The Healing Focus

The body is its own healer, designed to endure and recover from injury and illness throughout the course of its life. It does so continuously, without medical intervention, and usually without our even being aware of it. The recognition of this fact is the starting point and first principle of any true holistic therapy. 

We turn to outside medical intervention when there’s a specific injury or illness that the body can’t seem to deal with on its own. It’s our natural tendency, when faced with a problem, to lose sight of the big picture and focus on what’s wrong. As a result, the first impulse of medical intervention is often to zero in on an injury or illness in a very narrow way, and to forget that disease always appears against the backdrop of a highly evolved and complex ongoing effort by the body to heal itself.

Acupuncture is a true holistic therapy in the sense that it works by stimulating the body’s own healing mechanisms rather than trying to address problems directly. The needles used in acupuncture treatments don’t supply the body with any kind of medicine. In fact, they appear to introduce a new kind of injury for the body to deal with. Yet somehow the needles have the effect of refocusing the body’s own efforts to heal itself, as if injecting a new kind of intelligence into this process.

The true healing focus is not the narrow focus of typical medical intervention, but one that steps back and views physical injury and illness more broadly. What is interfering with the body’s own efforts to heal itself? Have digestive and immune functioning become sluggish? Has blood flow and circulation to parts of the body been reduced? Has communication with parts of the central nervous system been cut off? These same questions apply to every situation in which the body appears to be struggling and unable to cope with an injury or illness on its own. A true holistic therapy always keeps these basic questions in view, and in doing so maintains a respect for the integrity and intelligence of the body’s own healing capacity.