The conversations with my medical friends and colleagues are similar. There is agreement that the medical system is broken. One reason for this is that it is a system. Medical, psychological, practices are rarely, if ever anymore, personal relationships between a medical person who is also a medicine person, that is persons in profound and heartfelt relationship with their communities, their communities, the place where we all live together, or are interconnected despite distance, and the essential question is not how to earn a living but how to live. While our disconnection from each other, lack of true relationships, increasing alienation so rapidly accelerated by AI are familiar and grave concerns, these days, we are truly alarmed by the way the medical system has been breaking further in the last months.
We know what is happening because our patients are coming to us or are staying away. They can pay or they can’t. They are endangered by illness and or by ICE. They expect the government to protect them or they know they won’t. They are endangered by their illnesses and they seek out treatments or they avoid them. The insurance covers their needs or it doesn’t. The rich manage to get medical care and the poor, and even increasingly the middle class, cannot. Our patients get what is needed in time and without stress or they don’t. Our patients have confidence in Medical practice or they don’t. They have a primary physician who gives them the care they need or they probably don’t. They trust us or they don’t.
Our patients may survive these times or they won’t. We, whomever we are, may not survive either. All life is increasingly challenged. Trauma and fear created by the social, political, current federal government system are rampant. These concerns should also be under the purview of medical care but generally they are not permitted to be considered.
Chan Kin was an Elder among the Lacondon people in Mexico. My dear friend, journalist and peace activist, Victor Perera spent much time with him and then was inspired, with Robert Bruce, a linguist, to write the brilliant and insightful first-hand account, The Last Lords of Palenque: The Lacandon Mayas of the Mexican Rain Forest. Chan Kin explained to Perera, that healing ways were nested in the culture, that the Lacondon could heal the illness that were innate to their land and community but not the (many) illnesses which Euro-American culture brought. And Western or Euro-American medicine does not face and examine the illnesses it is causing. What is the nature of the diseases that this culture spawns which are, by fiat, not to respond to healing ways?
Western medicine often disdains healing ways and they are also, on occasion, illegal. As stated in Wikipedia: “Functional medicine (FM) is a form of alternative medicine that encompasses many unproven and disproven methods and treatments.[1][2][3] At its essence, it is a rebranding of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM),[4] and as such is pseudoscientific,[5] and has been described as a form of quackery.[6][7][8][9][4]”
This is a growing problem also because many of the current administrative responses to current standard medical practices such as abortion, autism, vaccines, covid treatments, Medicare, Medicaid, are very problematic and may also, rightfully, be questioned.
How then shall we respond when our medical practices as well as our patients are threatened?
To begin with we respond together. We respond as a community to our community concerns. A community of healers caring for a community seeking healing.
Here is a statement from Indigenous Elder from Curaçao, Muz Richenel Ansano, who identifies himself as a Kulturista/Cultural Heritage Expert.
“I keep thinking that these extraordinary times are a continuation of other extraordinary times, that were also continuations of other extraordinary times. And all of those continuations very intentionally, violently, systematically create disruption, despair, overwhelm. For our gathering, we have all sat in council many times, even when we did not call our realities council. We ARE council, each of us: councils of our ancestors inside us, and around us; councils of all the stories that made us and are still making us; councils of al the elders who guide us in our daily lives, our professions, trades, or dealings; councils of all the dreams that push us forward; councils of all our relations with whom we speak loudly or walk with quietly. As we prepare to gather I see these councils coming together as needed in these extraordinary times.”
Many of you reading this who are engaged in Medical practice of one form or another have experienced healing events, which you have enacted or received, but which are not recognized in current practice. This lack of recognition and public skepticism becomes internalized until we also deny what we know to the deprivation of so many who are suffering and could be assisted. Needless to say, we are speaking of healing events from individuals involved in rigorous self-scrutiny, in committed relationship with their communities, for whom healing and health are profound and sacred activities and probably were such from the time they/you were children.
It should be a mark of honor not derogation to be known as, called upon as a healer. For Indigenous peoples, healers and healing are central to their cultures and are ways of maintaining their intrinsic wisdom traditions. In times as we are experiencing of such great physical, emotional, spiritual, communal suffering, not always attended by conventional medical practice for all people, it would be of great benefit to allow ourselves to remember what we have known and experienced.
Such has been the hope of ReVisioning Medicine since its origins in 2004. We are hosting another council on Zoom from 1 pm to 5 pm PT on Sunday, November 16. Read more here.
We believe that we can, together, find ways to remember, restore and integrate healing into our medical and psychological practices. Please join us.
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I have been freely offering my writing to the community for 60 years and posting essays on Substack since January 2022. If you can support the work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation and / or recommend it to your friends and colleagues, it will be greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate if you share or leave a comment and check ‘like,’ when you do.)
The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.
