Fifteen Questions

While net searching for some basic information on Deepak Chopra the other day, I came across an amazing and inspiring web link to a documentary that will be released in Spring ’08. The Shift trailer is only 6 minutes long, but truly inspiring. It addresses issues of global suffering and destruction, followed by a burst of hope for the massive global change that is to come.

The Shift speaks of an evolutionary leap that is happening, from arrogance and negligence, to activism and action: a collective movement towards peace and equality. Now, I call myself an activist in my own little way. I have even been known to call community service my religion. This concept brought me to such an extreme level of global thinking, in 6 minutes, and has changed my direction. I feel empowered, and motivated to understand how we, as CAM practitioners, can play a role in this shift.

So what needs to happen? There is so much. We have issues of racism, genocide, war, global warming and hunger to address, but where do we start? All of these things impact the health and wellness (and I mean wellness in every mental,/emotional, spiritual and physical sense of the word) of people everywhere, so lets think for a moment about health, and how we as CAM practitioners can position ourselves to best serve our communities. How can we gain the tools that the WORLD has to offer, to make ourselves the best possible physicians and healers?

Part 1: Think Globally; 15 Questions

So what if…?

What if we as CAM practitioners ALL made a conscious effort to incorporate service into our mission? What if we collectively made community service our religion? What if we made it a point to really learn to serve as many different types of communities as possible? What is we chose to collectively value faith, race, ethnicity nationality and culture not just by acknowledging them, but by learning as much as we could about them, and even respecting them?

Okay, so I’m speaking like an idealist. But more specifically, let’s think large and small, globally and locally. If our first goal is to learn as much as we can, how can we do that as students of The World? What if schools of all six of our accredited naturopathic schools had departments of international medicine? What if these departments set up international preceptorships and offered scholarships and travels grants? I mean, are we the only country doing natural medicine? Wouldn’t it benefit students in training to see how Cuba has integrated medicina verde into their health care system? …and how medical doctors can be seen harvesting their own herbs from hospital gardens? Or how patients make their own ear seeds in the waiting rooms? Wouldn’t it be cool to see the herbs that many Kenyan’s are using to fight the secondary infections of AIDS, in the face of overpriced drug therapy? I mean, not just cool, but essential?

We do not have a completely integrated health care system in this country, but many countries do.

So why not survey those systems in order to understand the impact that many traditional medicines have had and continue to have on societies? Doesn’t that seem like a natural first step?

…Stay tuned for part 2.

–Concerned World Citizen