British Association for Holistic Medicine & Health Care
by David Peters - Editor in Chief of The Journal of Holistic Healthcare
In my work with NHS staff I meet many remarkable, dedicated and compassionate people. Medical science is a powerful channel for their gifts of service, and medicine’s progress has done humankind immense good. So it’s tempting to imagine that science and technology will eventually put everything to rights – suffering, disease, the climate crisis; you name it. This unquestioned faith in progress and boundless human knowledge is deeply ingrained; so deeply that we can hardly even think about it. We should though, because it shores up an out-of-date worldview that exaggerates our power to manipulate the world and the body.
Human health is an emergent property of mind, body and spirit in right, embodied relationship with the natural world. How are we to shape our ways of life around this assumption of one-ness so that planetary health can follow?
With the discovery that flesh is far from mind-less, diseases become more than simply biological glitches; the parallel realisation that the atmosphere and oceans regulate one another means the climate emergency is a meaningful symptom of Gaia in distress. Deprivation, injustice, and alienation sow the seeds of health breakdown; global heating and the world-wide surge in mental illness and chronic disease share common roots. Their healing - personal and planetary – will call for care at least as much as they do for cure. The political and spiritual implications are obvious, yet I fear that medicine – stuck, along with the whole of 21st century industrial humankind in the delusion of techno-medical fixes - will become ever-more technologised, industrialised and de-humanised.
That’s why holistic solutions to the planetary emergency and the need to re-imagine medicine go hand in hand. In reality, health and wellbeing of body, spirit, culture and planet are looped together, all radically dependant on Gaia. Plainly, as business as usual hurtles towards global ecological and social collapse, the worldview that got us here won’t solve the problems it has created. My hope is that evolutionary pressures will force our adolescent species to evolve a new paradigm of inter-dependence and inter-being. But paradigms are only maps: there will be no territory without a shift in consciousness, and a culture deeply connected with the so much more-than-human world that gave birth to our kind. The Anthropocene is a rite of passage. We will need to prepare together, for the journey into planetary adulthood will be hard one. Obsolete narratives hold us in the past, and redundant systems stagger on until better ones arise. In Jude Currivan’s wise interweaving of science and spirit I sense what a new (w)holistic worldview might look like.
With medical systems all over the world facing entwined crises of cash, care, cure and commitment, burnout is widespread. Our ways of thinking about health and healthcare need to change, and the Journal of Holistic Healthcare is all about shifting the paradigm.
Check out Jude's recent article, republished here.
Human health is an emergent property of mind, body and spirit in right, embodied relationship with the natural world. How are we to shape our ways of life around this assumption of one-ness so that planetary health can follow?
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