I bumped into a tweet about Seth Godin’s latest blog yesterday. The title is “All models are wrong, some models are useful.” This is how I feel about both traditional and nontraditional medical models.
Even traditional science is not a perfect representation of the human body, but it’s a good enough model to provide healing, and it’s a model that gets refined with time. Other cultures have medical models that are ancient in comparison to western medicine. They have been effective at healing, too.
I am open to integrating nontraditional concepts into my therapeutic approaches, but it’s not all-or-none. As with all individualized care, I need to practice discernment. I know about some herbs and supplements, but I trust the ones in the Cochrane Library. The most important rule is “Do no harm.”
When I had breast cancer, I felt blessed to incorporate some of these modalities into my own care: guided imagery, mushroom extracts to strengthen my immune system, healing mantras. I’m forever grateful to yoga for banishing my chronic joint pain. A friend did Reiki and polarity energy treatments on me. She had me lie on a mat with crushed amethysts in it.
Ultimately, I had a negative PET scan and 10 years of negative mammograms. I can’t say whether any of the healing models were right or wrong. Medical guidelines have changed since I had my treatments. But to me, all these models were useful.
Glad to see this post! I am always delighted to see health providers who use traditional along with nontraditional, for I believe that is how we receive the best medical care, with a careful balance of each.
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