The Future of Healing begins Now  – ARCHIVED

The future of healing will revolve around gut health, human connection, a conscious turn inward to slow down and listen to the body. It also includes a conscious respect for and partnership with the intelligence of natural processes. This is according to The Future of Healing Teleconference. Friday (6/25/15) is day Day 5 of 12 so there’s plenty left to check out. Marc David and Emily Rosen assembled many of the top healers working on the cutting edge in Functional Medicine, Nutrition, Gut health, and Hormone Health. These names include Dr. David Perlmutter (author of Grain Brain see my post from 12/3/14) Dr. Sara Gottfried, Christa Orecchio and over 50 innovative healers passionate about their pieces of the Big Healing Puzzle.  There’s a lot to learn here and I appreciate the gathering of so much useful information into one forum.

Gut health is core to this teleconference. It will be increasingly in the spotlight as the mainstream medical community comes on board with cutting edge findings about our microbiome. [1]

healing beginsWe all have naturally have an assortment of bacteria in our gut, but the mix varies widely depending on the foods we eat, the antibiotics we’ve taken, our exposure to parasites[2], our genetic propensity and other factors that are coming to light.  This New York Times article explains the microbiome and how so much of what we have taken to be disease can be healed by addressing microbial imbalance.

New Approaches for Specific Health Issues

Leaky Gut syndrome is a hot topic in the Functional Health community and the spotlight increasingly shines on functional ways to remedy this “root of many evils”, primarily by rebuilding healthy microflora with food.  Different practitioners have slightly different targets for their programs such as hormone balance or metabolic stability. All the presenters agree on the importance of eating whole, non-processed foods, and intervening in a way that addresses multiple facets of imbalance together. This is in direct opposition to the standard medical practice of changing one thing at a time, monitoring the effect, and then adjusting accordingly.  Steve Wright and Jordan Reasoner developed a program that screens for the various ways your microbiome can be compromised. The program puts participants into 22 functional intervention channels. You can find their program on their scd lifestyle website; ongoing webinars can give you plenty of information to start your own investigation.

The presenters have a new approach to auto-immune dis-eases and illness that is “managed” by ongoing medication without healing it. Most of the presenters have have written books. Some have YouTube videos to watch on their particular subjects of interest and expertise. Much of what Modern Medicine has treated as specific and isolated disease can be traced to imbalances in the microbes that inhabit our bodies.

Your Healing Begins when you Decide

I loved hearing clinician Liz Lipski, speak about how important connection is for patient outcomes in hospitals. There seems to be a growing awareness that people heal better when treated as whole beings. New research supports this because scientists need research to tell us what we understand instinctively. The result is a new trend in hospitals to allow and foster human connection.

Another component of future healing will be an increased humility and acknowledgement of the role of Spirit and the “unknown” in our healing.  There is a Western cultural bias that holds anything not scientifically “proven” as dubious; and traditional remedies and beliefs as quaint or quackery. Science can describe the process, but we don’t KNOW definitively how our finger heals from a cut.  Fortunately that doesn’t stop the healing from happening in it’s own magical way.  We can describe the process but we don’t KNOW definitively how our finger heals from a cut.  Fortunately that doesn’t stop the healing from happening in it’s own magical way. The presenters with heavy scientific backgrounds (MDs, PhDs) tended to apologize before acknowledging a higher or unknown power at work in the healing. Yet they are becoming bolder about recognizing both a higher Source and traditional wisdom as key to healing.

The best doctors and healers are the ones who say, “I don’t know exactly, but I’m listening.” Happily, they will be increasingly respected and supported in this approach.

I will talk about consciously turning inward to slow down and listen to the body in next week’s post.

 

#alternativemedicine    #alternativehealing   #healing #fibromyalgia #rheumatoidarthritis  #crohns   #IBS

[1] Microbiome – a community of intestinal flora. The gut microbiome includes a variety of bacteria that digests your food and makes the nutrients available to you.
[2] Parasites, e.g. giardia, tapeworms (found in raw fish and meat)