The Natural Evolution of Healing, Caring, and Curing

One of the most pressing concerns of the modern age, causing a great deal of consequent complications, arises from the shortcomings created by a prevalent preoccupation with short term, immediately applicable solutions to deep-rooted, enduring problems. The obsession of finding fast track solutions, immediate relief, instant gratification, is attached to another fixation of the modern age, the one that does not have the patience to look beyond quick gains, quick fixes, and rapidly acquired riches. A timely example of this policy is offered by the inadequate response to the present economic crisis, which seeks an immediate way out of the financial disaster by proposing stimulus packages, hefty enough to satisfy the greed of the big corporations, until the appearance of the next impending economic catastrophe which is rearing its monstrous head in the form of the credit crunch.

Global Advances in Health and Medicine, 2015

The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2005

The current health care system in the United States must shift from a primary focus on acute care and cure to also emphasize maintenance of function and the relief of suffering that derives from the ailments associated with chronic disease and illness. To achieve this goal, the individual components of the health care equation must all respond and work in concert. These components include the provider, the venue, the patient, the community, our society, and the fiscal realities of paying for care. However, the barrier for change stems from the marked heterogeneity that exists in the definition of each of these individual components. Thus, the fundamental question is, can our current and future medical care system respond to the imperative of focusing on healing with a particular emphasis on chronic diseases? A solution is the provision of individualized care in a mindful practice and the purposeful cultivation of a healing relationship suffused with compassion and empathy in the therapeutic alliances between patient, provider, and advocates.

Qualitative Health Research, 2011

The symbolic framework guiding primary care physicians’ (PCPs) practice is crucial in shaping the quality of care for those with degenerative dementia. Examining the relationship between the cure and care models in primary care offers a unique opportunity for exploring change toward a more holistic approach to health care. The aims of this study were to (a) explore how PCPs approach the care of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and (b) describe how this care unfolds from the physicians’ perspectives. This was a cross-sectional study of 40 PCPs who completed semistructured interviews as part of a dementia caregiving study. Findings show that PCPs recognize the limits of the cure paradigm and articulate a caring, more holistic model that addresses the psychosocial needs of dementia patients. However, caring is difficult to uphold because of time constraints, emotional burden, and jurisdictional issues. Thus, the care model remains secondary and temporary.

Healing is not just dealing with your body: A Reflexive Grounded Theory Study Exploring Women's Concepts and Approaches Underlying the Use of Traditional and Complementary Medicine in Indonesia, 2018

The use of 'traditional' medicine, or a combination of biomedical treatment and 'traditional' medicine, is a common phenomenon all over Indonesia. In today's Indonesian healthcare system 'traditional' and alternative medicine coexist with globalized biomedicine. It has been found only recently that Indonesian urban, educated households are more likely to use 'traditional' than biomedical healthcare (Nurhayati & Widowati 2017). As early as 2003, Liebich described 80% of the urban population of Jakarta as occasionally or frequently using 'traditional' medicine. Despite the dominance of biomedical approaches in the Primary Health Care (PHC) system and the accompanying skepticism towards other health etiologies, the 'traditional' and complementary medicine (T&CM) market in Indonesia has experienced a veritable boom during the past 30 years. Drawing on the transdiciplinary field of health psychology and medical anthropology, this thesis discusses concepts and approaches that explain the use of T&CM in urban Yogyakarta (Java, Indonesia). These discussions are based on a Reflexive Grounded Theory study, conducted with semi-standardized interviews as the main source. The interview questions were designed to elicit narrative elements addressing previous experiences and evaluations of illness and previous treatment as well as possible combinations of medical practices. Additionally, expert interviews with different health agents illustrate conflicting interests and controversies. Even though this study focuses on illuminating issues of healthcare in urban Yogyakarta, it also finds a textual form to trace the journey of a 'Western' researcher, who tries to understand the meaning of healthcare in urban Yogyakarta. Thus, in addition to the substantive focus, this thesis has a methodological focus, aiming to trace the formative influence of the author along different steps of meaning making about healthcare in urban Indonesia. The first part of the dissertation gives insights into the contextual, epistemological and methodological background of the study (chapters 1 and 2). The second part analyzes interview narratives. This is done, on the one hand, by highlighting narrations of binary conceptualizations of 'health', 'illness' and 'healing', presented in the model of natural versus kimia. On the other hand, the analysis follows the ways in which my interviewees navigate healing, where they transcend conceptual differences by referring to their 'traditional' Javanese rasa of cocok (chapter 3). The third part of the thesis identifies the author as a situated outsider, highlighting the entanglement of a Western researcher in conceptual constructions used during interviews with Javanese women (chapter 4). The last part argues that binary thinking needs to be overcome in order to offer health seekers a truly people-centered and context-sensitive navigation of healing (chapter 5). This study highlights different voices of health seekers who emphasize that the current healthcare system in Indonesia does not meet their needs: neither the needs of the female Javanese health seekers, nor those of the medical experts and practitioners of both sectors, natural as well as kimia. Consequently, research on healthcare needs to recognize and accomodate the plurality and complexity of medical approaches, in order to bridge the rhetoric of healthcare systems and the experienced reality of health seekers as well as the formal and the informal healthcare system. Similar to bricoleurs, researchers need to consistently reflect upon and adjust their assumptions, introduce new methodological tools and use different forms of representation and interpretation to unite various disciplines, multiple methodologies, and various theoretical perspectives in their healthcare research.

Journal of Pain & Palliative Care Pharmacotherapy, 2024

This paper was stimulated by reading 'What is Cure?' by Tracy D. Kolenchuk. This is a surprisingly simple question that seems to have no rational answer. despite the almost six years of research by that author, as he concludes that there is "no scientific nor medical definition of cure in any current theory or practice of medicine." Mr. Kolenchuk undertook his lengthy search for an answer to the question, What is cure?, because he was working on a project to set healthcare on a rational basis. This is an issue that is also one I have been working on for years. What follows is my answer to the lack of a rational healthcare system, and the answer to the most important questions it needs to answer: What is Life? What is Health? What is Not Health? What is Cure?

Journal of Patient Experience

This article offers a series of 3 vignettes exploring how art making has enabled me to understand my experience of the psychological and spiritual questions that have arisen throughout my diagnosis and subsequent treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS) in the private hospital system in Australia. The findings of the article indicate that the challenge to maintain a sense of identity that is separate to the experience of illness is critical for people who are living with MS and the language employed by health-care workers has a profound capacity to help or hinder this. Opportunities to make art in hospital supports the efficacy of prescribed medical treatments by enabling patients to exercise power in the midst of a process over which they have little or no control.

A Theory of Cure

The material is an excerpt of the book A Theory of Cure, a comprehensive theory of illness and cure covering every curable illness and disease. It is a product of several years of research that has taken many directions, explored many concepts, and resulted in several publications. It is an expansion and update of the research paper A Theory of Cure, first published in November 2019, based on the concepts published in the book: The Science of Cure, and the paper A Definition and Exploration of Cure, Kolenchuk, 2018. The foundation for these concepts comes from studies of Healthicine: The Arts and Sciences of Health and Healthiness which studies health beyond the current concepts of medicine and alternative medicine. My understanding of cure continues to evolve. The original version of the paper A Theory of Cure, published on Academia.edu, has been updated twice since its first publication. The most critical updates relate to the concept of present cause or cure cause. The cure cause of an illness is the present cause of negative signs and symptoms that, when addressed, leads to a cure. It is sometimes confused it a concept of root cause – which today is poorly defined. My intentions are not to dismiss the actions of any doctor or medical scientist. My life has been saved more than once by conventional medical staff. I have also been cured, on more than one occasion, by an alternative medical practitioner, and more often by natural healthiness. I have learned firsthand that the best cures for most illnesses are to improve the health of the patient, a factor more in the patient’s control, than the doctor’s. Doctors can facilitate curing but are rarely solely responsible for a cure and are not involved in most cures. Most cures are trivial, unnoticed, undocumented. Many diseases are compound and complex, having many present causes – many cure causes, each of which needs to be addressed to provide a disease cure. As a result of this, most diseases are considered incurable. I am certain this material has errors and omissions and look forward with anticipation to future additions, corrections, and further developments.

Theoretical Medicine, 1993

Analyses of biological concepts of disease and social conceptions of health indicate that they are structurally interdependent. This in turn suggests the need for a bridge theory of illness. The main features of such a theory are an emphasis on the logical properties of value terrns, close attention to the features of the experience of illness, and an analysis of this experience as "action failure", drawing directly on the intemal structure of action. The practical applications of this theory are outlined for a number of problems in each of the three main practical areas, clinical work, teaching and research. In each case the resources of the theory suggest new models and generate new results. The full practical significance of the theory, however, is shown to consist in the way in which it ties together biological and social theories into an integrated picture of the conceptual structure of medicine as a whole. It is argued, finally, that practical efficiency of this kind is a test of theory not only in the philosophy of medicine hut also in general philosophy.