How Western Healthcare Killed My Sister and Saved My Father
A vision on how to integrate our reductionist system with a more holistic approach
Photo by Kendal on Unsplash
We would not treat people the way we do when they had souls — Gabor Mate in a Russel Brand Podcast
My sister died 8 years ago of over-medicalization after a lifelong struggle. She worked in the medical ‘system’ before she got homebound. She took care of cancer patients for more than 10 years in one of the best academic hospitals in the world.
She deserves 10 gold medals.
I have seen with my own eyes how the medical complex saved the life of my father when he was 86 with an artery operation lasting 15 minutes. It was broadcasted on a monitor in his room where he, half sedated, watched his life-saving show. Two hours later he was on his way home again.
After this, again, we couldn’t be more thankful for an institute that actually produces medical miracles our ancestors could only have dreamed of while dying of a cold.
Still, from my own biased perspective, I believe humanity is ready for an integration between the classic Western scientific reductionist perspective on healing and a much more holistic approach.
Here is why.
The Story of my Sister
My dear sister’s walk of life was in many ways contrary to my holistic lifestyle.
I have seen her taking the highest dose of prednisone for 3 years, the highest ‘Illegal” doses of Morphine for 2 years. The medicines and more pills to ease pain and side effects literally killed her.
It was a slow gradual process of organs failing, using all of her willpower to fight for the best corner of life quality still available, and then seeing that being taken away from her.
A storyline from mountain biking and climbing, to walking short stretches, to doing only shopping, to being in a wheelchair, to stay in bed 20 hours a day. Still remaining positive most of the time.
She had an iron character and a Scottish brave heart.
I am more than deeply grateful for our last moment together. A live piano concert of Reinbert de Leeuw playing Erik Satie in our hometown. A magical deeply shared celebration of the beauty of life, with all its silent pain in between the notes, and silent joy that comes with that pain.
The eternal moments of the last goodbye. A few days later she died.
The Western Reductionist View on Healing
From holding space for my sister and seeing her body degrade during 20 years of illness, I experienced many angry moments directed to our Western Medical system, even when it saved my eye and my father.
When I say that this system killed her, I kind of mean it.
Coming from the more holistic neck of the woods, I witnessed her being educated into a system that focuses on symptom reduction, pills to kill, and pills to reduce the damage of killing. Where is the acknowledgment that we have a soul?
The healing according to this system comes from linear thinking and problem-solving. Detecting the problem, isolating the issue, and taking the right medicine to ‘attack’ the foreign invader, or cutting out the failing organ. For the collateral damage, you’ll just need more pills.
From this comes the bizarre idea that we can be at war with a virus, while we consist of millions of viruses. When we are at war with nature, we are at war with ourselves.
Not much space for the wider context, the body-soul connection.
Most of our hospitals look more like factories that work with targeted efficiency goals, than healing facilities.
A big issue for me is the almost total neglect of the self-healing capabilities of our own super-intelligent human bodies. We don’t even use the word healing much. Our ancestors did, the Phoenician culture that roared Europe around 500 B.C had their own God of Healing; Eshmun
I am fully aware I don’t do justice here to the more complex nature and hundreds of years of medical improvement that saved millions of lives.
There is a thin line of this institute performing sheer miracles through this reductionist approach, and at the same time ending many lives as a result of over-medicalization or medicine addiction and excluding the context.
Medicalization
The difficult part for me is this. My sister got a very rare autoimmune sickness. I happened to meet a girl around that time that had the exact same thing. This friend decided after half a year of devastating prednisone, to stop the medication.
She decided she’d rather die and accept when her time had come.
She didn’t die and is still happily alive.
I never told this story to my sister, since I always respected her choices, even when they drove me against my holistic wall of belief in the self-healing mechanisms of our bodies. This made me feel so freakin’ powerless most of the time.
Prednisone attacks your immune system what can be lifesaving when you’re own immune system decides to attack you! You can imagine how weak this internal version of WarCraft made her. It also increased her body weight to the degree that she needed to be in a wheelchair most of the time.
My sister took so much Prednisone so that stopping it would kill her. What happened was that the medicine took over her natural production of Prednisone through the adrenal cortex.
Her life had become dependent on pills.
Until the end, my sister kept on believing in medication. In fact, she was kept alive on funky colored tablets for more than 5 years. This belief was so strong that she didn’t really examine any psychosomatic approach, even when I was the perfect embodiment of that life view. She passed that station years ago, sitting in a synthetic speed train with no breaks.
Underneath was a deep trust, hope, and perseverance. The doctors that medicated her were her former colleagues. Taking another roadmap for healing would mean abandoning a social context and friends she knew for more than 20 years.
It is scary to exit a system and exile yourself into radical self authority.
The Holistic Approach
What would happen when you clean & heal the surroundings where dis-ease can arise? What about healthy natural food and being part of a healthy society respecting nature instead of depleting it? What is the relationship with past trauma, your state of mind, and your body awareness?
“In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
My healing starts with a deep ‘knowing’ of the self-healing ability of my own body, and fully trusting that truth. When I cut myself, the scar will heal itself.
My holistic view makes me investigate every aspect of my life. This comes from seeing things as one big organic hole. I believe this stems from our collective animistic origin. The times we sensed some kind of spirit in everything.
When things have a spirit, it can talk to our souls and spirit. The I See You avatar effect. This makes us feel connected, whole, complete.
There are great power and healing in this connectedness with others, nature, the cosmos. We are interconnected beings, and when we open really wide our hearts and souls, we feel the heartbeat of our mother planet and the universe.
When we acknowledge that all things have a soul, we become multidimensional beings with huge capacity. Nature is our medicine.
Integration
I believe the integration of the two approaches is the way forward.
We are currently in the biggest health crisis of humanity, maybe after the plague. But it's not COVID for me. It’s the way we look at ourselves, our bodies, food, society, money, work, health.
Humanity got out of balance to the point of almost no return. This is why radical change is needed, in almost all aspects.
At the core of it all is the story of separation that is so much embedded in our culture. Nature is hostile so we need to conquer and eradicate it. You are not me. We must fight for that small little space on earth with all our limited resources.
This story is coming to an end because it is no longer true for many of us.
We are in times of great transformation.
When I think of my sister, I believe what could have helped her most is an education in the belief of her own healing capacities. I don’t want to make anything wrong in her choices, but I’ve always felt that the system she was in, is only looking in one way to sickness. With a magnifying glass and a corrupted profit model steering it. A model that doesn’t earn that much when we all get better. And that’s a clear and true fact.
A holistic integration into our Western Medical healthcare needs these core changes first;
Re-introducing the word Healing again and putting the body first, connecting it with its environment.
Educating children about what really builds our immune system.
Rebuilding our society from the understanding that we are interconnected beings.
Putting the focus on community and connection.
Make people feel and experience that they are an integral part of a nurturing hole, where their gifts are welcomed, so we can belong on this amazing planet again
Our so-called New Normal couldn’t be further from that vision. Also, the way we treat our elderly says much about our society.
A vision for the future
Instead of going to war against nature, or a virus for that matter, we need to start honoring the incredibly complex and intelligent force of nature that we are simply a part of. From that humbleness, more gratitude and giving back in regenerative systems can arise.
Here’s my vision on health.
The new hospitals are no hospitals. They are self-regenerative autonomous communities led by a mix of decentralized technology and wise councils. Deeply connected to nature, with medical technology being in tune with our own incredible healing technology, or better, an extension of that. Applied within a wider context of trust and surrender to emergent processes in nature.
We will look completely different at sickness. We will track where the whole got out of balance, and fix that first. That’s the systemic change that is about to come.
We don’t fix the individual dolphin that got sick, we clean the seas.
This might feel far away and Utopian. But these times of crisis and transformation ask for dreaming and imagining a world where you like to live in and do everything to co-create this new earth.