If you're not hiding under a rock you've probably gotten into more than one heated discussion about Healthcare lately. Because of Obama's Healthcare push I've argued with a friend from an Eastern Bloc country who believes that any government participation in our Healthcare system will ruin it. I've argued with those who believe existing medical methodologies are beyond question and see alternative medicine not only as ridiculous and tantamount to theft, but a dangerous threat to any rational discussion of Healthcare.
Even among those who agree in the need for reform this is an explosive topic. What issues lay beneath the surface here? Why is it we can't get our Healthcare heads together? In a recent show devoted to the Healthcare debate Keith Olberman talked about the basic goal of Healthcare - to "stop pain". Rightly he felt he had to remind us what this was all about. What a wonderful way to focus a conversation. I'd rephrase that to "stop suffering". Suffering can include not only pain but emotional agony brought on by things like disability, as well as mental illness and even spiritual suffering.
After watching his program I realized I'd been arguing for a Healthcare system that I deeply mistrust. I had to remember what the real work is: to unburden our Healthcare system from the weight of politics, industry, and a medical insurance establishment that would view us as statistics instead of individual human beings. Many people fear government involvement for the same reason I fear insurance company involvement - we feel these institutions just don't care about us. I want to fight for competent healers who know what they're doing and are there for us when we need them.
I've been lucky enough to train with an organization that works directly with indigenous healers from around the world. Working with only the tools their senses, the natural environment and techniques their own unique traditions provide, these Shaman have for millenia worked to eradicate suffering. Without insurance companies, without medical technology many have provided great relief to members of their community. The successful ones are true healers, embodying something unique in the human experience. They are able to discern suffering in others and discover a cure for that suffering. Its easier to see the qualities of an effective healer without the trappings of our modern culture.
Healers become the light by which I judge my doctors. I've been lucky enough to know a few MDs who I can call healers. My childhood pediatrician, Dr. Lloyd was such a man. Blessed with diminutive height he was able to stand eye to eye with many of his patients. I visited him often as a kid because I was sick a lot. I can still remember with unpleasant clarity, vomiting up the last of my stomach acid into a snow drift outside of his office during one of my many bouts of stomach flu.
More than the flu I seemed to be a breeding ground for strep. I endured dozens of cases including one that simply couldn't be cured with antibiotics alone. Dr. Lloyd told my Mother to take me away somewhere quiet for a while. Without tests, or even a shamans vision, his common sense told him that environmental factors of some kind were impacting my ability to heal. My Mom took his advice and sequestered me at a motel in the desert for a few weeks. True to his diagnosis, I healed. There was nothing special about the motel - cheap beds, a t.v. and an air conditioner. I'm sure I was on antibiotics at the time, but the change of scenery and time alone with Mom was apparently what I needed.
Healers can wear many hats in any culture. Michael Harner, the head of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies says that typically shamanism is considered a part time job. Before he died I got a chance to spend a little time with the Native American Medicine Man Rolling Thunder. He proudly worked for the railroad much of his life and considered it normal that he would have two hats to wear. What job title a healer has is less important than the pathway from our front doorsteps to the places where they cure us.
In our culture the path to healers is greatly cluttered. Every doctors office I've been to in the last few years has a large staff devoted only to billing. Every hospital I've visited has huge numbers of staff devoted to battling diseases that lurk within the hospitals themselves. Every doctors visit I've attended has resulted in unseen costs and procedures I was never asked about and never agreed to. If all the lawyers who deal with malpractice were suddenly out of work I'm sure it would impact the national unemployment average. We seem to be exceptionally skillful at erecting impediments to seeing and supporting our healers. Is it any wonder that paying for an Accupuncturist, seeing a Homeopathist or a Shamanic Practitioner is more appealing than going to an MD?
Part of why Dr. Lloyd had to see me so often may have been the result of a vaccine I received as a child. The post vaccination symptoms I suffered are called "Serum Sickness" or "Serum Syndrom". Purportedly this is caused by an immune reaction to animal proteins in a vaccine. The short term symptoms can be quite painful, the long term impacts are thought to include a compromised immune system. I fear it may also have caused my near sterility.
While vaccines have saved millions of lives they also have produced a marriage of industrialism and medical science. Without them we may not have achieved the modern way of life we now enjoy, unfortunately they may also have unintended consequences. Three recent studies in Canada reported by CBC concluded that people who had received seasonal flu vaccines were more prone to catching Swine Flu. They don't know why, only that it is the case. Well meaning doctors don't want to discourage us from vaccinating our children, consequently reactions like mine and others receive little attention. The numbers of those who suffer are so small and the benefits so great, there is simply little profit in worrying about it. A simple allergy test for Serum Sickness can be performed before a child's first vaccine, but its not because there are less animal proteins in vaccines and instances of reaction seem to be so few and far between.
In a for profit Healthcare system where eager scientists are matched with corporate dollars, the next great cure inevitably receives more attention than worrying about collateral damage like human suffering. There are Everest sized piles of money between us and our healers. Strange how the Military Industrial Complex sounds a lot like the Medical Industrial Complex these days. How is it that we can trust our physicians when we know they are injecting us with a scientifically modified disease created by a corporation that holds the bottom line more sacred than our own well being?
Our real task in this medical debate is not to choose one plan over another, so much as to find a way to clear the paths to our healers. For some of us that means having a clear vision of what healing is. Is it to be found at the feet of Big Pharma? Do we ever get to have our country doctor back again? How much does self care and healthy eating have to play in our Healthcare system? Politics, industry and yes even science may need to take a few steps back so we can all take a breath and get a sense of what healing really means to us.
