Heroes Not Zombies

Self healing is our default. It’s what our bodies do. It’s a characteristic of all living organisms, of all “complex adaptive systems”. It’s an evolved phenomenon without which no Life is possible.

Think of a time you’ve been injured and a bruise appears. Over a few days, without your conscious involvement, the bruise changes colour, and fades away. Usually it’s gone without a trace of having ever existed, the damaged tissues now healed.

Or of a time when you’ve had a sore throat, a bad cold, or a tummy upset. A few days on and the symptoms have gone. Your body has done what bodies do. It’s healed.

But sometimes healing doesn’t return the body to its previous state. Like in this photo of a tree which has been damaged, presumably in a storm, bent over, almost in half. It survived. It healed itself, but it’s a different shape now, a dramatically, strikingly different shape. That injury has become part of its story, leaving it forever changed, but still living, still growing, actually still thriving.

Sometimes self healing fails catastrophically and the creature, or the person, dies. Sometimes self healing fails and an illness becomes chronic, never going away. But in the vast majority of occasions self healing works incredibly well.

Throughout my career as a doctor I tried always to support, stimulate or nurture self healing. It’s the best medicine after all. In fact there’s no healing which isn’t self healing. The difference I might be able to make is to assist, or accelerate it.

I still find it strange that this isn’t the main lesson taught to all doctors, nurses and therapists. And I still find it uncomfortable to hear healing described in war terms, as if we have to fight, conquer or overcome some enemy disease. Those metaphors don’t sit easily with me.

Healing takes time and therapy should support it through care, support and loving attention.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing I discovered as a doctor was the uniqueness of every single patient. We heal through the, largely unconscious, strategies of adaptation. With apparently similar diagnoses and symptoms some patients will find movement helps, others that movement makes things worse. Some find heat helps, others cold. Some get increased thirst or food cravings, others don’t. And so on over a seemingly endless set of variables.

Uncovering an individual patient’s adaptive strategies is often the key to discovering how to support their systems of self healing.

There really is no one size fits all chemical or technological fix in Medicine.