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Healers in Complementary Medicine

This article reports some of the findings from an upcoming book, The New Healers: Minds and Hands in Complementary Medicine, that looks at the lives and practices of nine women who provide some sort of complementary (alternative) health care to clients. They offer a wide diversity of services that aim to restore or improve some aspect of the client's body, mind, or spirit. For lack of a better word, these practitioners have been labeled "healers." The reader should understand that that term applies only to the nine healers interviewed. I suspect their views are typical, but only further research could validate that. The women interviewed were nine practitioners among the thousands who have emerged across this nation in recent years. The therapies they use were diverse, including: acupunc ture, moxibustion, herbalogy, sound therapy, aroma therapy and essential oils, massage, neuromuscular therapy, structural integration, Reiki, guided imagery, astrology, thought- field therapy, neurofeedback, polarity therapy, color therapy, hypnosis, past lives therapy, Feng Shui, rolfing, cranio-sacral therapy, various forms of psychotherapy (often Jungian or Gestalt), and shamanic soul retrieval and negative energy extraction, among others. The healers range from persons self-educated after highschool (including certificates in various therapies) to persons with doctoral degrees. With one exception, all of these women make their living as complementary health practitioners. The exception is a professor in a major university whose complementary therapy is primarily applied to clients in her funded research. This article is not an attempt to review complementary medicine techniques. It is simply an orientation to the viewpoints of a small group of practitioners. One obvious similarity among the healers is that they are all women. Most of the women in this survey have local, regional, or state, rather than national or international, distinction. Mostly, they make their living with real live clients, not doing the speakers' circuit or promoting their latest book. I wanted to listen in depth to a few voices from this alternative medicine world. The New Healers: Minds and Hands in Complementary Medicine provides a fuller picture of the individual practitioners in frank, in-depth interviews concerning their practices, values, and philosophies. This article does not reproduce these interviews because of constrictions of space, but one could say that these women share the fact that they have given their practice a lot of thought and have their own ideas concerning how their therapies work. One shared factor is that they are all very adept at human relationships. They are concerned that others give their clients their full attention. Some of the main categories emerging from the data will be discussed here.

Complementary Health Practice Review, Vol. 5, No. 3, 217-224 (1999)
DOI: 10.1177/153321019900500305


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