The Difference Between Healing and Curing
Following on from my blog the other day called “Can’t the Body Just Heal Itself?”, it like to go a little more in depth into this concept. Along with his other discoveries and concepts, Dr. Hahnemann made a very fine distinction between the words ‘healing’ and ‘curing’. If you think about it, we almost never hear the word ‘cure’ anymore, but we certainly hear a lot about healing.
What is the distinction that Hahnemann made here? Well, to put it simply, the “cure” is the action of the remedy to destroy a disease, and then to “heal” is the job of the body and mind to clean up in the aftermath. This distinction is a direct parallel to the two inter-related, but very different powers within the human being, called “the generative power” and “the sustentive power”. Where any disease will lodge itself into the generative power of the human being, it’s cure will involve a remedy that also acts on the generative power, in order to dislodge it.
It is the other power of the human being, the sustentive power, whose primary mission is to restore and maintain balance and all natural, healthy life functions. This is the “innate healing power” which we all have, and which keeps us maintained in health.
One of the big blind spots within Classical Homeopathy, as well as the whole natural health movement is in this distinction between the two powers in the human being, and their relative roles in curing and healing. Instead, we have many modalities which talk about ways of healing the mind and body, and assisting it in the process, but virtually never do we hear about the counterpart action of actually curing a disease — as I mentioned above, this requires an understanding of Hahnemann’s distinction between the generative and sustentive powers of the human being.
This is also the reason that we see so many “wellness” clinics springing up (which is related to the sustentive power, and its role in healing), but so far, I’ve never yet seen a “soundness” clinic, as in the phrase “of sound mind and body” — soundness is a concept related to the function of the generative power, and its role in creating a forward-moving state of health. I wonder how that would roll off the tongue : “Arcanum Soundness Clinic — Providing you and your family with sound mind and body”……
This is also the reason why I’ve seen so many examples in patients who bring to me their health history which included one or more ‘healing’ modalities which helped them get rid of a given condition, yet sooner or later, the symptoms return again in their original, or often worsened form, as the underlying diseases themselves still remain latent, and uncured.
There are many of these examples in the mental/emotional realm, where the patient has “healed” from their past through any number of talk therapies or energy work, yet when we reach that point in their time line treatment, the curative remedy very definitely brings about a whole discharge and transformation which the patient didn’t realize they were still carrying within themselves.
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