On Healing and Healers

When I was in college, one of the courses that I found most interesting was Medical Anthropology. It covered medical practices from a cross-cultural standpoint. Although it was a reasonable approach, it was also one that was often at odds with the scientific approach that western medicine embodies, primarily because in many cultures, healing is also mixed with mystical practices and beliefs. I generally do not like to use the word mystical or mysticism, because it denotes some kind of mystery usually not knowable. However, for lack of a better term, I will use it for the time being.

Although the thought of distinguishing healing from medicine would seem radical to the west, I do see it as analogous as viewing the distinction between spirituality and religion. A healer could be a physician, but not necessarily; while the reverse could also be true for some physicians, who heal, but not generally in the mystical sense. Although some physicians can be "mystical healers", their ability doesn't come from their western training.

While western medicine is steeped in science, healing and healers have been around for centuries in many different ways and in just about every culture. There is the medicine man in Native American, African and South American cultures to mention just a few. What makes a healer different from a physician? What constitutes the basis for healing? What are the ways healers heal? These are all questions that are valid to ask and reasonable for inquiry. They are also questions that are difficult to address in one short essay. My purpose is not to provide a detailed accounting, but just give an overview of the process. It's up to the reader to question, explore and come to his own conclusions.

- The Basis for Healing
Many belief systems view the body as analogous to the universe as being composed of energy that is either harmonious or disharmonious. When one is harmonious with the forces of nature (energy), health ensues. When one’s energy is disharmonious, sickness can develop. The task of the healer then becomes to find where the disharmony in the person's body exists, and help them to restore it to a state of harmony. In western medicine, a comparable view is HOMEOSTASIS. Wikipedia defines homeostasis as "the property of living organisms to regulate its internal environment to maintain a stable, constant condition, by means of multiple dynamic equilibrium adjustments, controlled by interrelated regulation mechanisms." In other words, homeostasis is a condition of harmony and balance, and the body, with interconnected mechanisms, works to maintain that balance.

Human life and health exists within certain boundaries where the body maintains all the systems in a harmonious interrelationship. If anything upsets that balance, then the person will get sick. How that illness defines itself depends on the kind and location of the disharmony.

In addition to the energy contained within each body, the individual cells also have a unique energy level. So there are many things to consider when health and illness is concerned. Perhaps cancer is the breakdown of the energy level of a cell that then proliferates and spreads, interfering with the other processes of the body by interrupting the homeostasis of the whole system.

How the healer works to restore the balance of the person's body can take on a variety of forms. Herbs that have been known to be effective in restoring the body’s energy balance can be used, or with acupuncture where certain nodes of energy regulation can be manipulated with inserting specially designed needles into the body at those nodes, then rotating the needle to stimulate the flow of energy to the weakened area(s).

Other kinds of healing can involve the healer who is able, by some process, to draw out the illness from the sick person, take it into their own aura (energy) and then discharge it by a process that is still unclear. Again, these are methods that are not generally accepted in the west because they don’t necessarily lend themselves to the scientific method or to reproducibility, because they largely depend on the ability of the healer. The scientific community, however, views the experimenter as simply the facilitator of the experiment; his energy level is not supposed to intermix with the experiment he is performing because it would affect the ability of the experiment to be reproduced by someone else. This is primarily the difficulty in using the scientific method to prove healing. We can't separate or isolate the energy of the healer from the person he is healing. It's not possible to reproduce the healing with someone else who claims to heal since their level of energy will be different, and the basis of the healing will often be determined by the level of energy of the healer.


[from the author]
There are other ways to conceptualize illness and healing. Although the differences are clear, there is a place for western medicine as there are for other forms of medicine and healing. The important thing is to have respect for the varieties of approaches and to recognize that those forms, unfamiliar to us, can work and do have at its basis a long tradition of theory forged from a view of the world and universe that goes beyond what we normally consider as part of the scientific tradition.