The Most Powerful Medicine of All

January 25, 2023

Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle. ~ Elizabeth Bishop, A Miracle for Breakfast

I’ve been ruminating upon the common principles of the complementary and alternative (“CAM”) healing modalities with which I’m familiar, like acupuncture and homeopathy. I believe CAM treatment strives to remove barriers to the body’s self-healing ability so it can be restored to its condition of “remembered wellness,” as Herbert Benson, MD, calls it in his book, Timeless Healing, The Power and Biology of Belief. He believes humans can heal themselves and discusses the placebo effect, where, for example, a patient’s condition improves when taking sugar pills because the patient believes he or she is taking medicine. 

It seems, however, that physicians may be inclined to discount this phenomenon as a formidable factor in a patient’s recovery. “Doctors are loathe to admit that the placebo effect contributes to the success” of their treatment, notes Dr. Benson. Since there’s a great deal of profit to be made by those who manufacture and distribute drugs, medical treatments, and the endless paraphernalia of hospitals and clinics, it’s understandable that “the patient healed himself” would not be popular. 

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How would it be, I wonder, if hospitals morphed into multidisciplinary conventional / alternative healing centers? If they staffed their bright and cheerful campuses with Traditional Chinese Medicine doctors, acupuncturists, chiropractors, homeopaths, and energy healers, along with nurses, medical technicians, and physicians? If they filled their Sacred Space rooms with massive quartz specimens, and if every patient room had its own altar and an array of depictions of spiritual masters for each patient to select?

What if these healing center–hospitals offered self-expression classes such as music, writing, art? Uplifting movement classes like yoga and tai chi alongside post-surgery and post-treatment physical therapy? 

How would it be if conventional medicine began to focus primarily on the ability of humans to self-heal, acknowledging that the professionals’ only real function is to help remove barriers to that powerful, natural, God-given process?

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I’m not sure how long we’re going to have to wait for the med beds, but I’m not willing to suffer stoically in the meantime.

Santa Barbara is blessed with a panoply of alternative healers. I seek them out with the confidence that they share my belief—my knowing—that they are facilitators, not creators, of my healing, and that love, self-love in particular, is the most powerful medicine of all. 

All I really ask from an alternative healer is the support to remember that I have everything I need to heal within me (and from the divine resources we call upon). Then, the natural miracle of vibrant health and well-being is mine.