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Healing

A Physician's Transition Into
the Art of True Healing

By Christine Gustafson, M.D.

Ten years ago I defined healing in terms of the hospital intensive care unit in which I worked. Life support, drugs, invasive monitoring techniques and control of every aspect of human physiology were my therapeutic tools. Today, without a prescription pad, in the milieu of plants and flowing water, I nudge a patient's body and soul into the realization of its own innate ability to heal. My tools are the natural plant medicines, Medical Meditations, and the broad spectrum of Mind Body healing techniques, as well as a touch of Eastern Medical therapies. Whereas I previously treated a disease, I now treat an individual who has a disease, or wishes to prevent one. I prefer to prevent illness through simple nutritional and lifestyle changes. I prefer to teach enhancement of one's own immune system to avoid illness.

My transition from Traditional Western Allopathic Medicine to an integrative combination of traditional and alternative therapies is based on a personal journey. Through the experience of metastatic melanoma, unresponsive to all high tech medicine had to offer, I experienced the strong bond between emotion and illness, mind and body and the inextricable necessity of addressing both in healing. After one and a half years of failed treatment, I had accepted the fatal nature of my illness as dictated by my physicians. When in the ICU

(now as a dying patient rather than a healer) I experienced the near- death toward the light occurrences that I had never believed in. God has a sense of humor. I was being drawn to the light and I wanted to go. During that experience, I saw my then two year old daughter (an old soul), dressed in rags at the end of the light. I did not want to come back. I had to. I came back with knowledge of there being other ways to heal and a need to seek alternative healing modalities for my own illness. I had no intention at that time of healing others with these.

The necessity of sitting with me during the creative visualization meditations I began stirred up a dreadful component of self loathing. I am quite certain now that this had everything to do with my contracting melanoma on my face (an atypical location for this cancer) for all the world to see, and that most illness involves to an extent an irregularity of the spirit, soul or inner self. I came to realize that, no matter what I had accomplished as a mother, physician or woman, something within me gnawed restless and longing in an empty, self-pitying rejection of the norm. My soul circled around and around like a dog before it lies down.

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