Cure versus Heal

Whether you work in holistic healthcare yet or not, it can be easy to get caught up in a perspective that the conventional mainstream healthcare model doesn’t always respect or appreciate the holistic model. However, there is another side to this and it has me so optimistic.

Conventional mainstream medicine only really became mainstream in the last 75 years. That means if you are my age, our grandmother’s lived in a time when modern medicine existed, but it wasn’t mainstream. When both of my grandmother’s were born, almost all babies were born at home. Midwives and other wise women and even farmers were trusted with remedies for common ailments. Even family doctors combined pharmaceuticals with natural remedies and provided a personal, intimate element of real care and connection in the service they provided in their communities.

Today we are bombarded with commercials for drugs, you may know your doctor but do they really know you? Or maybe you or your family members visit clinics or use telehealth with care providers you’ve never met before. We also have life saving technology that our ancestors couldn’t have predicted. Scientists collaborate with each other all over the world to innovate and study, usually for the greater good of humanity.

With all of that, holistic or natural healthcare has always continued to exist. When modern medicine reached the masses, many opted away from a holistic model for newer, “better”, faster.. but now, nearly 100 years later, the gaps in the newer model become even more obvious. Even with all of the good, most people can really see where their needs are not being met by one system. Mental health is being talked about now more than ever. People are coming to remember that the “cure” isn’t always in pill form. We are remembering that we are more than organs and chemicals, that our emotions are linked to our physiology, that chronic pain is often associated with a trauma, things like blood pressure may be managed with a prescription, but the underlying cause is often not physical. We talk about stress and how it can cause dis-ease.

When medicine was fairly new, the pendulum swung and it swung far. As is always the case the pendulum returns and will eventually find that middle place and balance.

Even if those who hold positions of power, media, big corporations etc. aren’t willing to acknowledge our truth, that we are not just organs and chemicals, that we are whole beings with a mind and a soul, that simple remedies are sometimes the most appropriate medicine, that symptoms can improve or be gone when we support the emotions, even without having them onboard, people are remembering. People are longing for care where they are acknowledged as a whole person, they know that connection with their care providers is important, they are becoming more and more willing to invest their time and money into healing support instead of reaching for bandaid solutions in a pill jar.

It’s not our work to fight against the mainstream. Modern medicine is an amazing gift and we can make a choice not to get caught up in the hysteria that sometimes comes with it and accept it for the blessings it brings. It is our work to step into the gaps that have always existed but are now expanding and becoming obvious to the majority.