La nature de la guérison.

Le Dr Andrew Weil nous renseigne sur le sujet:

 

The Nature of Healing.

Anyone who doubts the body’s ability to heal itself should pay attention to wound healing. It is a splendid way to learn the nature of the process and gain confidence in it as an innate capacity.

The next time you get a significant laceration or abrasion, try to detach yourself from the emotional upset of it as soon as possible. (Wounds are psychosomatic events, of course.) Then notice and record the changes that ensue. If there is pain, regard it as a correlate of the activity of nerves that are conveying information about the nature and extent of the injury to the brain and activating mechanisms for both immediate and long-term repair. Note its quality, duration, and change with time. If there is bleeding, see it as the body’s way of cleaning the area and ensuring an unobstructed flow of blood.

Observe how bleeding stops with the formation of a clot. How soon can you detect the beginnings of an inflammatory response (redness, warmth, swelling, and tenderness around the injured tissue)? These changes represent the influx of white blood cells and other cells whose job is the removal of debris and defense against infection. Does a scab form? How long does it remain? Does itching occur? How does the scab come off? What is the appearance of the healed skin? Is there a scar? Or any loss of sensitivity or interference with movement?

Wounds are fascinating, and people have watched them, I suppose, ever since there were people. With the invention of writing, some people began to record their observations of wounds and their techniques of treating them. The methods that have come down to us in old writings are marvelous in their variety. Some seem sensible, some absurd.

Ancient Sumerians liked to wash wounds with beer and included beer as an ingredient in plasters. One prescription, on a clay tablet dated from 2100 B.C. and thought to be the world’s oldest medical manuscript, says to pound together dried wine dregs, juniper, and prunes; pour beer on the mixture; then bind it on the wound after rubbing with oil. The oil might have served to prevent the plaster from sticking to the wound, and some of the ingredients might have antibacterial properties. 1

Ancient Egyptian physicians put fresh meat on wounds, which may have promoted blood clotting, and they rubbed in many strange substances, among them the excrement of various animals and the powdered green mineral malachite. The role of dung in treating wounds is obscure, at best, but malachite turns out to be an effective germicide. It is copper carbonate, and copper salts are powerful antibacterial agents. Another favorite Egyptian wound dressing was a salve of honey and grease. Modern testing shows it to be a good antibiotic. Honey kills bacteria in several different ways and has been a folk remedy for wounds in many parts of the world, even into modern times.2

The list of substances recorded as wound treatments throughout history seems endless. A few of them may actually retard healing; most probably do nothing one way or the other. Some, like honey and malachite, may reduce the chance of infection. The fact is that most wounds heal with or without treatment. The only way to prevent a wound from healing is to infect it or leave foreign matter in it. Moreover, in thousands of years of experimentation no one has found a way of speeding up the process of wound healing. In an otherwise healthy person, a wound that is clean and has bled freely will heal itself as effi-ciently as possible with no need of medicine, and we cannot make it heal any faster or better.

I find it interesting that the largest category of herbal remedies is the vulneraries, or wound healers. A great many plants are said to help wounds heal. The reason, of course, is that wounds heal, and if a plant does not actively interfere with the process, people will often come to see it as the cause of healing — the old problem of drawing cause-and-effect conclusions about med-ical treatments and cures.

Some plants feel good on wounds - the clear jelly in aloe leaves is an example — and so may be soothing and welcome, but they do not speed healing. In my own investigations of bo-tanical medicine, the most effective vulnerary I have come across is the latex of a Peruvian jungle tree (Croton lechleri). Peruvians call the sticky red liquid sangre de grado, a corruption of the Spanish name, “dragon’s blood.” Painted on a wound, it disinfects it, forms a tough, elastic skin that works better than a bandage, and seems to favor scab formation. Even this exotic remedy does not accelerate wound healing, however.

Disinfection of wounds should not be necessary if bleeding has occurred and there is no reason to think that unusual organisms have been introduced. If you must use a disinfectant, hydrogen peroxide is safest and best. It breaks down to ordinary water and an active form of oxygen that kills the most dangerous wound-infecting bacteria. Tincture of iodine, the standard and dreaded treatment of my boyhood, is a strong tissue irritant that probably adds insult to injury rather than does any good. The same is true of Merthiolate and mercurochrome they are less irritating than iodine but equally useless, if these familiar substances have any influence on an uninfected wound, they may retard healing slightly. Experiment on yourself, and you will soon be convinced that ordinary wounds behave the same whether you disinfect them or not, subject them to stinging irritants, or anoint them with exotic and colorful herbs, salves, tinctures, and plasters.

Wound healing is a model for healing in general. Becoming familiar with it and understanding that it simply happens automatically and cannot be improved upon is an important piece of medical self-knowledge.

Wounds of the skin and superficial tissues heal rapidly compared to some other problems, even when they are extensive, as in abdominal surgery. A broken bone may take much longer to heal than a laceration. Lungs damaged by years of cigarette smoking may take very much longer. Also, some people heal faster than others — the young faster than the old, for example. Always, healing proceeds as best it can given the circumstances of its occurrence.

Healing is not just a property of the physical body. Remember: we are mind-bodies, so that healing, like health and illness, must also be psychosomatic. If injury or disease affects the mind primarily, then healing will take place in that realm.

Consider the psychic analog of wound healing say the reaction to a severe emotional injury, such as the sudden death of a spouse or child. There is the same initial shock and intense pain that claims all attention and totally shatters one’s equilibrium. There is a flood of emotion, perhaps the psychic analog of bleeding, and with time and normal grieving the gradual but steady development of scab and scar, the regeneration of positive feelings, and adaptation to the loss. The wound may ache on occasion, even years later, but it is then an old wound, a healed one, no longer a threat to equilibrium.

Healing involves several distinct components. Three that I distinguish are reaction, regeneration, and adaptation.

The inflammation that develops around the edges of a wound is an example of the reactive component of healing. Fever in response to infection is another, although most people regard it as a symptom of illness rather than an aspect of healing. That way of thinking leads most people (and not a few doctors) to treat fever as a problem to be reduced or eliminated, as by taking aspirin. Unless fever is dangerously high (over 105 F or 40.5 C), such action is probably unwise. There is clear experimental evidence that fever helps the body fight infection and that artificial lowering of fever gives invading germs an edge. 5 Reactive phases of healing may be dramatic and productive of discomfort, but it is important not to mistake them for primary symptoms of disease.

Regeneration is the most spectacular component of healing. Some of our cells and tissues have astounding regenerative ability. Liver cells can multiply fast enough to replace large portions of that organ within a matter of hours of their experimental removal.* Destroy the delicate cells that line the digestive tract and cover many organs, and they will be replaced in a day or less.

I once had a chance to experience such regeneration in myself after a disabling episode of snow blindness. I went on an unplanned cross-country ski excursion high in the Colorado Rockies on a brilliant day in winter, lacking sunglasses. I was aware of the danger of snow blindness and made an effort to shade my eyes whenever I could; still, I underestimated the rapidity of sunburn at that altitude with such glare. I felt nothing but exhilaration from the trip when I arrived at the Grand Junction airport that afternoon to fly home to Tucson. An hour later, while waiting to change planes in Denver, I was overcome by tiredness and began to get a headache. My eyes felt sore and irritated, as if they had sand in them.

By the time I boarded the plane to Tucson, the soreness had increased so much that light bothered me, and my eyes started to tear. Shortly after takeoff, I had to close them. Then I drifted off into a brief, light sleep. When I woke up, I could not open my eyes. The slightest effort to raise the lids produced such intense pain that a muscular reflex took over and kept them tightly closed. I could not even pry them open. With the lids closed, my eyes felt raw and filled with grit, but these sensations were nothing compared to the searing pain that came with any attempt at opening.

I knew at once what the problem was, and since I also knew it would resolve spontaneously, I was not particularly worried; however, I could not remember how long snow blindness was supposed to last. I called a stewardess and explained my predicament. She brought me a cool cloth to keep over my eyes and seemed more upset than I. I told her my main concern was getting off the plane and into the airport, since I was completely helpless.

I had to be taken from the airplane in a wheelchair, much to the distress of the friend who came to meet me. I had never been so dependent in my adult life, nor blind ever — an educational experience indeed. I did not get home till late at night and went straight to bed, taking a sedative to help me sleep. By the time I began to get sleepy, I could already begin to open my eyes slightly and could detect the beginning of a decrease in pain
and the sensation of irritation. The next morning I could open my eyes fully, although they still felt a bit tender. I wore sun-glasses that morning but discarded them by the afternoon. In about twenty-four hours, my eyes were mostly healed. The fol-lowing morning they felt perfectly normal.

Snow blindness results from a sunburn of the cornea, the transparent covering of the iris and pupil. The burned cells swell, die, and slough off, exposing tiny nerve endings that register intense pain and trigger reflex closing of the eyes. Within a day, a completely new layer of cornea! cells can regenerate to replace the lost ones and protect the insulted nerves.

In lower animals, regeneration achieves results we cannot, such as replacement of whole body parts. Catch certain lizards by the tail, and the tail will come off in your hand, still thrashing, while the shortened lizard escapes. It will grow a brand-new tail promptly. Cut off the leg of a salamander, and a new one will regenerate.

Human beings seem to have the same potential to regenerate limbs and other organs, and researchers are trying to find out why they do not do it. Every cell of your body has in its genetic material all the information needed to make a new you, all of it coded in the molecular structure of DNA. Many cells, in addition, have the working machinery to turn that information into physical reality. In general, the more specialized a cell is, the less its capacity to regenerate itself or other tissues. Heart muscle is quite specialized, for instance, and when part of it dies, it is replaced by scar tissue rather than new muscle. Nerve cells in the brain are the most specialized cells of all and have no regen-erative power; such a nerve cell lost is lost forever.

Limb regeneration in lower animals is organized by nerves, which seem to direct some cells at the wound site to dedifferentiate, that is, to lose their specialized identity as bone or cartilage cells and regress into general embryonic cells with the ability to make a whole range of tissues, including bone, cartilage, and all the other components of a new leg or tail. Since many of our cells have the same potential to dedifferentiate and regenerate miss-ing tissues, we may one day find out how to grow new legs and hearts when we need them as easily as we can now grow new skin and corneal cells. 4

Regeneration will accomplish as much as it can in healing, but when it reaches a limit, another process must take over. The scar that forms in the heart of a heart-attack survivor is a healed area but not a regenerated one. The heart must adapt to the scar and compensate for the loss of a portion of muscle. In the first hours after a heart attack, the area of dead muscle is a focus of instability with potential to disrupt cardiac equilibrium (as by causing a sudden irregularity of heartbeat that can be quickly fatal). Healing by scar formation reestablishes stability, and the patient then can (and should) resume normal activity (perhaps with better habits of diet and exercise to minimize the chance of further losses of this nonreplaceable tissue).

Adaptation and compensation are important components of healing, when reaction and regeneration cannot completely reverse the destructive effects of injury or illness. The body adapts to its losses and finds the best way around them. In the case of a scarred heart, that may be the development of new pathways of circulation and electrical conduction around the damaged area.

One kind of adaptive response is the isolation, or walling off, of a diseased area that cannot be returned to a healthy state. Such isolation may prevent the disease from affecting more of an organism. Just as oysters make pearls to protect themselves from irritating foreign particles, so our bodies can wall off pock-ets of infection to form abscesses. This process often occurs in tuberculosis of the lungs, where the body’s defenses cannot de-feat the infection but frequently can contain it. The end result is a cavity surrounded by a fibrous wall, with normal lung tissue beyond.

Adaptation goes on at the behavioral level as well as the cel-lular level. I know a middle-aged naturalist who, as a college student, was stricken with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a strange disease of the nervous system that mimics poliomyelitis and can cause the same kind of permanent disability by depriving muscles of their nerve supply. This man has lost considerable function of his legs, but his adaptation to and compensation for the loss are impressive. He is an active explorer of the world and gets around difficult terrain better than some unimpaired people I know.

Reaction, regeneration, and adaptation, like healing itself, are
all automatic responses to the loss of health equilibrium. You do not have to think about them or work at them or seek them from outside. Healing just happens whenever the mind-body is disturbed. Indeed, it must happen, just as an analytical balance must react to being moved and must seek a new position of rest.

I mentioned in Chapter 6 that healing is probably a universal property of all creation. Certainly animals heal themselves, usually without benefit of medicines and doctors, and so do plants. I had the pleasure of living in a dense stand of giant sahuaro cactuses in southern Arizona for a number of years. Although their rhythm of life is slower than mine, living with them permitted me to watch them heal from injuries, reacting with a type of scar formation not so different from ours. I am ashamed to admit that I once caused injury to a sahuaro by building a bonfire too close to it. I thought the cactus was out of range, but the heat burned a two-foot section of the stem on the side facing the fire. The next day, the tough skin of the cactus turned pale in this area. In the following days it became paler still and soft-ened, and I feared the plant would not survive, since the injured area could easily allow loss of water or entry of disease agents. It did survive, I am happy to say, and over the next year covered the damage with a thick scar of gray callous tissue, a barrier tougher than the original skin, if not as attractive. The cactus has grown normally since then.

Healing is not limited to what we call living things. I believe that rocks heal, too; their rhythms are just so slow compared to ours that we cannot see them change. The mountain range be-hind my house in Arizona was defaced while I lived there by a zealous builder who carved a zigzag dirt road up to his mountain retreat. The gouged line is visible from miles away. If we could watch that mountain with time-lapse photography over the next centuries, I am sure we would see the wound fade and disappear, much like a scratch on an arm. Its sharp contours would soften under the influence of weather and age, and vegetation would regenerate in the denuded area. Is there any reason not to call that healing?

When a distant star hurls a great chunk of itself into space in the huge explosion astronomers call a nova, the rest of the star quickly regains stability and equilibrium, rearranging its layers to cover the wound and continue the business of fusing matter into energy. Is there any reason not to call that healing?

I find these considerations helpful, because they emphasize the generality of healing, which is simply the universal tendency to seek equilibrium, a reaction to and compensation for any disturbance, using whatever mechanisms and materials are available.

Though healing is universal and innate and must occur in us in response to illness or injury, its results are sometimes inadequate. We have all seen injuries that do not heal, illnesses that do not end. What goes wrong when healing is incomplete or ineffective?

An obvious failure occurs when disturbing forces are so strong as to overwhelm an organism’s ability to meet them and respond. Run into a person with an automobile at high speed, and death is a likely outcome. Deprive a plant of water and continue the deprivation long enough, and you will kill it.

There are men in India who smoke cobra venom regularly and eventually are able to let cobras bite them on the tongue. They say the venom gives a wonderful high, better than any familiar drug. This is certainly a curious practice and also a striking example of bodily adaptation. Alcoholics can swallow doses of liquor that would kill other people, because their systems have adapted to the regular presence of that poison. Still, there is some dose of cobra venom given all at once, and some dose of alcohol given all at once, that will overwhelm even the most adapted cobra guru or alcoholic, causing permanent loss of equilibrium. I am certain that most of us imagine our limits to be much more confining than they are, but oexist, including those that define the power of healing to restore lost balance.

Total inadequacy of a healing response to a disturbing force means death. More commonly, healing is partially inadequate, or, at least, unsatisfactory from the point of view of a sick or injured individual.

Return to the example of a wound. Wounds may fail to heal for a number of reasons. Healing energy may be unable to reach the site because of insufficient circulation to carry it there the case of the diabetic's foot. Material needed to repair the damage may be wanting, as in cases of malnutrition, especially protein deficiency. Healing may be opposed by destructive forces that aggravate the injury, such as infection.

A person with generally low vital energy — such as one with advanced AIDS — may be unable to mount a sufficient healing response to repair a wound. The terminal cancer patient is another example, where vitality is sapped both by the cancer’s derangement of total metabolism (resulting in the mysterious wasting known as cachexia), and by such treatments as radiation and chemotherapy, which weaken the blood-forming, immune and digestive systems, all of which must be in good working order for effective healing to occur.

Finally, and most commonly, healing may be stalled or blocked. A simple mechanical problem may be the trouble. Once I injured my right foot badly while climbing barefoot on a slope of loose rock. I stepped on a big rock that split in two, one half of it falling on top of my foot and inflicting a deep laceration, about two inches long, just below the middle toes. It bled a great deal, but I was able to stop the bleeding with pressure and an improvised bandage and get home. Although I could see some exposed tendons, I knew there was no really serious damage and decided to avoid stitches. I just taped the edges of the wound together with adhesive strips. It closed as I expected, but within a short time reopened, discharging a little blood and watery fluid. There appeared to be no infection, but it would not heal.

I experimented with various dressings, the most bizarre (and messy) being the rind of a papaya, recommended by a neighborhood herbalist. None of them helped. Finally, after two weeks, the wound closed and seemed to be healing; it was a little sore but not a source of anxiety. A few days later, however, while I was soaking in a hot spring, it opened once again, looking the same as before: not infected but unwilling to heal. This time I went to a physician, who probed it at great length and after fifteen minutes came up with a chunk of rock the size of a pea. Within two days the wound healed completely and never gave further trouble. If anything, healing seemed accelerated, as if it had built up a kind of pressure or urgency in its frustration. That piece of foreign matter did not belong there, and it obstructed healing until removed.

If nerve fibers are severed, the portions beyond the cuts degenerate, but the portions attached to the nerve cells begin to regrow, albeit slowly, seeking their target organs.* A regenerating nerve fiber has a problem, though. It cannot get to where it is going unless it can enter the sheath that enclosed the previous fiber. More often than not, the severed ends of nerve sheaths are displaced when nerves are cut as a result of injury, and regenerating fibers cannot find the right sheaths to take them home. As a result, the muscles, glands, or other tissues beyond the cut are permanently deprived of their nerve supply and so cannot function normally. Healing happens but is thwarted by a simple mechanical problem.

In recent years, reports have become more and more common of surgical successes in reattaching severed fingers, hands, feet, and arms. This kind of surgery must be prompt, lest the severed appendage begin to die. The most delicate part of it is meticulous joining of nerve sheaths, so that regenerating. fibers will reach their proper destinations. The regeneration may take weeks or even many months, depending on the distance that must be covered, but if the alignments are correctly made, full recovery of function will eventually come about.

A most dramatic and tragic form of nerve damage is spinal cord injury, often the result of accidents in otherwise healthy and athletic young people, who are rendered immediately paraplegic or quadriplegic, permanent invalids. Surgeons can repair the gross spinal injuries, removing bone splinters and blood clots, yet the vital nerve cord that carries messages to and from the brain and controls many muscles and organs remains obstructed at a certain level, even though the cord looks normal. In such cases, one can often observe a tendency to heal and reestablish function. For example, over the weeks or months following injury, sensation may return in border areas of the paralyzed zone, along with some motor activity. The nervous system seems to try to find new pathways of communication with the body, but usually any gains are very limited. Possibly, one day we will have the ability to assist spinal nerves in making new connections around cord obstructions resulting from injury.5

Mechanical obstruction is one type of blockage of healing. Obstruction can be nonphysical as well, such as an interfering mental state. Strong anger, guilt, or anxiety focused on an ailing part of the body may prevent healing from reaching it as effectively as a physical barrier. I do not know the mechanism of this phenomenon but suspect it involves use of nerves by the mind in ways that limit their capacity to convey whatever they should convey for healing to occur.

Some systems of treatment are based on theories now discredited by medical science, yet they can elicit rapid cures even of serious conditions that have persisted over time. They seem to work mainly because people believe in them. If belief can be a key to unblock healing, it must also be able to block it. For every case of a wound that does not heal because a piece of foreign matter remains in it, there are probably many cases of disease that persists because the mind obstructs healing.

I do not think chronic disease is a simple matter of conscious choice or repressed emotion. It is not just that some patients stay sick because they derive what psychiatrists call “secondary gain” or that a man with ulcerative colitis cannot express anger at a parent or that a woman gets breast cancer because she has bottled up her feelings. Those simplistic formulations come nowhere near to portraying the intricacy and subtlety of the interplay of mind and body. That is the subject of a later chapter. For now, let me state my conviction that when healing is stalled or blocked, the source of trouble is likely to be in the nonphysical end of the human mind-body, and physical intervention will not lead to cure unless it also produces change in the mental realm.

The fact that healing can be blocked creates the possibility of treatment. We may not be able to improve on healing or speed it up beyond its own proper rate, but we can, remove obstacles to it, supply it with missing materials, and help it reach a diseased site. It is a misnomer to call medicine “the healing art.” The healing art is the secret wisdom of the body. Medicine can do no more than facilitate it.*

That is all healers can do, too. Many persons claim healing powers, and all sorts of professional healers offer their services, from faith healers and psychic healers to Indian medicine men. Some are frauds, some are genuine, but none put healing into anyone else. Good ones can remove obstacles to healing, motivate sick people to get well, and perhaps raise the vitality of debilitated persons in some way.

Medical treatments are bewildering in their variety and inconsistency. Just as people have tried the most outlandish substances on wounds, they have come up with an astonishing number of different systems for treating illness in general, all intended to promote healing. Not uncommonly, these systems are incompatible with one another both in theory and method. Sometimes the methods of one system are expressly prohibited by the rules of another. Yet all have their devoted adherents, and all claim success.

When treatment works and healing ensues, the reason for success may be far from obvious. I want to know why treatments succeed or fail.

*1 This is a response of healthy liver cells to an experimental surgical procedure. In the world outside the laboratory, the liver is more vulnerable. Traumatic injury to it may result in fatal hemorrhage before cellular regeneration can repair the damage. Toxic injury from exposure to some chemical compounds can cause rapid death of the whole liver by deranging the metabolism of its cells. Unhealthy liver cells, such as those in alcoholic patients and victims of chronic hepatitis, lose their regenerative capacity and so cannot halt progressive destruction of vital liver tissue.

*2 It is nerve cells, especially in the brain and spinal cord, that cannot be replaced. Nerve fibers can regrow as long as the cells are intact.

*3 I came across an eloquent expression of this truth in the motto of a social club I belonged to at Harvard Medical School, the Aesculapian Club: "We dress the wound, God heals it.”

Reproduit uniquement à titre éducatif.

Référence: Andrew Weil, Health and healing, Cinquième Édition, Houghton Mifflin, USA, 2004, chapitre 7.

---

Dans l'article suivant, il est intéressant de constater que, dans la langue française, "guérir" est associé à "se défendre" et, par extension, à l'art martial.

 

La Volonté de Guérir

 

Par le Dr Charles Lebaigue md.

Cliquer sur la photo
pour se rendre sur son site.

Dans mon article sur les Trois Visages de la Maladie, je n'ai au fond parlé que du seul aspect "expérience" de l'aspect subjectif de la maladie. Tu te souviens: l'impuissance, la souffrance du malade. En fait son INCAPACITE à agir, à se sentir "comme avant", à penser de manière lucide. Et j'ai souligné à quel point cette incapacité est incommunicable, non prouvable à autrui.

Mais c'est encore bien davantage le cas du versant positif, actif, de notre expérience subjective de la maladie. Je veux parler de la VOLONTE ACTIVE DE GUERIR qui est presque toujours présente chez le malade.

Celle-ci reste cependant le plus souvent inaccessible à la conscience du malade lui-même. Elle agit en lui à son insu. Comme c'est le cas dans la plupart des processus volontaires, seul son BUT (penser, se sentir et agir "comme avant") est vraiment conscient. Et encore, il faut le solliciter par une question, tellement il paraît évident.

Il "va de soi", pensons-nous, que tout malade veuille guérir. Au niveau du langage, c'est vrai: poser la question , c'est y répondre. Même le plus grand simulateur affirmera sans rougir qu'il ne demande qu'à penser, se sentir et agir "comme avant".

Mais il est clair qu'il donne à ces mots une signification bien différente de celle que leur attribue le médecin contrôleur qui cherche à savoir s'il y met vraiment du sien. Y mettre du sien signifierait vouloir vraiment FAIRE tout ce qu'il faut pour que cesse l'incapacité. Et tout le monde ne le fait pas. Pas seulement les simulateurs conscients et organisés.

Certains malades ont peur de se retrouver COMME AVANT. La maladie est pour eux une solution, bancale et inconfortable certes, mais tout de même préférable à la situation qu'ils connaissaient AVANT que la maladie ne vienne les PROTEGER (de l'angoisse par exemple).

N'oublions pas que GUERIR est la version moderne du mot GUARIR qui, dérivé du germanique WARJAN (le verbe "wehren" signifie toujours en allemand "se défendre", songeons à la Wehrmacht!) garde toujours une connotation défensive: se protéger de la mort, de l'invalidité définitive, d'une souffrance "interminable".

Vouloir guérir, dans le monde francophone, est donc avant tout vouloir se défendre CONTRE une maladie perçue comme une agression à son intégrité, à sa capacité de penser, de sentir et d'agir comme on a été habitué de le faire.

Il n'en est pas de même dans les langues germaniques. Guérir signifie là "rendre ou redevenir SAIN" (l'allemand "Heilung"), COMPLET (l'anglais "heal"), ENTIER ("whole" dérive en anglais du même radical que "heal").

Faut-il s'étonner que la médecine holistique a fait ses premiers pas en territoire germanique (Paracelse, Hahnemann, Kneipp, pour ne citer que les plus anciens et les plus connus)?

Mais, qu'il s'agisse de défendre son INTEGRITE contre un danger externe ou de lutter à l'intérieur de soi pour recouvrer sa SANTE, sa COMPLETUDE, il s'agit toujours de LUTTER pour atteindre un MIEUX. Et cette lutte largement inconsciente de notre organisme pour parvenir à la guérison connaît des limites.

Il arrive, au terme d'une longue et pénible maladie, que le malade cesse - intérieurement - de vouloir guérir et accepte comme une délivrance l'arrivée de sa mort. Son "instinct de conservation" vient alors à lui faire défaut et il se laisserait mourir si son entourage ne cherchait pas à le maintenir en vie de gré ou de force (l'acharnement thérapeutique n'est pas l'apanage des seuls médecins...).

Tout se passe comme si quelque sagesse "supérieure" lui faisait "comprendre" que poursuivre la lutte n'aurait pour résultat que de prolonger la souffrance de son agonie. C'est peut-être cette même sagesse qui, dans la jungle, fait que la proie renonce à fuir et à se défendre de son prédateur lorsque la "partie est manifestement perdue", abandon terminal qui lui épargne probablement les affres de se sentir dévorée en pleine conscience!

Tous les professionnels qui ont accompagné jusqu'au bout des malades terminaux ont eu l'occasion de constater "intuitivement" ce revirement. Et, si leur intuition n'a pas été neutralisée par des considérations sentimentales ou des préjugés intellectuels, ils se sont accordé le droit de respecter cette dernière volonté de leur patient d'abandonner la lutte en vue d'une guérison évidemment impossible.

Je parle ici d'INTUITION dans une signification un tant soit peu différente de celle des dictionnaires. La plupart de ceux-ci la définissent en effet comme un processus de pensée, immédiate, non-discursive c'est à dire dépourvue de toute élaboration rationnelle.

Je ne suis pas seul à mettre en doute le bien-fondé d'une telle définition. Il s'agit, selon moi, d'un processus relevant de la volonté inconsciente que je préférerais voir appeler le Vouloir.

L'INTUITION est alors autorisation immédiate, décision qu'aucun raisonnement ne vient justifier d'AGIR de manière JUSTE. Nous savons avec certitude que c'est la BONNE décision qui nous est ainsi "affichée". Nous restons libre d'agir selon cette intuition ou de la négliger. L'avenir apporte souvent la "preuve" qu'elle était correcte. C'est à dire conforme à ce que la destinée "attendait" de nous.

Cette destinée strictement personnelle que l'individu n'apprendra à connaître par la pensée lucide que bien plus tard, quand il réalisera que les choix qu'il a faits durant son existence n'ont pas été le fait d'un hasard aveugle. Pour autant qu'il arrive à ce degré de lucidité rétrospective, bien entendu.

Une telle conception de l'intuition me paraît mieux rendre compte de nombreux faits que la pratique médicale permet de constater. L'intuition thérapeutique qui caractérise le "bon" médecin en est un bel exemple. Nous en parlerons certainement plus tard: c'était un des thèmes privilégiés de mon enseignement. Peut-être parce que je croyais être le premier à en parler de manière intelligible...

Référence: www.medecine-holistique-fiable.info/bulletin.html

Reproduit uniquement à titre éducatif.

 

Fin.

A.M.I.B.E.S Approche Médicale Intégrée Basée sur des Exercices de Santé
Joindre l'auteur Plan du site Introduction Quelques mots sur notre logo Qu'est-ce que la médecine intégrée? Santé et symbolisme (en anglais) La nature de la guérison (en anglais et en français) Hua Tuo et ses exercices de santé Le taijiquan comme modèle d'exercice de santé L'exercice physique et la dépression Le patient cancéreux et l'exercice physique