It’s a multibillion dollar game called alternative holistic medicine. In many cases charlatans, scams and frauds with sophisticated snake oil, circus showmen and amoral salesmen abound. Some professionals are sincerely deluded in their religious belief of their values and ethics. They are like male peacocks and Schwarzenegger rustling their beautiful feathers to beguile us all. Many professionals surfboard the seas and waves ego seductive of youthful beauty to accumulate gold nuggets to live lazy luscious lifestyles.
Planet earth is full of luxurious youth, beauty, health, regenerative, holistic medical clinics. Thailand is a supreme example of this practice with beautiful well heeled hospitals and showy clinics all over the place. They have exotic names like DNA Gold Clinic and Villa Medica Chiromed Clinic so forth and so on. Very high class unlike black and white witches, curandeiros, witch doctors, holy roman catholic exorcisms, lourds and even miraculous sainthood.
Movies abound that cover this subject from zombies coming alive and the dead leaving their graves. Of course there are professional debunkers who loathe this manifestation of the healing professions of today and the past in spite of the successes of plastic surgeons, the brahmins of body ego and only accept orthodox medical practice. Of course Semmelweiss taught doctors to wash their hands and revealed the dangers of blood contamination. It took Lewis Pasteur to discover the microscopic world of disease bacteria fungi and viruses.
In Thailand the royal Thai family has withdrawn from Singapore medical clinics because of rip offs and overcharging - a sign of the times in this no-money no-honey culture. Personally as a physician and child psychiatrist I actually met John of God a genius Mozart gifted healer in Brazil. Even the Pope acknowledges his gifts and hundreds visit his healing centre in long lines of buses coming for help the desperate from all over the world. He can actually read and manipulate the vibrations and fields surrounding human beings who are ill and diseased.
Like a brilliant orchestra conductor he leads dozens of Brazilians into an altered state of consciousness all Roman Catholics. In many cases he works miracles, successful psycho and physical surgical healing. He uses scalpels, tweezers and surgical techniques to operate on malignancies and even genetic defects. I was shocked as a physician that a human being can manifest this as an art form no different than let’s say persuading a depressed suffering human being from committing suicide or manifesting the stigmata of Jesus on the cross in a hypnotic trance or worshipping the Shroud of Turin or praticing altered states of consciousness like Mesmer of France.
Even voodoo practices of religious cults manifest in the real world. Movies like Avatar and Da Vinci Code play with this transpersonal aspect of human nature. Indeed medical healing can transcend the laboratory and orthodox science and the word can be a powerful healing or killing weapon. If an aboriginal witchdoctor points the bone in Australia the unfortunate victim will always die. Dramatic descriptions of Anna Hazare the Gandhian revolutionary in India who can withstand weeks of fasting which would kill an ordinary human being.
In Australia I personally met an 86 year old Aushwitz survivor whose body was irreversibly crushed in a car accident. He was in coma and the doctors gave him a few days to live calling in his wife to hold his hands because he was screaming words they could not understand. In Yiddish. “tata ich vil nicht schtarben” over and over again. A few months later his wife visited the Alfred Hospital and a few doctors went over to her to offer condolences for her dead husband. She looked backwards amazed and pointed to her husband alive and smiling. The doctors began to cry not believing this dramatic reality. Her husband because of his dead father’s great love had used his mind to mend his broken body.
Indeed mind and body are inseparably linked together and orthodox medicine is just one part of our real world which is as mysterious and unfathomable as the cosmos and eternal time. As citizens we must learn to choose mix and match to fulfill our needs and this is a very complicated business in matters of life and death.
