HEALTHCARE PHILOSOPHY

There’s a healthcare revolution going on in this country, and the alternative, complementary, integrative approaches to healthcare are part of this revolution!  People want the power that comes from active participation in their healthcare, the power from knowing that what they do makes a difference in terms of being healthy, healing from illness, or dying with dignity.

Yet, people seeking healthcare often feel powerless in the high-tech, profit-driven, fragmented system that still rules much of healthcare.  The Health Patterning Modalities and Power Prescriptions presented on this site involve people using their power in terms of defining what health means for them, taking charge of their own health, and learning to negotiate the system with their healthcare partners.

This philosophy of healthcare proposes a new worldview of “healing” in contrast to the conventional view of the biomedical “cure” model.  People are viewed as unitary, irreducible, indivisible wholes.  In this paradigm, the whole person is not a sum of parts, but rather is more than and different from the sum of the parts.  In other words, we cannot understand a unitary person simply by having knowledge of the parts.  Only when we seek to understand people in the context of the entirety of their lives will we understand their health and illness issues.  Disease is not seen as an entity to be stamped out, but rather as information about the pattern of each unique person.  A focus on the “cure” of disease and pathology is a limited view.  Healing of the unitary person, known as unitary healing, takes into account the person’s mutual process with the environment, including other people, places, and things.  So it is possible for healing to take place even when cure is not possible.

The present healthcare system resembles a military model waging a war on disease with the physician as general, other healthcare professionals in lower ranks, the disease as the enemy, and the “patient” as under siege.  The “goal” is to eradicate symptoms and conquer disease.   In stark contrast, from the unitary point-of-view, the focus in on health.   Health may at times include illness and health can be cultivated in partnership with healthcare providers to foster power, the capacity to participate knowingly in change through being aware, making choices, feeling free to act intentionally, and involvement in creating change.

Gerald N. Epstein, MD, says our lives are like gardens where we are in charge of weeding, seeding, nourishing, and harvesting.  Weeds grow in every garden, and they need to be pulled up by the roots to prevent further growth that will crowd out the seeds and prevent them from taking root and blossoming.  Illness, disease, negative beliefs and emotions are weeds that have grown in our personal gardens.  Some Health Patterning Modalities, especially guided imagery, clear out the roots of negative weed beliefs and emotions and replace them with new, positive seed beliefs.

This philosophical worldview is characterized by human science, acausality, negentropy, increasing diversity, and non-repeating rhythmicities.  It stands in contrast to logical positivism, and the objective, reductionistic, deterministic, causal, natural science worldview.  Rather than a material approach which maintains that “if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist,” this is a spiritual approach which maintains that “if you can imagine it, you can participate in creating it.”  Rather than “seeing is believing, “believing is seeing.” 

If you are new to the healthcare philosophy I am presenting, it may take awhile to grasp its essence.  After all, the conventional view is filled with assumptions that many of us have lived with and been surrounded by for most of our lives.  In learning this new worldview, you may find the words of Renee Descartes meaningful.  “Today, then, as I have suitably freed my mind from all cares, and have secured for myself an assured leisure in peaceful solitude, I shall at last apply myself earnestly and freely to the general overthrow of all my former opinions.”