BECOMING HEALERS:

THE POSSIBILITIES WHEN MEDICAL PRACTICE LOSES ITS WAY

In 2004, I gave the Keynote address at the American Holistic Medical Association annual meeting, entitled The Soul of Medicine. From that talk, ReVisioning Medicine was born.

I am not a physician and wasn’t one in 2004. Nevertheless, I was called upon to give the Keynote because I had learned healing in the old ways, through cancer and through the spirits and it seems I was invited to reintroduce the ways and concerns of healing to medical practice. There are, I said then, two critically ill patients we have to attend, Earth and Medical practice itself and then went on to speak of several patients suffering serious illnesses.

I was naïve enough to think that we came together to listen to each other’s best thinking, in order to change our lives to accord with what serves our souls and all beings. After all, that conference was titled, The Soul of Medicine, to the astonishment and gratification of those attending. ReVisioning began in order to support those physicians who said they wished to practice medicine differently and wished to explore the possibilities with each other. So it has been with great sadness that I have watched contradiction develop as the numbers diminish each year of physicians who could imagine a different practice that served them and their patients fully even as there was a growing concern about the direction medical practice was taking as hospitals and clinics become increasingly for profit, as pharmaceutical and insurance companies and governmental agencies impose more inappropriate controls, as medicine becomes financially and practically unjust, as residencies often exhaust and traumatize the young doctors, as ICE terrorizes many ER clinics, while AI, though callous and without wisdom, strives for dominance while private practices and the equivalent of the family doctors are disappearing.

You would think more and more physicians would gather to see what is possible to change these conditions but increasingly they capitulate, trying to survive, or leave medicine altogether.

Two novels I have written feature physicians, Lucas Jay an ER doctor with a degree in ethics, in La Vieja: A Journal of Fire, and John Birdswell who is doing his military service on the 4 Corners Reservation during the Vietnam war, in A Rain of Night Birds. The novels offered the opportunity to explore ways contemporary doctors could work in the old ways. Maybe I hoped they would be vital models for those doctors I was meeting who were so disillusioned and disappointed as I had also hoped the Woman in Feral might inspire therapists to be true healers. In ReVisioning Medicine, we weren’t judging Western medicine but looking to collaborate around potentials.

But even so, ReVisioning came to an end. Still, as we were organizing a last meeting to consider the years we had been together, an inevitable corollary of the ending appeared. If medicine continues to go downhill and become increasingly standardized, one size fits all, it became clear that we, the greater we, need to learn again, as uncolonized Indigenous people have always known, how to be true healers. And so, our gathering was called An Invitation to Becoming a True Healer.

We quickly realized we needed to learn and wanted to learn how to heal again. How do we learn? Not from academia, you can be sure. Healing is not a system though there may be technologies which can assist at various times. Perhaps we learn the way communities have always learned, by listening, individually and together, to Earth and all the creatures and beings, informed by the ways they interact with each other and create interdependent relationships. By listening to the spirits, and being trustworthy. Healing ways emerge in relationship to the intrinsic culture based on Earth, spirit and relationship. That was first made clear to me when I had breast cancer and Chan Kin the Lacandon elder told my friend, Victor Perera, (Last Lords of Palenque) that they could heal their own illnesses but not the ones Euro-Americans brought to them.

Healing is a world created from all the precise and caring interactions that take place in a community and create, sustain and preserve the future. Each time a healing takes place, the patient’s world and the larger world are constituted because we come to understand how all the parts relate to each other, the parts of the patient’s smaller story and the parts of the larger world with which it co-exists and how one informs the other. Healing does not treat a condition like western medicine does, it meets the story. When a story is met, a world is healed.

There is more to understand, but it is within this larger context – personal, social, national, our people’s history. Dreams, visions and co-incidences. Peace and war. Earth and the environment, the air, water and land, and yes, even fire, their presences and absences. Culture, ancestry and epigenetics. All of it.

Many of the principles of ReVisioning Medicine are the same for being a healer: Most essential is practicing a medicine that does no harm. “The physician [healer] must ... have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.” So says the Hippocratic oath, the core dictum of western medicine. You would think this would not be a radical goal, but, in truth, it has become so. As is the second call, that medical people would be like Indigenous medicine people, [Indigenous healers] deeply caring, deeply engaged in their community, practicing medicine which is relational, respectful, aligned with the natural world, and ethical. And finally contemporary healing needs to recognize that that climate dissolution, extinction, chaos, violence and war gravely affect our physical, emotional, spiritual and mental health and so are ours to meet.

As healers we try to understand what is occurring together, the patient being both the resource and the expert as is the healer. Healing is a most intimate event that brings all parties into relationship.

If there is a formula, it is this: listen, listen, listen, relationship, relationship, relationship.

Of course, there is more. Of course there is much more. But this is a beginning. Because we have to become healers of these times. Healers for our personal afflictions and our families’ and communities’ afflictions, our nation’s and Earth’s afflictions, that too.

And this: as individuals and tribal communities were taught / are being taught by the spirits and by the elders who still remember, then we, who have the heart for healing can also learn from the spirits and those elders who are still among us.

Even physicians can be healers. Contemporary medical practice may be degenerating, but healing is possible. The two critically ill patients we had to attend at the AHMA in 2004 are still suffering and bringing healing to them, to Earth and medical practice itself, is one way we can learn to how to heal.

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Deena Metzger has been working as a healer since 1977. She began the circle, ‘What will it mean to be a healer in the 21^st Century’ in the mid-eighties and has led the Healers’ Intensive since 1999.

The Healers’ Intensive 2026 will take place on the land in Topanga, CA, June 20- June 26^th. To register or for more information email deenametzger@pm.me.