One of the main differences between Western medicine and integrated healthcare is the focus in the former on curing or at least managing symptoms rather than healing the causes underlying the symptoms. An obvious and all too frequent example is depression. GPs frequently hand out anti-depressants to patients without also giving them appropriate therapy or social care to deal with the underlying cause of their depression. This may help patients to get out of bed in the morning and go to work/school/take care of their children etc, apparently curing the symptoms, which can be a useful short term strategy, but it can lead to a life of addiction (often with side effects from the medications) if it’s not accompanied by finding out why people are depressed and helping to deal with that underlying cause.

Johann Hari wrote a wonderful book called Lost Connections, which investigates the anti-depressant industry and then considers alternative treatments, which deal with the causes of the depression. This of course gets us deep into social policy and the fact that is it NORMAL to be anxious or depressed if one has no hope, doing a job you hate to feed your family, to live in terrible housing in an area where you are abused physically or emotionally whenever you leave, or where you feel chronically unsafe.

Therapists and their clients cannot always deal with these underlying social causes much as they might wish for systemic change or additional financial resources. But no matter what is happening around you, much of which you cannot control, the one thing you can control is how you react to it, which is called resilience. And often people do have more choices available than they may initially believe or perceive. But it is difficult to truly heal something that is not even seen or acknowledged, which is why the work needs to be done in the shadows, the trauma, the shit! As Thomas Hubl, an expert in Collective Trauma notes, a lot of what is going wrong in the world right now is the result of the unacknowledged and hence unresolved trauma of the past.

Caroline Myss writes, 'A 'cure' occurs when one has successfully controlled or abated the physical progression of an illness. Curing a physical illness, however, does not necessarily mean that the emotional and psychological stresses that were a part of the illness were also alleviated. In this case it is highly possible, and often probable, that an illness will recur.

'The process of curing is passive; that is the patient is inclined to give his or her authority over to the physician and prescribed treatment instead of actively challenging the illness and reclaiming health. Healing, on the other hand, is an active and internal process that includes investigating one's attitudes, memories, and beliefs with the desire to release all negative patterns that prevent one's full emotional and spiritual recovery.'

I am always working for healing, not just curing. And if one believes in the continuation of a spirit/soul/consciousness beyond the end of the physical body, then curing the physical body may indeed not be possible, but deep healing of the soul can take place before death so that there is less ‘baggage’ carried over into the next lifetime or realm. Big subjects on which I will say more later!