In an excellent book (in French) ‘les pouvoirs de l’esprit sur le corps‘ (the powers of spirit over the body), Patrick Clairvoy, a former army doctor and now emergency doctor in a leading French hospital, details the relationship between spirit and body when it comes to healing.
Beyond an analysis of classical healing miracles, he shows that real full physical healing requires personality to evolve and blossom. Concurrently, what prevents many people to heal is the avoidance of this internal work.
The core of the book is that while modern western medicine takes a mechanistic, organ by organ approach to medicine, there is also a need for a holistic approach considering ourselves as a complex system. In this system, there are complex interactions between organs through connections we only start to discover; and our mind and spirit also plays a large role in what is happening. Therefore, healing can be greatly influenced by our mind. The miracle of the intrinsic healing powers of our body can be greatly amplified by the way we deal with the illness.
I am sure that in the next few years, this holistic approach of medicine will develop as we increasingly recognize that the mechanistic approach of medicine, while it has brought many benefits, has to be supplemented by a systemic approach.
