Last month a young woman who almost died at five in a lethal car accident walked into my clinic, asking for Hypnotherapy. She had been in pain, on and off, since then and it had taken six weeks in hospital for her to come out of her coma. There were a few other issues that had continued such as a partial brain injury, a few tremors etc.
We began hypnotherapy and she had one other session since. She started on a natural mix of both Bach remedies and Shell Essences, some vitamin supplements to assist. We did EMDR for the trauma and also counselling. She has taken home recordings to relax her and assist with her therapy while she is sleeping.
Her text after our last visit told me that although she was feeling better, she was not cured. My ‘ha ha’ text back answered her that it had taken her 40 odd years to get like this and unfortunately I don’t have a magic wand. I wish I did. Even if she was ‘cured’ she needs to be more than that. More importantly she needs to be healed.
I have discovered there is a big difference between being ‘cured’ and ‘healed’. As a natural therapist and not a medical practitioner we are not allowed to say we ‘cure’ anything, by law. Only a medical doctor can claim to cure in Australia. I think it’s the same for many other countries in the world. I also think it’s about time we stopped worrying about ‘cures’. There are many people out there who can be cured, but not healed. They have a temporary ‘fix’ for their illness, a reprieve enough to make them think they are OK, and they go back after a while to their old habits that made them ill in the first place. So then modern medicine tells them they had a ‘relapse’. I would like to postulate that what the law says is very true for us natural therapists. None of us can ever ‘cure’ anything and we should never settle for that.
Instead we are healers. When something is said to be cured then they are said to be relieved of the symptoms of their disease. Whilst it is true sometimes the word is used synonymously with the word healed, that should not be the case, and that should never be enough for us. We are healers. When someone is relieved of their condition (cured) it has the propensity to come back. Hence people can have relapses or be in remission. Healers are more than that – when the person is healed, the inflammation underlying the illness, the energetic cause, the psychological or cognitive misconception is thoroughly removed. So thank you for making a law that defines us better. Nature does not cure – it heals, and nothing man made can beat that.
