Excerpt From Ch. 4 of A Beautiful Medicine by David Mercier

7/31/2019 Excerpt From Ch. 4 of A Beautiful Medicine by David Mercier

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Excerpt from

A Beautiful MedicineA Radical Look at the Essence of Health and Healing

From Chapter Four: Health as Transformation, Medicine as Catalyst

At its core, health is one face of transformation. When Pablo

Neruda wrote, I want to do with you what spring does to the cherry

tree, he gave us an image that captures the heart of this idea. Similarly,

Nikos Kazantzakis wrote, I said to the almond tree, Sister, speak to me

of God, and the almond tree blossomed.

Health is not what remains after we correct a problem; its more

than the useful but now slightly feeble notion of prevention. Its not a

static state. Instead, its the flowering of human possibility that occurs in

the way springtime draws out cherry and almond blossoms. The pink andwhite of the flowers are not solutions for a problem. When a small seed

grows into a big chiseled tree, nothing was fixed. The seed was all

blueprint, pure potential, only needing the right nourishment to sprout

and reach for the clouds and to manifest its gift.

So it is with a human being on the often-arduous passage from

infant to elder, becoming someone who, in the end, bears virtually no

resemblance to how she looked and behaved as a baby.

Health includes being joyful, energetic, conscious, and authentic.

Its the harvest that follows tilling, planting, and reaping in the terrains of

body and spirit. It depends on respecting those ingenious messages called

symptoms, whether theyre subtle as an itch or blatant as a migraine. As


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weve seen, health is not about band-aids and substitutions, but about

evoking our power to become a force of wellness and inner beauty.

The rational scientific mind is clearly necessary for the evolution

of medicine and society, but the intuitive mind is better suited to savor,digest, and absorb the full meaning of a multidimensional vision of health

and wellness. The image of the flowering almond or cherry tree conveys a

world of meaning beyond the descriptive abilities of logic and reason.

An integrative medicine includes both mind and heart, science and

art, medicine and poetry, logos and eros. A revolution in our approach to

health and our healthcare system will occur when this reconciliation

happens. Then a symptom will not be merely physical, nor will it be a

meaningless, random event or an opponent to vanquish.

Instead, it will be seen as part of the evolutionary impulse

thrusting against our inertia and our resistance, shoving us with strong but

gentle hands toward the fullest expression of human possibility. The

symptom is related, through and through, to the spiritual imperatives

flowing in our veins. It represents our family ties to the spirits of nature.

Its woven into the challenges of reclaiming our birthright of growing into

a happy, fulfilled, healthy self.

A healthcare system that appreciates the intelligent role of our

symptoms in the schematics of nature will help us grow in this regard.

Sadly, we are wasting billions of dollars on healthcare aimed at symptoms

that are only encouraging us to love more, hate less, relax more, drink

less, sleep more, exercise, and eat our vegetables just like Mom said. The

country spends a big percentage of its budget on the repetitive,

unproductive cycle of repairing symptoms that are only trying to help us.

We need instead to develop public policy and economic incentives

that feed the roots of wellness. Doing this will be a whale of a task, but at

the least, its a conceptual starting point. The system at large will change


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when the corporate world can make gargantuan amounts of money by

keeping people healthy, vibrant, and out of the hospital. Right now,

hospitals, as well as the entire pharmaceutical and medical equipment

industries, profit only when people are sick. This is a fundamental flaw in

design.

Health professionals in the clinic can exercise skills that evoke the

same catalytic power that spring grants the rolling hillsides of oak and

dogwood and sweet gum. When necessary, the patient can be repaired, as

broken branches should be pruned. But as appropriate, health

professionals can also help invigorate the patients potential to live a

vibrant life.

The ancient healing traditions knew that medicine, art,

spirituality, diet, and exercise all had to be woven into a single cloth for

healing. In those times, health was not the sole province of the body.

As one example, the word yoga is Sanskrit for union with the

divine. While this approach to health has become popular and even chic

today, it originally intended for the well-honed body to be a stepping-

stone for spiritual development, a physical floorboard for building the

spirit. It included diet, meditation, the study of ancient scripture, and a

relationship with a teacher. In another example, Tibetan medicine is

practiced not just for healing an individual patient, but for the sake of all

beings. Its ultimate purpose is to help people achieve a final freedom from

earthly suffering.

In integrative medicine, we can enfold the conversations of

science into the understanding that, in the end, the real work is to help

people reach their highest potential. We would help push this forward by

insinuating the ethos of art and poetry into the semiconscious daze that

permeates much of our culture and our schooling. A fusion of art, science,


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and morals into a new integral vision of health will ideally be both cause

and attribute of medicines transformation.

The arts are flesh and science is bone: science needs art and

moralsthe poetry, spark, and blusterto find its true place in theworld. With regard to health, the artistic self needs science. The unbound

aesthetic self can fly off on the balloons of fancy, and the itchy lust for

creativity can ignore the value of hard thinking, of logic and reason, of

screwing nuts onto bolts. In an integrative world, all these necessary

pieces of the puzzle can fit together neatly into a single wholewith

medicine as catalyst and health as transformation.

A Beautiful MedicineA Radical Look at the Essence of Health and Healing

2012 Indie Excellence Book Awards: Finalist in category ofAlternative Medicine and Winner of $4,200 Sponsors Prize

2012 International Book Awards: Finalist in Alternative MedicineISBN: 978-0-9852425-0-3, Still Pond Press 2012.

David Mercier 2012

www.ABeautifulMedicine.com
http://www.abeautifulmedicine.com/http://www.abeautifulmedicine.com/http://www.abeautifulmedicine.com/

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Excerpt From Ch. 4 of A Beautiful Medicine by David Mercier