of course these directives are coming from someone experienced with disease, a good thing, so their guidance can be very useful. But I’m offering for reflection what lies beneath that psychologically, from the moment of birth itself if not before.

Medical authority

I am clearly suggesting that it is this bedrock, laid down at the moments of birth that is largely responsible for the sometimes irrational authority with which we imbue a doctor.

I said irrational because doctors are not trained to uplift the spirit and to optimize the health of the body but rather to treat it when it falters. Prevention is just not their training or domain.

There are experts, some of whom are doctors, who have gotten trained and trained themselves to know an extraordinary amount about not only optimizing health, but healthy longevity and even the next step of biological age reversal.

The film A bit of heaven

In the film A Bit of Heaven with Kate Hudson, her attending physicians were not able to provide an effective treatment for her colon cancer. An otherwise happy-go-lucky girl full of vitality and mirth, once the doctor said that she only had about a month to live, indeed, according to their declaration, she died “right on time”.

Is this possible and if so, how exactly does that happen?

Did she want to be sure not to disappoint the doctors and subconsciously set out to fulfill the terms of their declaration? It could well be that in a somewhat weakened, vulnerable, theta state, and with the “power invested” in a doctor’s words—he who is like a psychopomp, interfacing between the worlds of life and death, she would listen very carefully and fulfill.

But short of that, where is the hope, the spirit, the will to live? Where do these reside?

Mind over matter

The entire body-mind is designed for survival. We have found that the mind has an extraordinary effect on the body and helps to accomplish what would typically be referred to as the miraculous.

So while it is interesting to be aware of the symptoms of dying toward the very corporal end, it is perhaps more interesting to intervene mightily in any number of different ways to bring more life into an ailing body. That takes skill!

But the subject of who in our society holds what authority and why it is a vitally important one, as well as examining what is the nature of that authority are good questions to ask. Is it alterable and if so, how and how easily?

The healing power of placebo

When I was studying Ericksonian Hypnotherapy, with Richard Bandler, co-founder of Neuro-lingustic Programming, and one of his colleagues, Robert Dilts, my appreciation of the power of words and of suggestion, even as a wordsmith, was further enhanced and upgraded.

Speaking to another’s conscious or subconscious minds, largely indirectly, proved to be both powerful and highly therapeutic. The power of suggestion, perfected by Dr. Erickson’s students and then colleagues, usually conveyed through story about someone else but that had direct application to the client at hand, showed remarkable effects.

Dr. Ernest Rossi’s work in hospitals demonstrated this power of language and belief system, and how medical outcomes could go well or poorly, depending on how the doctor spoke of the prognosis, favorably or not. The patient’s body, blood counts, anxiety or ease, could rise and fall accordingly.

When a doctor says “You have six months” there are many reasons one may fulfill what he has said. There are rebellious types too in this world who will do anything to prove him wrong and will live a long and healthy life.

Some when told they’d be paralyzed for life are both alive and dancing today. Beware of what you believe, why and from whom. There are processes to untangle and release oneself from the subconscious web that weaves.

The power of mind in healing & the power of emotions in disease

As you have seen in the power of the placebo, of hypnotherapy and the cited work of Drs. Dossey, Chopra, Joe Dispenza, et al, it is the power of mind over the physical body. Words, usually infused with feeling and passion, shape the body and can bring it from a state of imbalance to one of balance, from illness to radiant health.

This is work that is as old as any other healing remedy, and has been refined over time to specify word, feeling and image fused together in the mind and heart that literally changes the physical body. The work of Dr Joe Dispenza has amply demonstrated these phenomena.

When one understands what Einstein was teaching us all 100 years ago that the Universe consists of energy, that matter is energy just in another form, and it’s not that hard to move energy about, what appears in our conventional thinking of body influencing matter, becomes much more fluid and real an idea. Neuroplasticity abounds!

The work of Total Biology is another expression of evolutionary biology with direct application to health and causes of disease directly related to the emotions of survival. What is perceived as unmanageable emotional stress changes the biochemical and hormonal activity of the body to provide a forum for survival, even if it may appear to a conventionally-trained doctor as disease. This is the fascinating realm of body-as-metaphor. Cancer can be a solution to a kind of emotional conflict. Once resolved, the role of the cancer is no longer needed and over some time, fades away.

Hopefully from this article, you will have gained a broader appreciation of the history and variety of medical approaches, from holistic to conventional to integrated and complementary. And you have come to see how our being programmed from the womb in the first minutes of life has possibly affected attitudes and choices made during the rest of our lives.

One clearly sees that life, healing and medicine can be seen in so many different lights, and the differing modalities serve different moments in our lives, all with their unique value. Additionally you’ve learned a bit of the way the mind-body-emotional axis are not separate and all work together.

So here’s the deal: Indigenous and ancient medical traditions prioritize prevention, balance, and vitality. Western medicine, meanwhile, waits until you’re falling apart and then offers a scalpel and a payment plan.

Both have their place. If you break a leg, go to a hospital. If you want to not break a leg in the first place, maybe take a cue from ancient systems that prioritize long-term well-being. Understanding the history of medical authority allows us to make smarter choices. The best approach? A blend of both worlds—use Western medicine for emergencies but don’t forget that prevention, mindset, and actually taking care of yourself work best.