The concept of healing and integrative care

Western medicine needs to redress the imbalance between its proven ability to control disease processes and body function, and its limited ability to enable and support self-regulation and self-healing. In short, it needs to acknowledge its vocation and its responsibility to heal, to make whole. It needs to understand that this ‘whole-making’ not only transcends the task of managing disease but makes our efforts more effective, and improves both well-being and clinical outcome. This requires us to reflect more deliberately on what ‘natural’ healing really means; on how healthcare can inhibit or enhance the healing process; and on how holistic, integrated, or better still integrative healthcare is essential to the wholeness that is the goal of healing. This paper develops these points, and presents homeopathy as an example of just such a resource.