What the mainstream media is hiding
by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What kind of medicine do people seeking help experience in the therapy camps of my Auswege Foundation/ Ways Out Charity? If you need to condense what would actually take a whole book into a few dozen lines, it’s best to use keywords.
Is Ways Out medicine “alternative”? My foundation avoids this term, which is as common as it is misleading. Because it gives the impression that a patient is faced with a choice between two competing offers – and can forego one if they choose the other. There is an “either-or” involved, whereas we advocate a “both-and.” For us, it’s not about replacing; it’s about expanding.
“Alternative” is relative, which is another reason why I don’t like this label. Anyone who walks through a German pedestrian zone in a kilt and a bonnet on their head, blowing the bagpipes, comes across as very “alternative” – but not at all if they appear like that in the Highlands. “Alternative” is our way of healing insofar as it is “not integrated into the dominant health system” in this country. (This is how “alternative medicine” is defined by the World Health Organization. (1) But Western medicine is just as “alternative” in Far Eastern countries, where traditional Chinese and Indian medicine set standards, or in shamanic regions of Africa and South America.
Occasionally, healing methods that are “not part of the tradition of the respective country” are also referred to as “alternative.” (2) In this sense, the adjective does not fit our way of healing at all: herbal medicine, energetic massages, laying on of hands, prayer healing, discussions, and many other methods of treatment were already practiced in our culture centuries before the rise of mechanistic-materialistic conventional medicine.
I am particularly reluctant to have the “exit” healing methods dismissed as “alternative” in the sense of “scientifically unfounded.” (3) A large proportion of the procedures and means that are recognized and widely used within conventional medicine actually lack scientific foundation according to their own standards. On the other hand, many diagnostic and therapeutic methods of so-called “alternative medicine” are exemplary “evidence-based” according to these same standards. (There are now hundreds of controlled studies on spiritual healing alone.) (4)
I am also suspicious of the concept of science on which this definitional degradation is based: it is based on physical and scientific standards, which are appropriate for many medical disciplines – they are most effective in areas such as pharmacology, anatomy, genetics, molecular medicine, and orthopedics, surgery – but by no means in psychosomatics and psychiatry, as in all other human sciences: history, sociology, ethnology, pedagogy, and psychology are not nearly enough for them. Only a stubborn scientist would think of disparaging her because of this. (5)
“Complementary” is more appropriate, derived from the Latin complementum, supplement. Because what we offer effortlessly complements what conventional doctors prefer.
Ultimately, I don’t particularly like this label either. A “complementary” offer is secondary, subordinate, less important, and more of a mere accessory. If you’re looking for a new car, you can make do with the basic equipment – or buy “complimentary” extras such as an auxiliary heater and spoiler: pleasant but dispensable luxury in the direction of bells and whistles. However, I do not consider the healing methods advocated by “Auswege/ Ways Out” to be any more dispensable than what conventional Western medicine has to offer.
We prefer to speak of integrative medicine: one that brings together, combines, and unites the best of two concepts. We recognize the successes of an approach that aligns diagnostics and therapy with scientific standards but consider it to be incomplete and fundamentally limited. In connection with approaches that rely more on ancient healing traditions, on intuition and experience, on self-healing powers, and the resources of nature, he could achieve much more.
We help and heal pragmatically. The best medicine is one that brings the greatest possible benefit to those seeking help – regardless of what its findings are based on, what sources it draws from, and what explanations it gives. The question of how and why a therapy works is irrelevant from the patient’s perspective. The main thing is that it’s good. We view therapy offerings as a toolbox full of instruments, the value of which we do not measure based on their origin but solely on their successful application.
“Escape” medicine is person-related: We primarily treat not illnesses but sick people; not suffering, but sufferers; not individual organs, but their owners; not just symptom carriers, but whole people; not as objects on which measures are carried out, but as subjects who actively and self-responsibly participate in the therapeutic process, ready to awaken their “inner healer” and let them work – ultimately it is he who makes the difference. Your well-being is no less important to us than your diagnosis.
We help individually. Our offers are tailored to the individual patient, to their particular physical and psychological condition, their specific living conditions, and their unique history.
We take a holistic approach, going beyond the symptom level. When people become patients, they do not cease to be psychophysical entities: beings in which physical, mental, and spiritual processes influence each other. Imbalances between these areas are often expressed in manifest complaints. Bringing these back into harmony is often an essential prerequisite for symptoms to disappear permanently. Healing requires becoming whole.
The medicine of our choice is partly paraphysical: It takes into account and uses factors that (still) have no place in the current scientific world and human view but are of paramount importance in healing systems of other cultures, such as “life energy” (Prana, Qi), “energy pathways” (nadis, meridians) and “power centers” (chakras); In addition, we do not ignore possible parapsychological influences (e.g. telepathy and other forms of extrasensory perception, cathexis). They could work in the patient, connecting him with others and the universe. We don’t like to use “energetic,” a favorite word of the esoteric healing scene: we leave it open whether “energy” or another physical principle is actually at play. Yes, we are committed to practicing “paramedicine” while rejecting its contemptuous equation with “superstition.” We should have learned from the history of science: What we think we know today is just the latest state of error.
We take a systemic approach. Medicine must take into account the interrelationships in which each of us is integrated as a member of social systems. Anyone who ignores them runs the risk of overlooking or misunderstanding the main causes of illness – and losing chances of recovery.
We help in a meaningful way. When people are seriously ill, they also ask themselves questions like “What for?”, “Why this suffering?”, “Why me?”, “Why now of all times?” With us, they receive suggestions, a signal in the symptom, an opportunity in fate, seeing illness as a path.
In this respect, too, “way out” medicine is quite suggestive, in the original sense of the word: what we do not “persuade” patients, but rather “suggest” (from the Latin suggestere), is a changed perspective: on their illness, their living conditions, their whole To be there. Every life offers as many good reasons to be approached optimistically, calmly, and gratefully, to be experienced as happy and meaningful as for pessimism, constant worry, chronic dissatisfaction, bitterness, and emptiness of meaning. Every patient is free to choose which perspective they take. If one choice makes you significantly happier than the other, why should he turn it down?
We help empathetically. Compassion, understanding, patience, and sympathy seem to us to be indispensable in order to touch those seeking help, to gain their trust, and to persuade them to cooperate. That’s why the “way out” camps are mindful, friendly, sensitive, and loving.
We work collegially. Across professional boundaries, our doctors, alternative practitioners, psychotherapists, healers, educators, and other specialists see themselves as equal, equally valuable parts of a team in which everyone respects and values each other. What counts is the result achieved together, not the individual’s personal merit. “Therapy” comes from serving (Greek therapeia: serving, service). In our opinion, medicine should only serve the person seeking help – not the ego, the profile neuroses, the ambition, or the business interests of the helper. This requires team players who are mature in character, who are internally whole, and who are fulfilled by their calling.
The “Ways Out” medicine is charitable. The focus is on fulfillment in helping without making it dependent on financial rewards.
Can such an approach actually offer a way out for those excluded from conventional medicine, those who are supposedly “resistant to treatment” and “out of therapy”? She has been demonstrating what holistic healing can achieve in my foundation’s therapy camps since 2007 – you can read about it here.
The Ways Out Medicine in 12 keywords > integrative, pragmatic, person-related, individual, holistic, paraphysical, systemic, meaning-oriented, suggestive, emphatic, collegial, creative.
This article comes from the book by Harald Wiesendanger: – Kranken anders helfen (2015).
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Remarks
1 World Health Organisation (WHO) – Traditional Medicine: Definitions. Who. int. 17. August 2010.
2 ebda.
3 So wird „Alternativmedizin“ in der Internet-Enzyklopädie Wikipedia definiert.
4 Daniel J. Benor: Healing Research (3-bändig), Vol. I (Professional Supplement): Spiritual Healing: Scientific Validation of a Healing Revolution, Southfield 2001; Vol. II (Professional Edition): Consciousness, Bioenergy, and Healing, Medford 2004.
5 Mehr hierüber in Harald Wiesendanger: Außer Kontrolle. Warum die Stiftung Auswege “unwissenschaftlich” vorgeht – und dazu steht. 1. Auflage 2016
More about this in Harald Wiesendanger: Out of Control. Why the Ways Out Foundation proceeds “unscientifically” – and stands by it. 1st edition 2016