Since my near death experience some 5 years ago, when I thought I was dying of a myocardial infarction, a living organic matrix known as Healthy Medicine began and continues to unfold. It began with my book of the same title, continued with the formation of the non-profit Center for Healthy Medicine, moved on to the development of Healthy Medicine Radio, which is now both a local and national radio show. The name Healthy Medicine was suggested by a close colleague in this living and vital work.

What is Healthy Medicine? In one sense, it is the recognition that our one-size-fits-all brand of medical practice is largely ineffective if our goal is healing as opposed to fixing with suppression. As the great American essayist Ralph Waldo  Emerson once said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Healthy Medicine is a synthesis of what we call complementary/alternative medicine with allopathic medicine and energy medicine. Yet Healthy Medicine is more than just methods or combinations. It is a way of looking at and embodying health and healing that restores trust and truth to medicine, in these times of fear, mistrust, and deception. And it is a living organization that mirrors the inherent truths in nature, in the human being, and in the divine.

Over the last two years, the idea of Healthy Medicine is evolving three central types of organizations. This quality of three-foldness is a mirror of the human being (head, trunk, and limbs), the natural world (witness the tree with roots, trunk/branches, and leaves/flowers), as well as the common stream in most world religions ( Father/Son/Holy Spirit; Shiva/Vishnu/Brahma; Keter/Chokmah/Binah, and so on) These three central elements are

• Healthy Medicine Academy, or HMA
• Healthy Medicine Network, or HMN
• Healthy Medicine Collaborative, or HMC

Healthy Medicine Academy

The first of these is the Academy. In ancient Greece, this word embodied not just the learning of information and data, however important these are, but also wisdom and skill. 

With today’s 24/7 bombardment of thoughts and beliefs and sales information, we are constantly being asked to think and reason in a certain way, often in a way that someone else or some company or institution wants us to think. It not uncommonly becomes a difficult process for both lay and professional people to wake up.   Most of us become comfortable with our thinking, a thinking that is often fear-based. We develop a resistance to change that often accompanies deeply ingrained habits. For healing to occur, we need to learn how to change ourselves from these habitual lifestyle patterns. The HMA programs are designed to support this transformative process in all participants.

In health care, as in education and most other areas of human life today, a cold data-based thinking has become the norm, with an emphasis upon getting more information. This is often accompanied by a bottom-line no nonsense approach, that can and does, as we have seen in the health care industry, acquire a certain ruthlessness and insensitivity to human suffering. 

The HMA’s educational formats are designed to offer each individual - lay or professional - a way to learn how to combine a cool head and a warm heart. This means a capacity to learn the necessary information and data, and to be able to discern the truthfulness in these facts, then to warm this data/information acquisitiveness with a warmth of heart, a feeling for how our volumes of data, guided by our skills in discerning, can be used with empathy and compassion in the service of ourselves and others.

As many seasoned practitioners have learned in the course of their lives, the skill at being able to accompany a patient on his or her journey of healing requires such qualities as flexible thinking, an open and compassionate heart, and a sustained and persistent effort. It is these skills that the Healthy Medicine Academy will help practitioners develop, in addition to acquiring and learning how to integrate into daily practice, the volumes of data and information that all of us, patients and practitioners, have access to today.

The seasoned practitioner, at some time in life, becomes adept at building into a cohesive whole, with integrity, the capacities of intellect and data gathering, integrated with an intuitive sense of what will work best with each patient. This sense is gleaned from a combination of experience, a devotion to truth, and a capacity to be both externally and internally quiet so as to listen and observe. The practitioner also comes to the understanding that to do this service to its fullest expression requires a concomitant equanimity in daily life, a rhythm of inner work and relationship with the divine, as well as a strengthening of life practices and supportive and nurturing relationships that support an intimacy with all life.

The Healthy Medicine Academy is bringing together teachers and practitioners who have been working in their practices and in their lives to walk this talk. These individuals can help all of us, professionals and lay people, to be more flexible and discerning in our thinking, and more capable of integrating and making sense of the mountains of data.  This is a thinking that is at once intuitive, common sense, and imbued with heart. It is a contemplative intelligence that helps the practitioner to perceive the essence of the individuality of each patient and what is behind the phenomenon of illness.

There are indeed many good sources of ongoing integrative health education in North America, from conferences to online classes. The Academy is part of this growing educational evolution.

To begin its participation in this process, the Healthy Medicine Academy is initiating a series of seminars and on-line educational formats for both professionals and the lay public. This is beginning with the  Cancer Strategies Symposium in Phoenix in March 2011.

This symposium has been crafted so as to represent a broad swath of thinking and experience in cancer care. It will include broad representation of medical oncology today, both traditional and integrative oncology. In addition, the conference will present some of the most innovative thinkers and practitioners in cancer care in the U.S. and worldwide. It will present a multileveled template of how to look at cancer- from well- researched and successful targeted botanical, nutrient, and chemotherapeutic programs, to injectable therapies such as Vitamin C and mistletoe that enhance effectiveness, to movement therapies that support healing in cancer, and methods of perceiving and resolving the deeper conflicts associated with specific types of cancers.

Healthy Medicine Radio: Healthy Medicine Radio brings us weekly in-depth interviews with some of the brightest and heartfelt people in the country. An integral part of Healthy Medicine education is hearing and understanding the teaching and experience of some of the finest thinkers and practitioners in the nation. These are people whose lives are devoted to seeking truth and sharing this truth, people who are committed to serve, who deeply understand the problems we face today, and who are working towards a healthy transformation of our social milieu for the betterment of all. The radio shows can be heard at any time by downloading from the Academy website, www.healthymedicineacademy.com. A number of these speakers have agreed to become a part of the new online educational forums of the Academy. 

Healthy Medicine Network

The second aspect to the three fold image of Healthy Medicine moves beyond the theme of education, and extends efforts into helping to build stronger local and international communities. This is the Healthy Medicine Network. Whereas the Academy is anatomically the head of Healthy Medicine - the place of education - the Network is the heart of this threefoldness. Whereas the Academy encourages not only education but also a spirit of self-reliance, the Network is about rebuilding a sense of participation in what used to be called the Commons, a word which refers to resources that are shared between or among populations -- forest, atmosphere, rivers, grazing lands, parks, and even the internet today, that are shared, used and enjoyed by all -- that has been fractured in our lives and culture for at least several decades. With the Network, the idea of healthy medicine moves from educating to connecting. Whereas education is often a very personal thing, where we each internally develop our knowledge and insights and capacities to perceive and discern, connectedness is about our relationships with others. 

Today, connectedness has become more about online sites where we have lots of “friends.” Or, connectedness is about staying in touch with family and close friends.

The idea with the Healthy Medicine Network is to go beyond this limited and stereotyped concept of connectedness, and move towards a much deeper sense of interrelatedness. Today, most people live relatively isolated lives, and connect with the world through television and work or school. The purpose of this Network is to help build an effective bridge of communication within the format of online networking in health care and on-the-ground local burgeoning efforts to improve and transform health care throughout the country.There is a need today in the places we live and work, for a loosely connected yet deeply intercommunicating heart-felt network of practitioners, patients, and families. The Network will provide opportunities:

1. People can tell their stories and hear the stories of others. One important role of this part of Healthy Medicine is to encourage and support a depth of dialogue and listening to each other’s stories. This was an essential component of more traditional cultures that strengthened the fabric of the social milieu and provided each person with an enhanced feeling of trust of being cared for. Much of these important qualities we have lost today in our atomized, intellectually based, survival-of-the-fittest, over-opinionated, head-strong culture. Through its networking support, the Healthy Medicine Network will help restore a balance, a more heart-centered thinking that is really only possible through receptive listening and dialogue.

2. Communication with others in related networks nationally, so that an interlinking organic connectedness can emerge, one that will enliven recognition of common heart.

3. Along with the Academy, the Network will support the development and manifesting of a movement towards local and neighborhood based health care and the home becoming a healing sanctuary. It is our strengthened local communities that will become the focal point of trust and healing in the years to come.

Local members of the Healthy Medicine Network, linked together in a loosely woven and intercommunicating national and international network, function out of the idea that each participant has the capacity to develop an internal awareness to speak as an authority on that which lives within them. 

In contrast with the Academy, with its expert speakers that offer the public and professionals their wisdom and experience, the Network, by contrast, has no keynote speakers. This encourages participation by everyone, in a new way. 

The Healthy Medicine Network is at the heart of Healthy Medicine. It is the meeting place at the well, so to speak. The Network will provide a vehicle for the growth of renewed health care networks in communities small and large throughout the country. Through conversation, and the sharing of stories, locally and through the national network, each individual is challenged to ask himself or herself how they will take their words and ideas, and cultivate new kinds of effective actions in health care.

Healthy Medicine Collaborative

The third part of the three fold Healthy Medicine image and development is what is being called the Healthy Medicine Collaborative. Together with the Academy as part of a national multifaceted educational renaissance that will free many more people up by empowering them with knowledge and new thinking capacities, and the Network as a meeting place at the well that will further a sense of equality in health care through more active local, national and international participation, the Collaborative will bring this comprehensive impulse into the business of medicine and health care through transformative economics, so that we may fundamentally change and improve the current business model of health care that is stifling most of us.

The role of this Collaborative is to spearhead a new economic basis for healthcare that is not based on the current private insurance driven model that is increasingly excluding more and stifling business growth, nor is it based upon the current governmental model of top down decision making with built in inertia. We are going to need new economic forms of health care in the future, forms that may include elements of the present systems but which are enhanced and enlivened by more active and aware participation of more people.

Health care today, like many other areas of modern life, worships at the altar of competition. This means that it is commonly understood and accepted that we do not get ahead and stay ahead unless we are competitive. The idea of Healthy Medicine is that the true home of competition is in the way each of us strives to excellence in our own lives. The educational and cultural realm of life is the true home of competition. Many of our problems today stem from the misconception that we cannot have a healthy economy, providing goods and services that everyone needs, at prices that are affordable, without intense and often ruthless competition. This has led to most of our destructive economics today. 

The Healthy Medicine Collaborative is founded on the principle that economics succeeds for everyone if the basis of economics, in health care and other central areas of modern life - food, water, transportation, infrastructure, goods and services, and more - is collaboration and cooperation. These have become high sounding but remote words in today’s world, words that are difficult for many people to connect with other than abstractly as an ideal.

This is in part due to the fact that our present system of medical economics is based upon a survival of the fittest mentality. This has never worked, especially in health care. What happens in this competitive health care economic climate is that health care has become a commodity, something to be fixed. The sacred is no longer part of health and healing, where in prior times and indigenous culture this separation was not there.

This spirit of cooperation is beginning to re-emerge in health care economics. There are now national laboratories that are co-ops that physicians can use to bill their patients at a price that is much less than that charged by regular labs. Health care co-operatives do exist in some areas of the country, mostly rural, and this idea has not caught on nationally and has not become a driving force in changing health care.... yet.

This may in part be due to the fact that working cooperatively in economics is very foreign to most people. To do so on a scale that will benefit more people will require considerable time and effort. It is essentially a change in consciousness.

The Healthy Medicine Collaborative is a work in progress. It is continually developing towards a well thought out plan. And it cannot succeed by itself. This is why it is part of Healthy Medicine’s threefold plan. To become a living health economics that serves human needs, collaboration requires both education and connectedness. These three are one.

The Healthy Medicine Collaborative cannot succeed without developing a trust and awareness that with freedom comes responsibility, and that a new economic exchange in health care, one that is based upon the co-op model in part, will need to have a transparency that does not exist today in any private or public plan. Attempts at this have been made in some areas, such as the Ithaca Health Alliance and Philahealthia, and the efforts of Patch Adams to form a new ways of delivering care. Developing and manifesting a new economics in health care, based upon cooperation, transparency, freedom of choice, and self-reliance, will not be easy. There will be significant resistance from firmly entrenched organizations and institutions in our present illness care system. 

The Healthy Medicine Collaborative welcomes interest from anyone who would like to discuss ideas and share experiences along these lines.

Economics unfolds through our imagination of tomorrow. 

A New Mainstream

If we are to create a New Mainstream in health care today, both nationally and locally, then this will require a concerted effort on the part of many people and organizations cooperating together in a spirit of service. The shape that this new mainstream will take remains to be seen. But it is growing inside the imaginations of many people and manifesting in small ways in some local communities and health care settings. 

In embryology, the heart is formed from a gradual coalescence of small blood vessels at the periphery of a budding fetal yolk sac. These small vessels initially isolated, gradually coalesce and form a growing current that then converges at the center and forms the heart. The heart is formed by the blood.

The purpose of this illustration is to demonstrate how our hearts, our centers, are formed: from the periphery. The periphery in health and healing is the effects of the "Field" upon our biochemistry and physiology. The periphery in a social sense is the growing number of local movements of effective change towards redeveloping a Commons based upon the strength of interdependence and upon the inner work of individuals to become more self- reliant. As these efforts grow, a new center. a new heart, for health care will start to take shape. It will replace or fundamentally change both the current excessively profit driven model that is increasingly controlling and generating much fear today, and the system of governmental bureaucracy that becomes mired in inertia and resistance to change.

The three-fold Healthy Medicine idea - Academy, Network, and Collaborative - is an idea that is slowly manifesting. It is one which it is hoped will contribute to the betterment and beneficence of all, and will participate with other individuals and groups nationally and internationally in providing a guiding and hopeful light in a spirit of service to the Greater Good in these challenging times. If these ideas and plans resonate with you, and if you would like to participate with any part of these developing expressions, you may learn more about these efforts at www.healthymedicineacademy.com , www.healthymedicinenetwork.com, or www.healthymedicine.org. We welcome you to join us.

Robert Zieve, M.D.