What Unifies the Vast and General Scope of Heilkunst Medicine?
My practice, being general, is one which is full of a great variety of patients — a variety of medical conditions, as well as types of people (such as different constitutional types and character structures). Yet there is something underlying which unifies all of this. It is the idea of evolution, and how illness and healing are a fundamental part of what drives it forward. In this sense, illness is not a simple “inconvenience” in our life, but something which has the function of bringing our consciousness to a focal point on something which we have not yet raised up into the light of day within our own mind. Along these lines, everything which I’ve written in previous blogs about the difference between suppression, palliation, and cure (ie the direction of cure) is another way of keeping the therapeutic process on track, and moving in the correct direction (ie the proper curative direction is one which increases consciousness, not diminishes it). This reminds me of how Andy Ihnatko, tech journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times, summarizes his own job description as “keeping the blinking cursor moving from the left side of the screen towards the right”.
So, it is not a particular medical condition, or general state of health which defines a patient that can be helped with Heilkunst, but rather one who, at some level, has a motivation to keep their health moving from the left side of the proverbial screen towards the right. My job, as the practitioner, is to marry the patient’s motivation with my solid map of principles and therapeutics which keep things moving in the correct direction.
In this sense, it is not a question of any patient comparing which stage of health they’ve reached in relation to anyone else, but that they are making tangible progress forward. This is part of how an objective view point is kept during a patient’s healing reaction — when the patient may be feeling at their worst in subjective terms, it can be determined that they are in fact objectively moving forward, and will shortly experience it when they emerge from the other side of their healing reaction.