Medicine is a Sacred Practice.

Medicine is sacred.

The relationship between practitioner and patient is holy ground. A profound, complex, intimate journey. 

There was a time when medicine was elevated to the level of divinity. It was recognized as a sacred undertaking. 

The Rod of Asclepius remains the symbol of medicine—an homage to the Greek God of Healing and Medicine, Asclepius.

Even today, the ancient origins of medicine whisper to us.

Paramedics, hospitals, army medical bodies, wilderness medicine councils, even the World Health Organization use this archaic symbol of renewal, transformation, steadiness, and sacred purpose.

The practice of medicine—and the art of healing—reunites a dynamic and complex organism into symbiotic wholeness and homeostatic equilibrium with its biological, psychological, and symbolic environment(s).

This is not hyperbolic.

We have watered-down, pigeon-holed, and sheer-ignoranced our way to an apathetic, incorrect, and dangerous definition of what medicine is and how it should be approached. 

Medicine brings a series of nested wholes into internal coherence, wholeness amongst each other, and narrative cohesion throughout the stack.

Cell > Organ > Vital System > Body > Mind > Psyche > Identity > Habitat > Environment > City > Country > Culture > Planet > Metaphysics. 

Disease is disconnection or dysregulation of individual layers, and/or in the relationships between them.

It’s never an isolated problem. Nothing exists in isolation.

Resolution is as straightforward as cleaning and stitching a gaping wound. It is as complicated as journeying into the past to find where the soul is stuck in time—frozen development from acute traumatic experience—and bringing it back into the present.

Medicine is intimate.

From the most sterile clinical Western gynecologist appointment to the hardest ego-eradicating Bufo Alvarius experience—medicine takes people straight into their most intimate, transformative, and sensitive moments.

• EMR rescuing someone after a car crash. Stemming major bleeding, performing CPR, a human life hanging in the balance.
• Taking someone to the brink of annihilation in a Bufo experience. Rewriting and physically rewiring their relationship to God, Reality, Love, and Life.
• Fertility consultation shapes the ability of couples to continue their bloodline and their living participation in the mythopoetic narrative of humanity.
• Confronting atrocities beyond recognition: childhood abuse, mutilation from war, varieties of self-destructive behaviour, and all forms of trauma and wounding.
• The expectation (and fear) that you have to show and tell the practitioner things you have never disclosed to another human. Intimate details like sexual health, getting naked, crippling addictions, historical trauma, physical ailments, fear of death, the list is endless.

This is not to be taken lightly.

• We can do better than 15-minute 2-question consultations every 6 months.
• We can do better than $125 bonuses for every person vaccinated.
• We can do better than allowing vending machines in hospitals.
• We can do better than pill-first, change-later approaches.

We must do better.

Medicine is the field that directly honours the basic fact of existence: YOU ARE ALIVE.

Medicine—in more ways than one—is the art, science, theory, practice, dance, and discipline of bringing people back to LIFE. Helping people feel truly alive. Reconnecting them to the flow of time and their place in existence.

Medicine affords people a simple freedom: the opportunity to walk on this planet without pain.

Psychological pain. Physical pain. Emotional pain. Existential pain.

Medicine is a sacred practice. It is an intimate relationship between practitioner and patient. It is a hero’s journey reuniting Creator & Creation. 

Medicine is a dynamic process, a life-long practice. It’s not an isolated intervention, though that may be part of the greater journey.

I hope we soon remember to recognize it as such.

To your medicine,
EB.