The Ways of ReVisioning Medicine
ReVisioning Medicine
- is a relationship not a technology.
- Prioritizes medicine and medical practices which do no harm to individuals, the community and the environment.
- Encourages medical and mental health practitioners to be like medicine people who serve their patients, tribes and Indigenous communities in wise, respectful and intimate ways.
- Restores Spirit and Earth centered ways to the core of medical and mental health practices, and recognizes that right relationship with the natural world is essential to all healing.
- Recognizing extinction, climate change, and the escalating violence and increasing chaos in our social and political lives as causing grave mental and physical disease. Attending the inter-relationship between individual, community and planetary pain, suffering and illnesses, and the intersections between individual, cultural and global healing.
- Collaborates with and incorporates Indigenous and ancestral wisdom traditions, ceremonies and rituals into medical treatment. Includes solitude, meditation, time on land, prayer, ritual, divination, ceremony, music, art, animals, the natural world as well as takes responsibility for our health and the health of the earth.
- Acknowledges the role of community as integral to healing.
- Places the patient’s individual, ethical, moral and cultural wisdom at the center of the healing process.
- Learns the ways of epigenetics and understand how individuals may carry an illness on behalf of family and community and that healing can be on behalf all beings.
- Discovers the way of Story which recognizes the personal, historic, social, political, environmental, ethical, spiritual involvement in physical and mental illness and affliction Learns how Story when explored between healer and patient can help to reveal the nature of an illness and the paths toward healing and can be useful for diagnosis and treatment.
- Includes conversations about death and dying in the healing process and accompany the dying in skillful and spiritual ways.
- Removes the war mindset and language from medical practice.
- Examine the increasing limitations and distortions imposed on medical practice by different aspects of corporate and institutional medicine, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and government. Explore ways to practice good medicine, offer primary care and survive in what has become an industry. Explore ways to divest practitioners and patients of unnecessary or dangerous pharmaceuticals, criminal, torturous, violent treatments and harsh incarcerations.
- Bears witness to and confronts iatrogenesis as the third leading cause of death in this country and is wary of dangerous side-effects and complications from conventional medical hospital treatments and medications.
- Respects those physicians and healers who are called to challenge certain protocols and treatments in order to practice in well documented. often natural ways, although they may be disapproved by the Establishment.
- Challenges colonial and imperial thinking and distortions of Western medicine which dominate health care and undermine cultural wisdom traditions while insisting on compliance.
- Is concerned with professional ways leading from burnout to moral injury and how hospital practices can undermine or exhaust students, interns and residents. Is alarmed that many health professionals consider resigning from medical practice, or become drug addicted and or attempt suicide. Seeks the health and well-being of the professionals as well as the patients.
- Brings ReVisioning understanding to medical training so that future physicians will not be gravely undermined in their energy, health and soul.
- Remembers our particular calling to be healers and healing presences.
