Page 6 - Time Special Edition Alternative Medicine (January 2020)

NEW ROADS

TO WELLNESS

Ancient healing traditions pose a challenge,

and offer a complement, to modern biomedicine.
And vice versa. That’s a good thing

BY DAVID BJERKLIE

the history of medicine has no beginning. humans have devised

healing traditions ever since we became, well, human. But whether the

traditions are Indian, Chinese, African, North or South American, or Greco-

Roman, they all share, in the words of Claire M. Cassidy, an executive edi-

tor at the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, “the goals

of alleviating the suffering of the sick, promoting health and protecting the
wider society from illness.” Each of these traditional healing systems, ex-

plains Cassidy, offers answers to fundamental questions about the body,

life, death and the role of the healer. This is as true for healing traditions

that are practiced only locally, among a single rain-forest tribe, as it is for

traditions that have spread across continents.
All of this also applies, of course, to the healing tradition that most of

us refer to as “modern” medicine, the health-care system that delivers

organ transplants, billion-dollar cancer drugs and imaging technologies

that track the subtle flow of blood in the brain. This is a system, notes Cas-

sidy, “that can barely function in the absence of electricity, computers,

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