Why Complementary Health?

CONVENTIONAL medicine or complementary? Yig Labworth and Will Wilson argue that practitioners on both sides should learn to recognise the value of the other.

All that lives has a tendency towards wholeness and health. Human beings are no exception to this rule. All that any doctor, therapist or healer does is to encourage this tendency, and anyone who claims otherwise is deceiving themselves and their patients.

For example, we cannot duplicate the incredible process involved in healing a simple cut – we may support the process by cleaning and dressing the wound, but we rely on the healing power of nature to do the rest. Modern medicine has some superb methods for supporting this healing process and can be excellent in saving lives in acute situations – look at any accident and emergency department – but after the drama comes the quiet, resting recuperative process where tissues repair themselves, broken bones mend and so on.

It would seem to make sense then to support the natural healing process as much as possible. Modern medicine tends to view the causes of illness as mostly physical and therefore physical intervention, be it a medicine or surgery, will affect a ‘cure’. The reason for this is that modern medicine has departed from the idea that we are body, mind and soul. True, some doctors may acknowledge the influence of the mind on health (after all, there is a large body of scientific evidence to support this), but when you visit your GP with some ailment he or she tends to see your ailment, not your whole being, your hopes and fears, your meaning for life.

One could argue they don’t have time for that, and in this regard modern medicine is a victim of its own apparent success. Society has been brainwashed into the idea of a ‘pill for every ill’ and many people will rush to their doctor for a ‘quick fix’ when some attention to how they are living their life is maybe what’s needed.

Illness is often the result of some inner conflict. On a simple level, you might be really exhausted and need to rest, but you feel some deadline at work needs to be met, so you put your work before your health. But your body knows best and you are forced to rest, maybe by a bout of ‘flu. There may be a physical cause (the flu virus), but your conflict and the subsequent overwork made your immune system less efficient than it might otherwise have been.

Conflict may go deeper than this, to the core of our being, affecting major life decisions. All living things have a formative process, which informs their development. A rose seedling, given light and the right nutrients, develops into a rose and we humans also have a rather more complex formative process. As babies or children, if we were loved for whom we were and not shamed or made to feel guilty for what we were not, we could develop our full potential – we could become us!

But all too often our soul’s path is thwarted and we maybe try to become what is expected of us, rather than what we are destined to be. So maybe we think we’re meant to be roses but find life hard. When we learn that we’re actually daffodils or snowdrops, and our family were the roses, then we are able to become who we are. This is not to deny the value of roses – it takes many kinds of flower to make a beautiful garden!

These kinds of conflict can lead to ill health, as we get older.

Our being knows when it is met in kind, when a therapist or doctor ‘resonates’ with our daffodil-ness. Then we are already halfway to getting healed. It is useful for a practitioner to have knowledge, but it is this ability to resonate with a client that makes their work more effective. We all recognise this, consciously or unconsciously, yet the question never seems to be asked, in conventional medical circles at least – what generates this resonant quality?

Doctors do know of this quality – they call it ‘bedside manner’. We really need to be able to choose our healers – those we resonate with – but this is usually not possible within the NHS. This could be one reason why alternative, or complementary, medicine is so popular and effective – clients get to choose the therapist they work with!

A medicine that views illness as purely physical will dismiss the above as ‘placebo effect’, but this effect can often be more powerful than any drug. Since it’s not a physical agent, however, it seems to attract no research grants!

Currently, more £millions are being fed into the NHS, as it has been done since its inception, but are we really any healthier? The system falls down because it regards the body as a machine. DH Laurence put it eloquently in the accompanying quotation.

Finally, we believe stress and strain are at the root of much disease in today’s world. Do we take but one hour out of 24 for ourselves? We fill our time with hours at the shops, with a multitude of TV programmes. Mobile phones and laptops bring our businesses into times when once we could escape them. ‘Do, do, do’ is the message - we forget about just being. Time to "just sit and stare", as Milton said in ‘Paradise Lost’ – spending quality time with ourselves so we enhance our being, feeding our souls rather than our egos – this is needed.

We lose sight of the Paradise we could inhabit, where our bodies have time to heal ourselves.
There are advertisements for a certain medication that claims to inhibit the symptoms of colds and flu, so that we can meet the deadlines our jobs impose on us. It seems our jobs take precedent over our body’s need to rest. Isn’t this the wrong way round? We are being driven – for what? To spend ever more time working so we can buy stuff, and ever more stuff. We feed the ego and ignore the soul.

Bearing in mind DH Laurence’s lines, is it any surprise we get ill? Can we find a way to be at peace with our bodies, and ourselves and not treat illness as some foe to be vanquished but a message to be heeded? Above all, can we find a way to trust and support each other rather than be rivals?

The medical professions, both conventional and alternative, could perhaps set an example by recognising each other and the good work they do, rather than dismissing the other and claiming their way is the way.

As Goethe said: This is my way. What is your way? The way doesn’t exist!

Yig is a body-oriented psychotherapist and Will a body therapist and former medical scientist. Call 01392 427370.


I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly that I am ill
I am ill because of wounds to the Soul, to the deep emotional self
And the wounds to the soul take a long long time, only time can help
And patience, and a certain difficult repentance
Realisation of Life’s Mistake and freeing oneself
From the endless repletion of the mistake
Which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify

DH Lawrence.