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The Profound Importance of Language in Cultural Dynamics
Author’s Accepted Manuscript The Profound Importance of Language in Cultural Dynamics David Hufford
www.elsevier.com/locate/jsch
PII: DOI: Reference:
S1550-8307(17)30114-3 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2017.04.009 JSCH2200
To appear in: Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing Cite this article as: David Hufford, The Profound Importance of Language in Cultural Dynamics, Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2017.04.009 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting galley proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
SETION HEAD: COMMENTARY The Profound Importance of Language in Cultural Dynamics David Hufford, PhD
In his reflections on usages of the word healing Professor Levin has, as he always does, given us an erudite and detailed analysis. In this case, however, I believe that his commitment to technical precision has led him into problematic territory. Healing is a very old natural language term. That is to say, it arose and developed in ordinary speech. When modern technical language appropriates natural language terms, and then seeks to rehabilitate them for technical use, serious difficulties are often created. Natural language terms always carry complex connotations and ambiguities. To the extent technical revision renders such terms useful in technical discourse by reducing this complexity, it creates equivocation when natural and technical discourse overlap. A related example is the increasingly popular term spirituality. Spirituality and health researchers have spent a great deal of effort on “fixing” the meaning of this word for use in medical research, but have only rendered it more vague and distant from its ordinary meaning in English, a meaning that has been stable for centuries. Spirituality has been endlessly redefined “officially” to focus it on that which “creates meaning” for people, a definition linked to the influential modern theologian Paul Tillich. This provides a functional meaning that avoids issues of spiritual belief. But in fact the meaning of spirituality in ordinary discourse is inherently linked to belief. It means that which is associated with spirits, the non-material aspect of a material creature. This meaning is thoroughly documented by modern lexicography. (Hufford. 2012, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 1993). As a direct result of the technical redefinition of the term, the discourse of spirituality and health research often misses central issues of belief and consistently conflates psychological and spiritual referents. Professor Levin’s efforts to turn healing into a concise biomedical term has a similar effect. In his abstract he states that “For biomedicine healing mainly concerns repair of wounds or lesions.” He goes on to discuss and criticize a great many broader meanings of healing, saying that the word “has become a default label for the restoration of goodness and righteousness in every human sphere, a concept that evokes a positive response and universal endorsement and thus comes to mean whatever anyone wishes it to mean applied to any setting.” (ms. p. 17) What he decries as a weakness is, in fact, a natural extension of the word’s proper meaning in English. That meaning is almost the biomedical meaning; except that Levin’s phrasing of the biomedical term consistently, and I would say, incorrectly, employs verbs suggesting medical intervention, most frequently repair. At one point he goes so far as to state that healing refers to “the curing of disease.” (ms. p.1) But the traditional meaning of healing refers to a naturally occurring process arising within the subject. A surgeon does not heal your wound. If the surgeon must suture the wound this is an intervention intended to facilitate healing, in other cases the decision may be that the wound will heal without sutures. In either case the healing is not being done by the doctor, the healing is being done by processes arising within the wounded subject. Healing originates in the ancient Indo-European root word kailo meaning whole, uninjured or of good omen. Some of the words etymologically related to healing are health, whole, hale (as in hale and hearty), halo and hallowed. As Levin says, we do not find a word’s “true meaning” by “deconstructing its etymology” (ms. p.4 ) However, contemporary lexical meanings often reflect and can be clarified by their etymological history. This is the case with healing. The contemporary meanings that Levin finds confusing and excessively broad have actually been part of the term’s semantic core for centuries. Wholeness, the
state of being uninjured, is the endpoint of wound healing. Holiness and several other words related to kailo indicate the spiritual connotation of healing, a connotation that suggests both an inner resource (as opposed to an intervention) and a supernatural link. First, healing as the result of an inner resource accounts for biomedicine’s limiting of the term to tissue, wounds, broken bones, torn ligaments, etcetera. Other aspects of modern medicine have tended to be more anti-disease (antibiotics, chemotherapy, amputation, etcetera) than pro-healing. This is neither exclusionary nor dichotomous. The antibiotic treatment of a bacterial infection can certainly facilitate the healing that follows the end of infection. And biomedicine does suggest rest, healthy diet and other pro-healing factors. But modern biomedicine is known for its aggressive interventions, just as CAM is known for its cultivation of practices that promote healing from within. The lexical difference between these two points of view is therefore understandable. At the same time biomedicine, partly in response to the success of CAM, has increasingly focused on the support and enhancement of natural healing processes as an active goal. But, nonetheless, much of what Profesor Levin sees as ambiguity and “lax” language is actually appropriate use of healing in its traditional sense. Concerning CAM healing, Professor Levin seems particularly worried about the spiritually oriented use of the term, of which he says, “Throughout the literature on this subject, the multiple conflicting usages of “healing” seem to be especially confounded.” (ms. p. 13) He gives as examples of the problem, prayer “energy work,” help for a spiritual problems, improvement in one’s relationship with God, spiritual growth, and work with the chakras or subtle bodies. (ms. pp. 13-14) Here we find the biomedical redefinition of spiritual, noted at the beginning of my comments, interacting with the problems defining healing. If we accept the natural language meaning of healing discussed above, and the long standing meaning of spiritual as referring to the non-physical aspect of a material being, the multiple usages of healing that Levin finds confounded all seem clear and consistent. Subtle energies, chakras, relationship with God, spiritual growth, all of these topics fit comfortably within spiritual belief traditions as naturally (in the normal course, not as opposed to supernatural!) occurring aspects of whole persons that may generate healing or may be in need of healing. This also solves Professor Levin’s problem with the way that healing is variously used in connection with interventions, processes and outcomes. The surgeon who sutures a wound facilitates the natural healing processes and “healed” describes the hoped for outcome of those facilitated processes. The biomedical usage includes all three. In spiritual healing spiritual interventions similarly work toward the mobilization of spiritual processes believed to be capable of healing. Intercessory prayer seeks Divine spiritual intervention, spiritual counseling seeks to assist the subject in accessing their innate spiritual resources. Intervention, process and outcome are all seen as spiritual and as healing. Spiritual healing, though, cannot be expected to be a single and cohesive set of beliefs and practices (even modern medicine is not quite that!), given the diversity of spiritual belief traditions. Nonetheless, when one accepts the fundamental meaning of spiritual (quite apart from whether one shares any of these beliefs) the diverse examples noted by Levin do relate coherently. And they no more contradict medical uses of the term healing than internal medicine contradicts behavioral medicine, different though they are. Another issue arises from Professor Levin’s criticism of usages of spiritual healing. Noting that “ ‘Spiritual healing,’ for many medical professionals connotes fraudulent faith healers” even though the term is “valuably used as a descriptor” for many respectable traditions from psychotherapy to pastoral care. (ms. p. 14) He then adds that “The connection between faith and healing ... has a solid naturalistic foundation theoretically.” (ms. p. 14). I would agree with both of these points but not with the conclusion he draws from them, saying that if “spiritual healing remains fringe among scholars and scientists, no matter a potentially substantive value, then its proponents have mostly themselves to blame. There is a price for playing fast and loose with words and concepts and for laxity in defining what it is one is about.” (ms. p. 15) As I have already indicated I do not agree that spiritual healing advocates are, as a group lax, in their
language; certainly some are, but so are many scholars and scientists when they speak of spiritual healing. In particular the use of fraud and quack are often used as an assumption, unargued and without evidence other than the speaker’s dis-belief that healing claims could be true as described. That is lax language indeed. The insistence that those with spiritual beliefs should yield to “naturalistic explanations” if they wish to be taken seriously shows a serious misunderstanding of the cultural, lexical and epistemological dynamics involved here. In closing I find Professor Levin’s analysis here to be an effort to appropriate the traditional language of both healing and spirituality for biomedical use in a way that would facilitate the full assimilation of spiritual practice and belief to a reductive biomedical framework. I am not attributing that to Professor Levin as a conscious intention, but terminological disputes often have motivations and consequences not visible to the participants. This illustrates the profound importance of language in cultural dynamics and underlines my longtime conviction that definition of terms very often has a covert political function.
WORKS CITED
David Hufford. 2012. Methodology. In Oxford Textbook of Spirituality in Healthcare. M. Cobb, C. Puchalski, B. Rumbold, Eds. Oxford University Press, 2012(309-322). _____. 2010a. Strengths and Weaknesses in the Field of Spirituality and Health. In William Grassie, Editor. Advanced Methodologies in the Scientific Study of Relgion and Spirituality. Philadelphia: Metanexus Institute, 2010(73-116). ____. 2010b. Visionary Spiritual Experiences in an Enchanted World. Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 35, Issue 2 (2010):142–158. _____. 2010c. Hufford, DJ, MJ Fritts, JE Rhodes. Spiritual fitness. Military Medicine. Vol. 175 (August 2010). Supplement: TOTAL FORCE FITNESS.... Eds. WB Jonas, G O’Connor, P Deuster, C Macedonia. _____. 1993. Epistemologies of Religious Healing. In K. Danner Clouser and David J. Hufford, editors, "Nonorthodox Medical Systems: Their Epistemological Presuppositions," Thematic issue of The Journal of Philosophy and Medicine. 18 (1993):175-94.
NOTES
The other place in medicine where the term healing is often used is in psychological medicine, where, as in treating wounds, much therapy is oriented to facilitating the operation of inner resources. These include the following: hale (as in "hale and hearty"); health; whole; holy. The ancient connection of wholeness and holiness with healing gives us some indication of why the connotations of healing have always been larger than the connotations of "curing.” One may or may not be made whole by being cured of a specific condition, depending on how whole one was to begin with. A successful cure or remedy, however, is not likely to be said to have made the patient more "holy." It is not, then, that modern
or ancient meanings exclude the approaches of modern medicine, but rather that, they are broader. To oversimplify in a manner that has been rather popular lately we might say that traditional medicine has been more concerned with disease than with health and wholeness. The word "healing" is occasionally used today in the context of modern medicine, as when it is said that a "wound is healing," but the connotations of the word currently tend to set it apart from medicine, Universities have colleges of medicine; none that I know of has a college of healing, Medical doctors are generally called "doctors" or perhaps "physicians," but rarely "healers" except at times when one wishes to make a special point about a particular physician or when speaking with an historical flourish, as in "the healing arts." A newspaper piece about "healing" is much more likely to concern religious healing, or the use of health foods, or meditation than drugs or surgery.
MODERN ENGLISH DERIVATIONS FROM THE ANCIENT INDO-EUROPEAN ROOT KAILO
kailo (whole, uninjured, of good omen) health
wholeness
holiness
hallowed
Wassail
Although to some extent these connotations of "healing" represent modern developments, such as the holistic health movement, they also reflect the very ancient history of the word "healing" and the history of medicine in recent centuries. A series of English words, including some that we do not always associate with one another, are related to "healing" and have all developed from the single ancient Indo-European root word kailo meaning whole, uninjured or of good omen. These include the following: hale (as in "hale and hearty"); hea;lth; whole; holy. The ancient connection of wholeness and holiness with healing gives us some indication of why the connotations of healing have always been larger than the connotations of "curing.” One may or may not be made whole by being cured of a specific condition, depending on how whole one was to begin with. A successful cure or remedy, however, is not likely to be said to have made the patient more "holy." It is not, then, that modern or ancient meanings exclude the approaches of modern medicine, but rather that, they are broader. To oversimplify in a manner that has been rather popular lately we might say that traditional medicine has been more concerned with disease than with health and wholeness.
The connection of "holiness" with healing goes further still beyond the traditional boundaries of medicine. While it has long been recognized that medical healers and priests were often the same persons in ancient cultures, the separation of religious and medical functions has generally been viewed as a progressive accomplishment of medicine. This was one of the most fundamental steps in the specialization of function in modern medicine that has brought so much technological advancement, but the human consequences of which have begun to be questioned. At all events, I have selected the term "healing systems" because it does have connotations that include health practices and beliefs beyond medicine (such as religious healing, herbalism, powwow and other traditions that we will be discussing); because it does suggest positive wholeness and health; because it does have connotations of spirituality, and this is a common thread running through most "alternative healing systems," in varying proportions; and because it does not exclude modern medicine.
AUTHOR BIO David Hufford is a Senior Fellow for Spirituality in the Center for Brain, Mind and Healing at the Samueli Institute, and Professor and Director at the Doctors Kienle Center for Humanistic Medicine at the Penn State College of Medicine.
www.elsevier.com/locate/jsch
PII: DOI: Reference:
S1550-8307(17)30114-3 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2017.04.009 JSCH2200
To appear in: Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing Cite this article as: David Hufford, The Profound Importance of Language in Cultural Dynamics, Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2017.04.009 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting galley proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
SETION HEAD: COMMENTARY The Profound Importance of Language in Cultural Dynamics David Hufford, PhD
In his reflections on usages of the word healing Professor Levin has, as he always does, given us an erudite and detailed analysis. In this case, however, I believe that his commitment to technical precision has led him into problematic territory. Healing is a very old natural language term. That is to say, it arose and developed in ordinary speech. When modern technical language appropriates natural language terms, and then seeks to rehabilitate them for technical use, serious difficulties are often created. Natural language terms always carry complex connotations and ambiguities. To the extent technical revision renders such terms useful in technical discourse by reducing this complexity, it creates equivocation when natural and technical discourse overlap. A related example is the increasingly popular term spirituality. Spirituality and health researchers have spent a great deal of effort on “fixing” the meaning of this word for use in medical research, but have only rendered it more vague and distant from its ordinary meaning in English, a meaning that has been stable for centuries. Spirituality has been endlessly redefined “officially” to focus it on that which “creates meaning” for people, a definition linked to the influential modern theologian Paul Tillich. This provides a functional meaning that avoids issues of spiritual belief. But in fact the meaning of spirituality in ordinary discourse is inherently linked to belief. It means that which is associated with spirits, the non-material aspect of a material creature. This meaning is thoroughly documented by modern lexicography. (Hufford. 2012, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 1993). As a direct result of the technical redefinition of the term, the discourse of spirituality and health research often misses central issues of belief and consistently conflates psychological and spiritual referents. Professor Levin’s efforts to turn healing into a concise biomedical term has a similar effect. In his abstract he states that “For biomedicine healing mainly concerns repair of wounds or lesions.” He goes on to discuss and criticize a great many broader meanings of healing, saying that the word “has become a default label for the restoration of goodness and righteousness in every human sphere, a concept that evokes a positive response and universal endorsement and thus comes to mean whatever anyone wishes it to mean applied to any setting.” (ms. p. 17) What he decries as a weakness is, in fact, a natural extension of the word’s proper meaning in English. That meaning is almost the biomedical meaning; except that Levin’s phrasing of the biomedical term consistently, and I would say, incorrectly, employs verbs suggesting medical intervention, most frequently repair. At one point he goes so far as to state that healing refers to “the curing of disease.” (ms. p.1) But the traditional meaning of healing refers to a naturally occurring process arising within the subject. A surgeon does not heal your wound. If the surgeon must suture the wound this is an intervention intended to facilitate healing, in other cases the decision may be that the wound will heal without sutures. In either case the healing is not being done by the doctor, the healing is being done by processes arising within the wounded subject. Healing originates in the ancient Indo-European root word kailo meaning whole, uninjured or of good omen. Some of the words etymologically related to healing are health, whole, hale (as in hale and hearty), halo and hallowed. As Levin says, we do not find a word’s “true meaning” by “deconstructing its etymology” (ms. p.4 ) However, contemporary lexical meanings often reflect and can be clarified by their etymological history. This is the case with healing. The contemporary meanings that Levin finds confusing and excessively broad have actually been part of the term’s semantic core for centuries. Wholeness, the
state of being uninjured, is the endpoint of wound healing. Holiness and several other words related to kailo indicate the spiritual connotation of healing, a connotation that suggests both an inner resource (as opposed to an intervention) and a supernatural link. First, healing as the result of an inner resource accounts for biomedicine’s limiting of the term to tissue, wounds, broken bones, torn ligaments, etcetera. Other aspects of modern medicine have tended to be more anti-disease (antibiotics, chemotherapy, amputation, etcetera) than pro-healing. This is neither exclusionary nor dichotomous. The antibiotic treatment of a bacterial infection can certainly facilitate the healing that follows the end of infection. And biomedicine does suggest rest, healthy diet and other pro-healing factors. But modern biomedicine is known for its aggressive interventions, just as CAM is known for its cultivation of practices that promote healing from within. The lexical difference between these two points of view is therefore understandable. At the same time biomedicine, partly in response to the success of CAM, has increasingly focused on the support and enhancement of natural healing processes as an active goal. But, nonetheless, much of what Profesor Levin sees as ambiguity and “lax” language is actually appropriate use of healing in its traditional sense. Concerning CAM healing, Professor Levin seems particularly worried about the spiritually oriented use of the term, of which he says, “Throughout the literature on this subject, the multiple conflicting usages of “healing” seem to be especially confounded.” (ms. p. 13) He gives as examples of the problem, prayer “energy work,” help for a spiritual problems, improvement in one’s relationship with God, spiritual growth, and work with the chakras or subtle bodies. (ms. pp. 13-14) Here we find the biomedical redefinition of spiritual, noted at the beginning of my comments, interacting with the problems defining healing. If we accept the natural language meaning of healing discussed above, and the long standing meaning of spiritual as referring to the non-physical aspect of a material being, the multiple usages of healing that Levin finds confounded all seem clear and consistent. Subtle energies, chakras, relationship with God, spiritual growth, all of these topics fit comfortably within spiritual belief traditions as naturally (in the normal course, not as opposed to supernatural!) occurring aspects of whole persons that may generate healing or may be in need of healing. This also solves Professor Levin’s problem with the way that healing is variously used in connection with interventions, processes and outcomes. The surgeon who sutures a wound facilitates the natural healing processes and “healed” describes the hoped for outcome of those facilitated processes. The biomedical usage includes all three. In spiritual healing spiritual interventions similarly work toward the mobilization of spiritual processes believed to be capable of healing. Intercessory prayer seeks Divine spiritual intervention, spiritual counseling seeks to assist the subject in accessing their innate spiritual resources. Intervention, process and outcome are all seen as spiritual and as healing. Spiritual healing, though, cannot be expected to be a single and cohesive set of beliefs and practices (even modern medicine is not quite that!), given the diversity of spiritual belief traditions. Nonetheless, when one accepts the fundamental meaning of spiritual (quite apart from whether one shares any of these beliefs) the diverse examples noted by Levin do relate coherently. And they no more contradict medical uses of the term healing than internal medicine contradicts behavioral medicine, different though they are. Another issue arises from Professor Levin’s criticism of usages of spiritual healing. Noting that “ ‘Spiritual healing,’ for many medical professionals connotes fraudulent faith healers” even though the term is “valuably used as a descriptor” for many respectable traditions from psychotherapy to pastoral care. (ms. p. 14) He then adds that “The connection between faith and healing ... has a solid naturalistic foundation theoretically.” (ms. p. 14). I would agree with both of these points but not with the conclusion he draws from them, saying that if “spiritual healing remains fringe among scholars and scientists, no matter a potentially substantive value, then its proponents have mostly themselves to blame. There is a price for playing fast and loose with words and concepts and for laxity in defining what it is one is about.” (ms. p. 15) As I have already indicated I do not agree that spiritual healing advocates are, as a group lax, in their
language; certainly some are, but so are many scholars and scientists when they speak of spiritual healing. In particular the use of fraud and quack are often used as an assumption, unargued and without evidence other than the speaker’s dis-belief that healing claims could be true as described. That is lax language indeed. The insistence that those with spiritual beliefs should yield to “naturalistic explanations” if they wish to be taken seriously shows a serious misunderstanding of the cultural, lexical and epistemological dynamics involved here. In closing I find Professor Levin’s analysis here to be an effort to appropriate the traditional language of both healing and spirituality for biomedical use in a way that would facilitate the full assimilation of spiritual practice and belief to a reductive biomedical framework. I am not attributing that to Professor Levin as a conscious intention, but terminological disputes often have motivations and consequences not visible to the participants. This illustrates the profound importance of language in cultural dynamics and underlines my longtime conviction that definition of terms very often has a covert political function.
WORKS CITED
David Hufford. 2012. Methodology. In Oxford Textbook of Spirituality in Healthcare. M. Cobb, C. Puchalski, B. Rumbold, Eds. Oxford University Press, 2012(309-322). _____. 2010a. Strengths and Weaknesses in the Field of Spirituality and Health. In William Grassie, Editor. Advanced Methodologies in the Scientific Study of Relgion and Spirituality. Philadelphia: Metanexus Institute, 2010(73-116). ____. 2010b. Visionary Spiritual Experiences in an Enchanted World. Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 35, Issue 2 (2010):142–158. _____. 2010c. Hufford, DJ, MJ Fritts, JE Rhodes. Spiritual fitness. Military Medicine. Vol. 175 (August 2010). Supplement: TOTAL FORCE FITNESS.... Eds. WB Jonas, G O’Connor, P Deuster, C Macedonia. _____. 1993. Epistemologies of Religious Healing. In K. Danner Clouser and David J. Hufford, editors, "Nonorthodox Medical Systems: Their Epistemological Presuppositions," Thematic issue of The Journal of Philosophy and Medicine. 18 (1993):175-94.
NOTES
The other place in medicine where the term healing is often used is in psychological medicine, where, as in treating wounds, much therapy is oriented to facilitating the operation of inner resources. These include the following: hale (as in "hale and hearty"); health; whole; holy. The ancient connection of wholeness and holiness with healing gives us some indication of why the connotations of healing have always been larger than the connotations of "curing.” One may or may not be made whole by being cured of a specific condition, depending on how whole one was to begin with. A successful cure or remedy, however, is not likely to be said to have made the patient more "holy." It is not, then, that modern
or ancient meanings exclude the approaches of modern medicine, but rather that, they are broader. To oversimplify in a manner that has been rather popular lately we might say that traditional medicine has been more concerned with disease than with health and wholeness. The word "healing" is occasionally used today in the context of modern medicine, as when it is said that a "wound is healing," but the connotations of the word currently tend to set it apart from medicine, Universities have colleges of medicine; none that I know of has a college of healing, Medical doctors are generally called "doctors" or perhaps "physicians," but rarely "healers" except at times when one wishes to make a special point about a particular physician or when speaking with an historical flourish, as in "the healing arts." A newspaper piece about "healing" is much more likely to concern religious healing, or the use of health foods, or meditation than drugs or surgery.
MODERN ENGLISH DERIVATIONS FROM THE ANCIENT INDO-EUROPEAN ROOT KAILO
kailo (whole, uninjured, of good omen) health
wholeness
holiness
hallowed
Wassail
Although to some extent these connotations of "healing" represent modern developments, such as the holistic health movement, they also reflect the very ancient history of the word "healing" and the history of medicine in recent centuries. A series of English words, including some that we do not always associate with one another, are related to "healing" and have all developed from the single ancient Indo-European root word kailo meaning whole, uninjured or of good omen. These include the following: hale (as in "hale and hearty"); hea;lth; whole; holy. The ancient connection of wholeness and holiness with healing gives us some indication of why the connotations of healing have always been larger than the connotations of "curing.” One may or may not be made whole by being cured of a specific condition, depending on how whole one was to begin with. A successful cure or remedy, however, is not likely to be said to have made the patient more "holy." It is not, then, that modern or ancient meanings exclude the approaches of modern medicine, but rather that, they are broader. To oversimplify in a manner that has been rather popular lately we might say that traditional medicine has been more concerned with disease than with health and wholeness.
The connection of "holiness" with healing goes further still beyond the traditional boundaries of medicine. While it has long been recognized that medical healers and priests were often the same persons in ancient cultures, the separation of religious and medical functions has generally been viewed as a progressive accomplishment of medicine. This was one of the most fundamental steps in the specialization of function in modern medicine that has brought so much technological advancement, but the human consequences of which have begun to be questioned. At all events, I have selected the term "healing systems" because it does have connotations that include health practices and beliefs beyond medicine (such as religious healing, herbalism, powwow and other traditions that we will be discussing); because it does suggest positive wholeness and health; because it does have connotations of spirituality, and this is a common thread running through most "alternative healing systems," in varying proportions; and because it does not exclude modern medicine.
AUTHOR BIO David Hufford is a Senior Fellow for Spirituality in the Center for Brain, Mind and Healing at the Samueli Institute, and Professor and Director at the Doctors Kienle Center for Humanistic Medicine at the Penn State College of Medicine.