Preventive and Integrative Medicine emphasize the interpersonal aspects of medicine and uses high tech interventions more sparingly than conventional medicine. Lab tests are also used more sparingly and tests using radiation or possibly toxic chemicals are avoided wherever possible.  We treat the person, not the disease.  While imaging studies and blood tests can be of incredible value, they are imperfect, often inaccurate and misleading, and often cause undue anxiety. Modern medicine has come to rely on them excessively, diminishing unwisely the role of the history, physical examination, and the therapeutic relationship in the process.  Much has been gained, but much has been lost.  

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It came as a profound epiphany to me how powerful it was to experience healing passing through my own hands, when doing Bowenwork.  Touch by health practitioners has increasingly become about poking and pressing on parts of us that make us hurt, even pushing us

into psychic realms we are not ready to go. Therapeutic touch is replaced by needles penetrating our skin, endoscopes penetrating into our orifices, or sharp steel in the surgeon's grip slicing our body open.  Certainly there is a place for these interventions, but do they need to come at the expense of a therapeutic relationship, giving people the time and space as well as the emotional support to heal.  Nowadays, if you want support, you are supposed to join a support group or get therapy.  The doctor doesn't have time to address your experience of illness or healing.  Doctors have become technicians and have thrown away their human value as healers.  

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At Dynamis, I aspire to bring a more humanistic approach to healing, that includes recognizing the need to hear a narrative clearly, the need to have a safe and healing relationship, and the space to choose from different options when choices may be frightening.  We attempt to do this without sacrificing technical expertise. We seek to make technical medicine our servant, and to stop being its' slave. We also need to bring greater  humility as healers to our work, acknowledging that we have limitations both on a technical and a human level, and seek our patients forgiveness for our weaknesses.  We healers would do well to abide by the great 12th century physician Maimonides' prayer: 

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"The eternal providence has appointed me to watch over the life and health of Thy creatures. May the love for my art actuate me at all time; may neither avarice nor miserliness, nor thirst for glory or for a great reputation engage my mind; for the enemies of truth and philanthropy could easily deceive me and make me forgetful of my lofty aim of doing good to Thy children. May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain. Grant me the strength, time and opportunity always to correct what I have acquired, always to extend its domain; for knowledge is immense and the spirit of man can extend indefinitely to enrich itself daily with new requirements."

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