ReVisioning Medicine for a Healthy Future

Hello. ReVisoning Medicine!  Why not?  It is so badly needed by practitioners and patients.  Some year ago, when giving the keynote for The American Academy of Environmental Medicine, I felt compelled to address everyone as a patient, both the victim of increasing environmental injury and the perpetrator. The question I have been asking for years was most pertinent there: What is the story and the path that illness is revealing and how do we meet them for the sake of healing all?  In that instance, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the wounding of the earth through human activities was similarly enacted on the body of humans and also non-human and that true healing required meeting all.  Since then, the ways that illnesses and healing affect and are affected by all aspects of life have become painfully obvious and call us into new relationships that need to be attended for life, and so health, to thrive.  

ReVisioning Medicine has been meeting to address such issues since 2004 and we hope you will join us. 

Recently, I spoke with a friend about her husband, a brilliant mathematician, renowned creative thinker and visionary beloved by many friends and students, about the agony of his last months of medical care in an enlightened community in California.  Ultimately, despite insurance, but because of civic lack of medical and technological resources and as a consequence of corporate, for-profit hospital and rehabilitation practices, he died, according to the autopsy, of malnutrition.  His inability to eat for complex reasons was dismissed or ignored by all the weary and over worked professionals who treated him, and who, to a person, did not investigate his wife’s growing alarm and inability to remedy the situation.  

Within the last few months two colleagues who were prescribed stat MRIs in October and November were automatically scheduled for the test next March and April, 5 to 6 months later. They needed to use their energy, smarts and influence to change it to within two weeks.  But they had the ability and were living in Los Angeles, had adequate medical insurance and primary physicians. What if they lived elsewhere, had far more basic health insurance or none, or were not educated regarding medicine or what they deserved or needed as people?

These are just two events ... I could tell you dozens and sadly also about the physician’s, or the physician’s mother’s or father’s treatment, or the hospital’s neuropsychologist’s mother’s highly inadequate, or even dangerous treatment, or the like.  And you can do the same.  

But I can also tell you multiple stories of remarkable healings that occurred when conventional practices expanded to include wonders because the true story of healing is so much larger, deeper, more beautiful and complex than is ordinarily permitted.  

One of my own stories occurred when the electricity failed at Cedar Sinai hospital, Beverly Hills, California, one of the largest in the world, during a 1977 winter storm, preventing me from receiving reconstruction surgery three days after a mastectomy¹.  I had received major anesthesia three times in ten days and the surgery couldn’t be scheduled for six months.  In that time, much understanding came to me so that instead, I had my chest tattooed at the same time as I was writing my book, Tree, about the experience of Breast Cancer. Both events assisted my actual healing and lead to the creation of the Woman Warrior Poster, which went viral internationally, beginning in 1981, and is still saving thousands of lives of women globally from a variety of dangerous implants, whose use remains threatening in current days. 

[ Working photo of Woman Warrior poster for Italian and other language editions of Tits Up by Sarah Thornton, 2024]

Healing stories are so different from what can be charted; they are intricate and blessedly tangled in the events, histories, relationships, insights, even dreams that more than describe and influence an individual’s life.

Accordingly, ReVisioning Medicine seeks to bring together medical intelligence with time tested indigenous ways and contemporary vision.  Based on Council principles everyone’s unique intelligence, medicine tradition and wisdom are appreciated as cooperation between western medicine and non-western healing practices can be a source of needed wisdom.

ReVisioning Medicine is a spirit-based, earth-based medicine, as healing is a spiritual practice for medicine people. It promotes alliances between the patient and physicians, healers, the family and the natural world. If we are free to think differently about the nature of illness and healing, as well as the relationship between common illnesses and modern life, we will find ways that truly bring healing and do no harm to individuals or the planet.  For this reason, in the 2004 Keynote Address for the American Holistic Medicine Association, I introduced Medicine and the Earth as our primary patients.

Gathering for ReVisioning Medicine is an act of hope and possibility.  As downhearted as we may be about the state of medicine, we, who have been convening ReVisioning since 2004, see the possibilities that our explorations of mind and heart offer.  

Please join us. Click the photo below to learn more.

 (Just for our information -I had a mastectomy – by a very kind, mostly pediatric surgeon, “with a fine stitch” - no chemo, no other medical treatment - and have been entirely cancer free for 47 years.)

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