Editorial September 23, 2002 Issue

A song of encouragement

Editor

Healthcare today moves along a continuum. At one end, there is conventional diagnosis and remedy for physical ailments. At the other end, there is spirituality, in which one looks beyond an ailment in order to relieve it—where health is reestablished by focusing on the spiritual, perfect reality, and healing is deep, thorough, and permanent.

There are many different points along this continuum. Fear and fiercely held beliefs sometimes hold many people to the material basis of treatment they have come to accept without question. They may be uncertain of the remedy, but the idea of a spiritual solution seems even more uncomfortably vague. They live in a world in which daily they see advertisements for drugs that offer to mitigate an array of illnesses they have sometimes never even heard of. Billions of dollars are spent developing and marketing these drugs, and the public is left to weigh their options.

At the same time, many are testing the waters of less material, more spiritual approaches to wellness, including healthier habits and lifestyles. They seem to gain greater self-determination and less fear of random illness. They are beginning to assert their freedom from the unpredictability of disease and of the drugs designed to address it.

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