The difference between curing and healing
Physician
n. a medically qualified person who is skilled in the art of healing.
As I prepare for the upcoming H.E.A.L. training that I’ll be leading in November, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to heal oneself, others and the world in which we live.
In this article I want to share a key distinction between curing and healing with significant implications for elevating your own health and wellbeing as well as that of your clients, whatever you practice.
Autumn 1992, I was eighteen years old, and it was the first week of the rest of my life in a career in medicine. It was an exhilarating yet daunting experience. I was alongside a hundred other ‘freshers’. We had been selected from two thousand other potential candidates earlier that year. It felt like we’d arrived at Top Gun academy for doctors.
We were ushered into the old lecture theatre inside the legendary St Mary’s hospital medical school. The smell of old leather and oak pervaded the hall. I could feel the spirit of previous generations of students and physicians. It felt that we had entered hallowed grounds and were stepping into a noble profession. Alongside the privileges of the trust and respect of our patients, there would be the great responsibility of caring for their welfare.
Following an inspiring talk by a renowned consultant physician, it was time for us to take the Hippocratic Oath. This stated the obligations and proper conduct of a doctor which was traditionally taken by many generations of aspiring physicians at the beginning of their medical studies. There was a line that struck a very resonant chord with me,
“I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.”
To me, that seemed to imply an untapped healing potential within the patient - the implications of which would not fully land until nearly two decades later.
Over the ensuing five years of medical school, I learned a ton of information about the mechanisms of sickness in body and mind. There was an entire library overflowing with tomes on sickness. Whilst there were astounding, often heroic breakthroughs in finding a cure for certain sicknesses, a pattern began to emerge that the vast majority of these sickness were incurable according to Western medical science. The very best that was on offer was to manage them. It was frankly a depressing prospect that my life would become devoted to fighting an insurmountable battle with little hope of ever winning.
Shortly after qualifying as a medical doctor, I met my first teacher, a master of acupuncture, Chinese medicine, and the Daoist healing arts. It was then that I got more than a glimmer of hope that there was another possibility for healing sickness.
For over a decade I diligently applied myself to learning and practicing the art and science of acupuncture alongside various practices collectively known as Yang Sheng - life nourishing. However, another pattern began to emerge. Whilst a great number of patients felt better, their spirits were elevated by something within, they weren’t necessarily always cured of their sickness.
Many years later, the penny dropped about a key distinction between healing and curing. Since then my approach to the practice of medicine - both allopathic and alternative - has radically shifted. This one insight has led to a re-appraisal of everything that I had learned at medical school and acupuncture training I had hitherto known.
The difference between curing and healing
Curing means to eliminate sickness, healing refers to repairing the body, mind, or spirit. That is curing is the total elimination of a disease, healing means to become whole.
The process of curing and healing can be very different. You can often cure a sickness without healing yourself, and you can often heal yourself without curing a sickness.
Which illnesses can be cured, and which respond better to healing?
Short term, acute conditions can often be successfully cured with western or alternative interventions. These include colds and flus, acute bladder infections, pulled muscles, sports injuries, surgical removal of a skin tumor, sprains and fractures.
However, most health conditions are not so easily cured with the current therapeutic approaches either allopathic or otherwise. The list of chronic illnesses and emotional dis-ease is long and include conditions such as - anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, cancer, chronic insomnia, migraine headaches, diabetes, fibromyalgia, chronic pelvic pain, arthritis, chronic insomnia, emphysema, irritable and inflammatory bowel, the whole range of autoimmune diseases.
Despite the awesome advances in medical technology, imaging and surgical procedures, the best that modern medicine has to offer is managing sickness. There is no satisfactory cure for these conditions. This can often involve the use of expensive and toxic drugs taken over a long period of time. The burden of managing these conditions places a massive burden on our health services.
The good news is most of these health problems can be successfully cured if we undertake the process of healing. In other words, for chronic sickness or emotional dis-ease, a lasting cure is possible when healing involves the whole person.
Implicit in most holistic healthcare modalities (homeopathy, acupuncture, Ayurveda, osteopathy, hands on healing etc) is the notion of healing the whole person. However in practice this is often not very clear nor emphasized. Why?
One reason is that most training courses and practitioners are still practicing at the level of either curing or healing. There are a handful of practitioners, regardless of the modality, who can successfully and effectively combine both. However it is often very difficult to model or replicate how these practitioners actually do it.
Another reason is that the patient often expects (and directly pays for if you’re in private practice) a cure, not healing. The perception is that a cure is quicker, whilst healing takes longer.
Also in the light of my own breakthrough, I can say that a fundamental reason is that there is no cohesive understanding of the underlying universal principles that underpin health and healing. A new paradigm is required, and does exist, which is inclusive of but not dependent on any modality, and yet enhances all these approaches.
The aim of these articles is to explore and unpack the implications of this paradigm. And through my work and training courses, to offer ways of applying this paradigm to healing the whole person in an effective and sustainable way.
What happens when you combine healing with curing?
I have been fascinated with investigating the viability of that for nearly three decades.
When you marry the imperative for greatness with curing a particular sickness, you enter the domain of alchemy. You're reaching for deep and radical inner transformation.
Putting healing back into healthcare
Presently, there is an immense burden on the healthcare systems across the globe.
Governments of economically advanced nations are focussed on changing the external aspects of a broken healthcare system. Yet this can only go so far without a fundamental shift in understanding of what it means to heal. This lies within each of us - our innate health.
The main focus of these articles and my work is to empower and remind each of us to reclaim agency over our own health and wellbeing. We can awaken to our innate capacity for limitless healing. Beside administering acupuncture treatments, in my work with individuals and groups is very much focussed on exploring simple yet effective methods for curing ourselves. I also train practitioners in the underlying principles of how healing happens to help their clients heal and cure.
The methods and approaches to self-healing being put forward here are in no way meant to replace the current medical or alternative medical approaches. They are intended to enhance them.
What is clear and certain is that,
Healing starts with you. It starts with me. And together we can co-create health and healing.
Simply, effectively, and sustainably.
In a follow up article, I look more in depth at what constitutes healing, here
