Thought piece – Walter Willies

Complementary Therapies as Approaches to Core Medicine 

The elusiveness of core medicine and an invitation to collaborate

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By definition, complementary therapies aren’t mainstream medicine. They’re seen as add-ons, nice-to-haves, esteem-boosters, pampering. Their insurances are less risk-loaded, their social value on a separate ladder and their regulation less centralised. 

But I’d like to suggest that mainstream medicine itself is increasingly confused about the role it has come to play. Its methods remain the same as ever: symptomology, diagnosis, aetiology, treatment, prognosis. I’d like to point out a missing factor to which mainstream medicine has limited access, and to which complementary therapies have better access: attention to the body’s core conversation. 

Core conversations are rare and real in individual experience, and usually life-changing. In the legal sphere they’re likely to be contractual, in the emotional context spontaneous outpourings, in the medical world literally a matter of life and death, and within complementary therapies an exchange of trust in the efficacy of holistic health strategies. The individual stories are crucial here: Bill Bengston can’t tell exactly how the cancer-induced mice are cured, but they are. I can’t tell you how I had a woman with a frozen shoulder scratching the back of her head within forty-five minutes of treatment, but she could. I have no idea how to explain what happened when  a nurse complaining about carpal tunnel syndrome showed me her hands for a few minutes just because I said, “let’s see this, I work with this kind of thing”  came tumbling into the office the next day asking, “what did you do, the pain has gone?”. 

For the past few months I’ve been doing support work in the emergency and accident department of a large hospital in Scotland. I’ve never seen so many people crying, retching, calling for help, bent over double, doubting their survival. And the clinical staff gained my total admiration, working carefully, methodically, focused, efficiently and certainly effectively. I know of only one deceased during my shifts. 

There wasn’t any time for conversation. There was communication, certainly, but not of the personal kind. From behind the curtain I heard “So tell me what happened? Was it a fall? Have you been injured here before? Were you dizzy?”. And so on. And in the face of verbal abuse from patients who were still high, calling imprecations on the heads of anyone close by, sometimes with amazing vehemence, the response was calm and confident: “We’re giving you the best attention available, let’s just get on with it”. 

The evidence of best attention available was in the technology and pharmaceuticals present in that rather noisy area. Bleeps of various pitches and lengths described what was running high, low or out. Screens with moving lines and numbers abounded. The best attention available was also in the training and demeanour of clinical staff who were never anything less than thoroughly professional. My moment of discovering the core conversation was when the daughter of a woman who’d had a stroke turned to me and said, “It’s such a shock!”. And when a patient who’d broken an ankle told me: “It happened so quickly!”. And interestingly enough, also in listening to patients with dementia who were expressing themselves in incoherent words or merely sounds. 

Mainstream medicine has limited the scope of its attention to its ever-expanding specialised disciplines and interventions. While effective practitioners no doubt use elements of intuition and compassion in dealing with cases, their focus is necessarily limited to professional boundaries which are verbally and legally defined. 

But the real core of medicine eludes this kind of verbal, legal definition. 

Lissa Rankin’s book, “Sacred Medicine” attempts to put this core into words. Like most things, medicine has moved a long way from its beginnings, and has become prey to industrialisation. It’s a pity to observe how human consciousness has capitulated to this impetus, but then again, most of us have submitted to ongoing slavery and submission to formality, which is, indeed, not the original purpose of the human body. The cosmos is not a formal process. 

Core Medicine and research. 

Physiological suffering is part and parcel of the human condition, and the alleviation thereof is a core purpose of medicine. Margaret Mead (public domain) suggested that the first evidence of civilisation was the binding and healing of a fractured human femur from prehistory. Attention to assistance in contrast to self-survival was a notable feature in this instance. Once again, the scope, limits and efficacy of attention are important. What I’m pointing out is that when the body requires attention, it doesn’t do so in terms of any model. A broken tooth takes me to the dentist, a ruptured appendix to the emergency room, but where do broken hearts go? Where does an aching soul find restoration? So we may well ask: just as surgery has developed amazing tools since its beginnings, why have complementary therapies grown exponentially? 

The answer is that they answer needs. 

The point of this short article is not to discuss how energy medicine may or may not heal cancer, but that massage does more than pamper, homeopathy offers more attention than GPs can give, aromatherapy can touch you where few dare to go, and reiki can alter your physiological states dramatically. (Shamini Jain: Healing Ourselves, 2021, Sounds True, Boulder, USA.)

I’d suggest to complementary therapists that the way to grasp how their various practices add to core medicine, is to observe daily research. We often come across “research has shown” or “scientists have proved” and this is as phoney as an uneducated preacher shouting his opinion of what the Bible says. Research is valuable, and has taken humankind to amazing places. Chesterton had a different view: “Research is the search of fools who don’t know what they’re looking for”. My own view of research is that it’s often about counting, and thus you should know what is being counted, who is doing the counting, and why the counting is important. I’ve had the interest of assisting a large number of students with theses, and those that fell within the discipline of psychology nearly always outsourced the chapter that dealt with the validation of results. For the vast majority, stats just wasn’t their thing, so they paid someone from that department to set it out for them. My own understanding of stats is limited to this simplicity: if something happens ninety-five percent of the time, you can say it’s true. I’ve read books by spiritual mediums who reckon that anything above eighty-five percent accuracy is good going. 

I tried an experiment once: I asked a class of twenty-eight students to participate. I was to leave the room, draw a geometric figure on a piece of paper, and they were to intuit what it was and draw it themselves. I can’t remember what I drew, it was something simple like a triangle or a square. I entered when time was up, and help up my piece of paper. They held up theirs and we counted and worked out the accuracy percentage. It was sixty-eight percent. To me, that’s significant. Something not entirely random was going on. So much more about intention, randomness and non-randomness has been done at the PEAR Institute by the late Robert Jahn. Lynne McTaggart’s work refers to this. (The Field, The Bond, The Intention Experiment, The Power of Eight.)

Taking your practice seriously.

It’s quite a common experience for doctoral students to experience imposter syndrome once they graduate. I have the sense that many complementary therapists shrink rather than shine when it comes to self-perception and the relevance of their practice. My encouragement would be “Take it seriously and begin to count the relevancies”. Long ago I knew someone who knew a politician personally, and I remember that friend shaking his head and saying mournfully and amazedly, of the politician, “He takes himself so seriously”. So I think it’s a significant step for a complementary therapist to take: to frame the questions, decide what would be relevant to count, work out a design, to practise it daily, and to refine it weekly, or monthly, and to collaborate as much as possible. 

Shamini Jain’s work in the CHI (chi.is) is this kind of adventure. One has no idea of where it could all lead. One of my friends was a vivisectionist, who has taught me a lot about experimental design. His purpose was to gain the most data possible from the least possible suffering, all of which might feel cold-blooded, but it certainly makes you think about priorities. The sense of purpose and intent which forms the foundation of so many complementary therapies has more than enough energy to explore by research. 

Connecting the stories.

My own preferred way of doing research is to connect stories. I’ve experienced that deep listening is at least as relevant as counting, and frequently builds fruitful development. Thus I’d like to extend an invitation to ThinkTree members: if you would like to spend a half-hour telling me how you came to begin your practice, and what you’ve experienced as effective results, I’d be interested to know more. There are no financial implications, merely the wish to establish more connection within ThinkTree, and to gather my own data. 

Feel free to go through www.story-clinic.com, and to make contact via email at info@story-clinic.com.