Curing Disease and Healing Illness
We all die! Until someone comes up with the cure for dying our responsibility still remains to give the patient the where withal to increase his/her quality of life. When we look at an organization to promote the teaching and experientials of healing, we must determine what it is that we are trying to do. First, we must make a distinction between disease, illness and sickness.
Illnesses are experiences of disvalued changes in states of being and in social function; diseases, in the scientific paradigm of modern medicine, are abnormalities in the structure and function of bodily organs and system.When the disease/illness distinctions become clear and acceptable then we progress in total integrative clinical wellness. We are very willing to speak about mind over matter in connection with that distinction: we seldom speak of mind over matter as a way to cure disease, but we often use this concept to interpret healing and to understand how healing could help in curing.
Leon Eisenberg, Disease and Illness, p. iiA key axiom in medical anthropology is the dichotomy between two aspects of sickness: disease and illness. Disease refers to a malfunctioning of biological and/or psychological processes, while the term illness refers to the psychosocial experience and meaning of perceived disease.
Arthur Kleinman, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture, p. 72
To distinguish the two components, we could say that the surgeon is better at curing disease while the complementary therapist is better at healing illness. And that might be all right, of course, if those two processes were always totally separate.
Arthur Kleinman, in a subsequent book, introduces a third term, sickness, and defines it as “the understanding of a disorder in its generic sense across a population in relation to macrosocial (economic, political, institutional) forces.”
What happens when social forces, political situations, or economic con-ditions cause the sickness, be it disease and/or illness? How does mind over matter work then? The point is not to get lost among those variations on sickness, but to realize the inevitable interaction between them.
When we discuss the contribution of the tobacco industry and their political supporters to the burden of lung cancer in North America, we are describing the sickness cancer. Not just researchers but patients, families, and healers, too, may jump from illness to sickness. Adding another wrinkle to the experience of disease, seeing it as a reflection of political oppression, economic deprivation, and other social sources of human misery. Society (and its systemic structures) can not only intensify the illness that follows from a disease; it can create the sickness that leads to the disease.
Modern professional health care tends to treat disease but not illness whereas in general, complementary systems of healing tend to treat illness, not disease. Ideally, good clinical care should treat both disease and illness.
Complementary healers talk about the stressors of anger and fear, of grief and guilt, of spiritual forces and society as being responsible for sickness and death. Modern professional health care speaks of sanitation and nutrition, of bacteria and germs, of microbes and viruses. How is one not wrong if the other is right, and vice versa? Sometimes the obvious becomes the answer to what is causing the illness and therefore the curing of disease. Healing then becomes our main purpose. Integrative clinical medicine uses techniques of hypnotherapy and energy work, of pain management and acupressure, of healing touch and massage, of regression and spiritual counseling and of modern professional health care; to give us the ability to heal the illness and if possible cure the disease.
The distinction between healing illness and curing disease is devastatingly obvious. Healing the interactive loop between the twin processes of disease and illness becomes our main objective. The patient’s immune system is actually under attack on two fronts. The stressors cause one’s immune system to be in danger and just treating the disease prevents the immune system from reactivating. Integrative support from modern professional health care and complementary healers activates the immune system and counteracts the stressors. When curing is not generally possible, healing might still be very important. A patient can have a successful healing when no successful curing is possible.
We must then educate those who wish to practice these integrative principles of how wellness takes place. It must be a two pronged effort, first to the modern professional health care system so that they become more aware of illness and its causes and second to the potential complementary healers to make them proficient in handling stressors.
Marty Patton, MBA, C.Ht.
9200 Montgomery Rd #12A
Montgomery, OH 45242
9200 Montgomery Rd #12A
Montgomery, OH 45242
|
|
Copyright © 1986 Infinity Institute International, Inc. All rights reserved.