INTEGRAL MEDICINE-FROM NOETIC INSTITUTE

The integral vision of healing

It always struck me as interesting that a major tenet in the Hippocratic Oath, an oath that in various forms has been taken by many physicians around the world for almost 2,000 years, is simply, “First, do no harm.”

The positive injunctions are few; but that negative injunction jumps right out at you. Why would it even be necessary to ask a future physician to promise something like that? Hippocrates understood that, of all the power a physician has, much of it is enormously positive and beneficial. One item needs most to be checked: the almost unprecedented capacity to harm a person, legally. In several versions of the Hippocratic Oath, it is clear that there are two ways to do harm: errors of commission and errors of omission. A physician can harm a patient with what he knows; but even more so, with what he doesn’t.

The aim of integral medicine can be stated simply as the desire to lessen the harm done by both of those types of errors. Therefore, medicine may more effectively set the stage for the extraordinary miracle of healing that, 2000 years later, none of us yet fully understands.

Stated more positively, the aim of integral medicine is to utilize as complete and as comprehensive an approach as possible in treating any illness—while remaining constrained by the pragmatic realities of time, insurance limitations, and office management. The integral medicine that is rapidly developing today has moved significantly beyond early attempts in this area, variously known as “holistic,” “allopathic,” “alternative,” and “complementary.” Although some of the components of those pioneering efforts are retained, integral medicine is being launched from a platform much wider in its reach, more grounded in empirical research, and more effectively related to comprehensive models of human psychology and consciousness. But it is helpful to remember that an integral medicine differs in significant ways from both conventional and complementary medicine, while attempting to include the enduring and effective elements of each.

What does such an integral medicine look like? And how can it effectively be applied given the economic and pragmatic constraints of today’s world? The following chapters are attempts to address such questions. Before outlining some of their ground-breaking conclusions, let’s set the stage by considering some of the traditional problems and dilemmas faced by most medical and health-care professionals.
The Dilemmas facing medicine
Everybody knows the first dilemma, because for years it was drummed into medical students: “Don’t get emotionally involved with your patients.” At the time, it was certainly not a cruel and uncaring injunction to treat people like objects; it was a genuine and sincere attempt to bring a dispassionate and scientific approach to healing illness. Becoming emotionally involved with a patient not only clouded the physician’s judgment, it constantly drained the physician and accordingly seemed to harm the patient.
And yet, beginning in earnest a decade or two ago, there was an explosion of hard empirical research showing that positively enlisting various emotional factors—on the part of the heath-care practitioner as well as the patient—has a profoundly affirmative effect on the treatment, in many cases not only reducing recovery time but medical costs as well. Nor was this a case of “needy” patients doing better if somebody held their hands. Controlled studies consistently show that, if certain emotional and affective elements are engaged in the healing process, positive effects tend to be seen across all types of patients. Put bluntly, not becoming emotionally involved in some ways could not only increase medical costs but significantly harm the patient. What’s a poor doctor to do?
Medical schools across the country began viewing this research warily. The whole thing had too much of a “New-Age” ring to it for most conventional medical practitioners. Trying to introduce these “subjective” factors was the opposite of what modern medicine ought to be doing. Nonetheless, virtually all medical schools were forced to confront this issue when research showed that patients were bypassing conventional medicine and spending some two billion dollars annually on types of healthcare that did not ignore these subjective factors. Over two-thirds of medical schools now have courses in complementary medicine. Part of integral medicine is an attempt to find a framework that can allow both of those approaches—conventional and complementary—to exist in a form that embarrasses neither.
A second common dilemma faced by medical practitioners is the very difficult problem that has become popularly known as “Cartesian dualism,” or the mind-body problem. For all its high-minded philosophical accoutrements, this dualism may be simply seen as this: right now you most likely feel that you have some sort of consciousness and free will, and yet physical science proceeds as if reality is a closed materialistic system. Even if philosophically you are a materialist, you have to constantly translate every experience you have into materialistic terms, because that is simply not how your experience arrives. Physicalism, in other words, violates the grain of how the world naturally presents itself (not to mention the fact that the majority of philosophers in the area simply do not believe that consciousness can be reduced to eliminative materialism). And yet a conventional physician is more-or-less forced to treat a patient as if the patient were essentially a biophysical or material system—medications, surgery, radiation --- one physical intervention after another. Their patients, when it comes to science based medicine, are physical machines, and yet in their own awareness they do not feel that they are a physical machine—and neither do their patients. The “Cartesian” problem in the conventional practice of medicine is that they treat a patient as if he or she were a physical machine, when they all know otherwise.

A third common dilemma faced by conventional medicine is that of compliance. It is now estimated that in many cases a majority of treatment failures are due to lack of patient compliance with the prescribed medical intervention (from taking pills to following a recommended diet). Patient compliance has always fallen into the rather nebulous area of “subjective psychology”—exactly the area ruled out by the biophysical model of medicine. Once again, the very core practices of biophysical medicine are rendered ineffective precisely by those factors deemed not central to the model.
A fourth dilemma faced by health-care practitioners is rarely spoken about, but it is a topic always lurking in the background: just where do we locate illness? And where do we locate the causes of any illness? It is simply impossible to draw a boundary around any disease entity, let alone its causes. Arteriosclerotic heart disease has many contributing factors, including diet, with primary culprits including trans-fatty acids, now thought to directly contribute to thousands of deaths annually but are nonetheless widespread ingredients in virtually every packaged food product in this country. Or take the number of hormone-like synthetic chemicals, now numbering in the tens of thousands, around 10% of which are known carcinogens. Can any person be healthy if the biosphere is sick? From this uncomfortable perspective, it appears that as a physician, when they treat any patient, is being asked to fix one small link in a thoroughly diseased chain of events.
Psychiatrists face this painful dilemma all the time. A teenager comes to the office for treatment of anxiety neurosis; it soon becomes obvious that it is not so much the teenager who is sick as his family, with an abusive father and alcoholic mother. Where is the illness “located?” Not to mention the fact that this teenager has to pass through metal detectors every day in school in order to make sure that he is not carrying an Uzi machine gun. And so what’s the poor psychiatrist to do? Medicate the kid, of course.
This dilemma is simply that, just as in some mysterious way everything is connected to everything else, so all illness is somehow deeply embedded in networks, systems, and chains of pathology, with any individual patient being something like a canary in the proverbial mine shaft, picking up the systemic illness a bit earlier than others and having the good sense to drop dead first.
Whether or not any particular health-care practitioner explicitly thinks of illness as being part of larger (and possibly diseased) systems in the world, there is usually the gnawing sense that one’s efforts at health care are not much different from being a surgeon in a MASH unit during a war: the medic patches them up and sends them right back out on the battlefield to catch the next bullet. The intrinsic insanity of the situation—this impossible Catch-22 job—seems to be felt to some degree by all sensitive health-care professionals.
Related to that difficult issue of how to define or even locate “illness” is the converse and equally impossible dilemma: what do we mean by “health”? Once it is understood that a human being is not simply an assemblage of physical parts, but contains emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions that cannot be reduced without remainder to material processes, then what exactly does “health” mean in such a multidimensional being? How many levels of being—physical, emotional, mental, spiritual—should a doctor treat? Can I be healthy if I am spiritually malnourished?
“Well, as a physician, that is not, and cannot be, my primary concern.” But that is the same agonizing dilemma. By saying that those areas are not the concern of physicians, we are by default pledging allegiance to the old materialist version of medicine, thus forcing ourselves to treat a person according to a model that both the doctor and the patients know is incomplete. And there is the painful dilemma: as a health-care professional, you might indeed have to specialize in one particular area and ignore and compartmentalize all others; but as a human being, you simply cannot do so. The more effective one is as a conventional physician or health professional of any kind, the more they may struggle as a human being.
Integral medicine is designed, in part, to help with those dilemmas, not only as they effect the patient or client, but as they effect the physician and health-care practitioner. Integral medicine is also, of course, a way to more effectively and efficiently help patients. But it is, first and foremost, a way to help the health-care professional handle all of those pressing problems and painful dilemmas.
This is one of the defining ways that sets integral medicine apart from both conventional medicine and alternative medicine. It is sometimes said that conventional medicine treats the illness and alternative medicine treats the person. That’s fine, and I personally believe both of those tenets are very important. But integral medicine goes one step further: it treats the illness, the person, and the physician.

My comment to Kim Wilber's article

I agree that a healer attracts the pacients according to what conscious level he/she has and this is just because his/her own next level to be reached and the this partnership helps both:the patient and the doctor. The conscious life ( the spiritual, emotional, physical)the doctor has is reflected like a mirror in the patients results. The doctor should work with oneself all lifetime, this is the responsability as an oath to the Divinity, in favour of LIFE as a sacred Gift, life being what doctor is valuing. The Pacient is another sacred Creation, who asks support to a human being, but they link in between is always The Superior, Pure Consciousness, The Divine they both should be aware they belong to and can reach in Lifetime. The Disease is not an entity as it is seen now. It is a way to a change, an awakening trigger for the patient and this sign should be interpreted by the doctor and this way, the patient receives the empowerment to work with oneself, to LET THE CHANGE HAPPEN, to give up the old paradigms, dogmas, attachments in his/her life and BE THE ONE this change calls him/her to be. I teach my patients not to say any more: I am ill.This way, they identify themselves with the illness instead of being themselves, the LEADERS OF THE CHANGE, THE INSIDE, CONSCIOUS HEALERS. There are a lot of difficulties to offer support to people this way, because the rush to feel better in a second its easier to be obtained with a pill than with working with yourself. To empower yourself to be YOUR OWN LEADER not dependent on any external means is far away from many people, still. To BELIEVE that YOU are born a MIRACLE , A CREATOR , to be able to RECREATE YOURSELF means responsabilty of a CREATOR,it means the TRUE FAITH in the Divinity INSIDE AND EVERYTWHERE. To heal means to focus on the Divinity in yourself, being aware that the Divinity doesnt have flu or cancer, these are just our attachments results, our soul ways od leading our life, based on wishes and methods which doesnt fit our Spirit.So, the Spirit teaches us, talks to us through events, peoples rections to ourselves, long time BEFORE a disease appears.If we repeat the same behaviour , having the same emotional sufferences, judgements about the EXTERNAL world, the disbalance occur and this is the disease, helping us to have a rest, to revise our values, attachments , to purify our Souls and to GET STARTED TO A NEW WAY WE STRINGLY BELIEVE IN. We are the Ones to Be the Change we want to LIVE. Each and every. The healer and the pacient and all of us. Open-minded, open-Souls, Open-Spirits to the Open Universe, to Our Way. Fear of BEING AND MANIFESTING AS CREATORS OF SELFS is individually and socially detrmined, but its FREE CHOICE. Social structures are time-limited and created by people and should be revised and changed accotding to the consciousness critical mass. They should not harm, but support human Creation and next step of being. And this is up to all of us. A doctor should be aware that he/she should be a Change Catalyst in the community and we live now the time when we are confronted with an epidemic of social determined diseases( dogmas,cultural, material attachments).They cant be solved with pills, never mind whether they are chemical or natural, what I mean, the solution is inside, not outside. HAVE FAITH THAT YOU CAN CREATE THE NEW YOU, THE BETTER YOU! a message for all the ill ones in ourseleves told and prooved as successful by a Conscious, Integral Healer who works with Oneself as a TEACHER of the patient, of himself and a DISCIPOL of PURE CONSCIOUNSNESS all the TIME.
Dr. Gabriela Morusanu MD. Ph.D