19 Inquiries
ReVisioning Medicine
1. How can we create medicine and medical practices which do no harm to individuals, the community and the environment?
2. How can medical and mental health practitioners become medicine people? How can we transform medical ways so physicians and therapists can relate to patients and communities in the respectful and intimate ways that medicine people serve their communities?
3. How can medical and mental health people remember their calling to be healers?
4. As spirit and earth centered ways are fundamental to medical and mental health practices, how can we restore right relationship with the Earth as essential to all healing?
5. What shifts are required to recognize extinction, climate change, and the escalating violence and increasing chaos in our social and political lives as causing grave mental and physical disease? Shall we explore, understand and attend the inter-relationship between individual, community and planetary pain, suffering and illnesses, acknowledging the intersections between individual, cultural and global healing?
6. How can we collaborate with and incorporate Indigenous and ancestral wisdom traditions, ceremonies and rituals into medical treatment? Can we revision standard physical and mental health healing practices and treatment for patients and practitioners to include solitude, meditation, time on the land, prayer, ritual, divination, ceremony, music, art, animals, the natural world as well as take responsibility for our health and the health of the earth?
7. How shall we acknowledge the role of community as integral to healing?
8. How will we, again, as physicians and health practitioners serve the community in the best ways that medicine persons served their tribes or indigenous communities?
9. How will we recognize and place the patient’s individual, ethical, moral and cultural wisdom at the center of the healing process?
10. How shall we recognize that individuals may carry an illness on behalf of family and community and that healing can be on behalf all beings?
11. Shall we explore, develop and teach the fullest use of Story in diagnosis and treatment as it can significantly reveal the nature of the illness and the paths toward healing, and can be core to diagnosis and treatment while restoring dignity to the physician – patient relationship? The way of Story recognizes the personal, historic, current, social, political, environmental, ethical, spiritual involvement in physical and mental illness and affliction. How shall we learn this way?
12. Can we include the conversation about death and dying in the healing process and accompany the dying in skillful and spiritual ways?
13 Can we take the war mindset and language out of medical practice?
14. Shall we examine the increasing limitations and distortions imposed on medical practice by different aspects of corporate and institutional medicine, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and government? How can we be more alert to the harm created by Corporate, Big Pharma, Insurance and Government control of the medical system? Shall we xplore ways to practice good medicine, offer primary care and survive in what has become an industry? Shall we, together, explore ways to divest practitioners and patients of unnecessary or dangerous pharmaceuticals, criminal, torturous, violent treatments and harsh incarcerations?
15. Are we willing and able to bear witness to and confront iatrogenesis as the third leading cause of death in this country, thus bringing awareness to the cascading harm it creates in our communities? In addition, shall we confront the too common dangerous side-effects of and/or complications from conventional medical hospital treatments and medications? Shall we take seriously and investigate the threats and discipline extended to physicians and healers who dare to challenge protocols or treat patients in well documented ways, often natural ways, which may be disapproved by the Establishment?
16. Can we challenge and replace colonial and imperial thinking which dominates health care and undermines cultural wisdom traditions? Shall we confront and protect ourselves as practitioners and patients from Western medicine’s requirement that we follow and yield to its practices?
17. Shall we face the distortions of medical practice which impact practitioners from burnout to moral injury? How shall we meet the overwhelm and disillusion that students, interns, residents often feel and the disappointment, disenchantment and deep concern that plagues so many physicians, psychiatrists and psychologists , recognizing that these often lead to resigning from medical practice, drug addiction, even suicide? Shall we supports participants to speak openly, honestly and from the heart about the grief and vision carried about contemporary medical ways? Shall we consider which practices should be rejected, changed, restored and which followed and respected?
18. Can we bring ReVisioning understanding to medical training so that future physicians will not be gravely undermined in their energy, health and soul?
19. Will we hold the essential questions of how to meet our calling as healing presences at this time in history?
