Treating the Patient Behind the Disease : The Science of Healing as an Art

THE PROLIFERATION of approaches to healing and medicine today--with its smorgasbord of treatments, from the exotic and unproved to longstanding and well-understood procedures--presents the patient with a bewildering array of choices. More crucial than the method of treatment that is adopted are the inner workings of doctor and patient. Factors such as attitude, belief and faith are unquantifiable and perhaps unmeasurable; yet they have an enormous relevance to the healing process. They can reinforce the efficacy of a particular treatment or doom it.

In our Western obsession with “objectivity,” with its emphasis on repeatable experimentation, a study of healing is thought to be tainted if any of those factors creep in. Yet as the evidence so eloquently shows, behind the therapy is the therapist and behind the disease is the patient. Looking at the disease and the therapy--rather than the healer and the healed--robs us of our very humanity. It renders medicine an impassive, inerrant, uncontrollable monument, on a plane removed from the uncertainties and unpredictability of everyday human life.

But what of science--the science of healing? It has a vital place, but that place is in the context of healing as an art. The painter wields brush and paints to give voice to the creative urges within. Yet the brush is the end-product of a long technological and manufacturing process. So are the paints. What the artist creates with them, however, far transcends their value as technology and chemical formulas. It is the living expression of a set of inner values.

So, also, in healing. The great healer must master his or her technique, as must the great painter. But the true healer wields techniques as a master--a master of the art of healing--never becoming so lost in the mechanism of science that he forgets the essence of healing as an art.

M.D.s, chiropractors, psychologists, mystics and priests have chosen to express their art through several different techniques. While there is a diversity to their views, there is a remarkable underlying unity that springs from what each of them has to say. Some great common themes emerge. Perhaps the most striking of those is the often reported experience of entering a state in which there is no differentiation between the healer and the one being healed--only of oneness. That is the inner state from which healing proceeds, an “inner ground of healing” characterized by stillness, peace and a sense of the infinite wellness of all things.

Seeking the core of what “makes” a healer leads the inquirer beyond any favored therapeutic approach. It involves a fearless personal evaluation of one’s inner state, to what it means to be “standing in the place of healing.” From that stance, everything one touches is imbued with life; everyone one treats stands within the compass of one’s own atmosphere.

In the strictly scientific approach to medicine that came into its own in the 19th Century, pioneered by such visionary surgeons as Ignaz Semmelweiss and James Lister, the fathers of antiseptic sterilization, the sphere of the responsible healer unintentionally became more and more confined to the definition and treatment of ill conditions of the human body.

With Sigmund Freud, and the development of psychoanalysis and its progeny, even the elusive mind became subject to systematic analysis, definition and prescriptive treatment. By the middle of the 20th Century, the medical profession was convinced that every something called a “disease” had something called a “cure,” and that the irrevocable march of research would eventually place in the healer’s hand the tools to eradicate virtually every human ailment.

That myth was seriously dented by the intractability of diseases such as cancer, in which the nature of the human being as a circular continuum of body, mind and heart, or rather the ancient Greek idea of “body, soul and spirit,” is evident. Diseases of the body are not confined to the body. They may be caused by the mind or heart, and have real and observable effects upon the soul and spirit. Indeed, the division of the human being into component parts is for the convenience of discussion only: Real human beings are indivisible. Wellness or illness in one part of the system affects the whole. Illness cannot be successfully treated in one part of the organism only.

Here the realms of anatomy, psychology and spirituality fuse and the idea of holistic treatment emerges--respect for the integrity of the whole system, rather than fragmented attention to symptoms. That synthesis has come to make sense to more and more medical practitioners, who can breathe a sigh of relief at not having to judge their performance by their success at temporarily manipulating a bit of the whole. Healers are not mechanics, driving the patient’s body to surgery or the medicine cabinet, replacing a faulty distributor cap or doing an oil change and sending them, “healed,” on their way. Rather, honoring both the “human” and the “being” aspects of the human being, we find ways to become sensitive to the implicit order and rhythms of life, and facilitate their unobstructed expression through those we serve.

‘Diseases of the body are not confined to the body. They may be caused by the mind or heart, and have real and observable effects upon the soul and spirit. Indeed, the division of the human being into component parts is for the convenience of discussion only: Real human beings are indivisible.’

In doing that we reclaim our links to the oldest forms of healing. The ancient tribal shaman used prayer and supplications to the gods, herbal remedies (as many of our modern miracle drugs are derivatives of substances extracted from plants), and the support of family and society. Drugs and surgery have also long been potent arrows in the quiver of the medical profession, and only in the last century has the peculiar practice of limiting medical authenticity to those two tools become widespread.

The modern holistic and truly holistic healer sees no need to restrict himself to that partial approach. If healing is the desired goal, then what promotes healing? Does prayer promote healing? Then let doctor and patient pray together. Is psychotherapy effective? Let it take its place in the lexicon of legitimate treatments. Will the warmth and closeness of good friends be an effective tonic? Then encourage their presence. Do drugs and surgery have their unique value? Then have them available as tools for appropriate use. All those things are the province of the healer, and to the degree that a healer’s preconceptions or pet theories preclude the use of one or more of those, to that degree are that healer’s patients impoverished and denied the resources of the fullness of life to effect healing. That is as true of those who practice allopathic, or disease-centered medicine, as those who go overboard on “alternative” approaches that seek to deny the remarkable advances of 20th-Century medicine in the fields of drugs and surgery.

Most of those who make professional careers in the healing arts start with a burning desire to enrich the lives of others by offering them the gifts of freedom from pain, relief from anxiety and suffering, and the blessings of wellness. Healers are healers because they want to give. Yet all kinds of things get in the way. The indoctrination of schooling, the grind of getting a practice started, the healer-patient routines that develop, the pressure of peer evaluation, personal desires (such as getting ahead and making money), the fear of malpractice lawsuits. All those things become a shroud covering up that original impulse--the magic that springs from the heart of the healer. The passionate flame of service does not endure; burnout ensues.

Healing starts with life. When we cut a finger and place a Band-Aid over the wound, is it the Band-Aid that causes the healing? Of course not. The natural processes of life operating through that particular human body provide the healing. And that is the thing with which the effective healer is aligned. When the healer and the person being healed both recognize themselves to be part of the whole process, that process comes to a specific focus in that situation, and healing is a natural manifestation.

The interest of the new healer is life, and what it is that leads to a greater abundance of life. Gone is the fixation on disease, which is merely the result of the blockage of that innate energy. The vision is instead on what makes people well; what keeps people well. The healer who makes it his first business to align himself with that creative process is truly a gift to his patients, as well as a medium for the release of an increasing quantum of the balm of life so desperately required in an ailing world. The new healer, the complete healer, the truly modern healer, fuses in his practice enduring ancient truth with modern technique. It does not matter whether the new healer chooses to equip his therapeutic tool bag with surgery, chiropractic or herbology.

What does matter is the heart of the healer, and whether or not it is imprisoned within the structured confines of a favored method, its energy channeled into defending its prison. When released, it may blossom into fulfillment with its first love--the love of serving the whole of life.

From “The Heart of the Healer,” edited by Dawson Church and Alan Sherr, to be published by Aslan Publishing in November.

Copyright 1987 by Aslan Publishing, New York. Reprinted by permission.