As a physician trained in the orthodox Western model, I’ve long been aware of the astonishing achievements of modern medicine, as well as its limitations. What we, as medical doctors, can’t cut out, poison, or burn, we can only alleviate, at best. Mesmerized by cure, we know virtually nothing about healing. We can mend broken bones, transplant hearts and livers, but can do little for fractured souls and traumatized minds. Above all, we don’t seem to understand that people’s illnesses, mental or physical, are not isolated, accidental events, but the results of experiences and beliefs and lifelong patterns of relating to the world. In the face of all the evidence, medical practice separates the mind from the body and the individual from the environment. And we’re arrogant, not in the sense that we think we know everything, but in our conviction that realms of knowledge outside our awareness are not worth investigating.

I have worked in family practice, in palliative care with the terminally ill, and with addictions in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, notorious as North America’s most concentrated area of drug use. From both personal observation and the study of the new science of psychoneuroimmunology, I came to understand that often cancers, autoimmune diseases, and chronic illnesses are manifestations of lifelong emotional patterns of dissociation or repression. In turn, these patterns originate in coping mechanisms in response to early childhood emotional suffering.…