Where Traditional Healing Practices and Contemporary Approaches to Healing Converge and Where They Do Not
By Emily Ireland
Modern medicine has given us extraordinary tools for treating illness, among them pharmaceuticals developed through precise understandings of chemistry and biology. Yet human well-being has never depended upon medication alone. Across cultures and centuries, people have turned to medicinal plants, ritual, touch, movement, dialogue, spiritual practice and connection with community as part of healing.
There is more continuity between these worlds than we are usually aware of. Many modern medicines trace their origins to substances found in nature, and plants have provided important starting points for drug discovery. Modern pharmacology, however, generally seeks to identify which constituent of a natural substance is producing a particular biological effect. Scientific inquiry requires isolation to allow researchers to study mechanism, establish dosage and determine more precisely what a substance does.
What Can Be Lost in the Modern Process
A medicinal plant is not a single molecule. It may contain hundreds of constituents interacting with one another, and research into botanical medicines has shown that these interactions can be synergistic, additive or antagonistic.
By eliminating the entire plant or natural resource in favor of an isolated constituent, we may also remove ingredients that assist, buffer or further empower the primary mechanism of action. When we separate the whole into pieces, we can sometimes diminish some of the powerful effects that made the original medicine valuable.
The behavior of the whole cannot always be predicted by studying each of its parts independently.
The same question extends beyond plants and into our understanding of the person receiving care. Scientific research necessarily separates variables. We study the brain, the heart, the breath, behavior, emotion and physiology so that each can be measured. Human beings, however, do not experience themselves in pieces. Breath changes heart rate. Emotion changes physiology. Relationship to our environment changes our sense of safety. Meaning changes how an experience is carried. Traditional healing systems have often situated medicine within this larger field, joining the physical remedy to ritual, relationship, community, story, place or spiritual meaning.
The act of separating variables can also influence what we ultimately conclude is true. A study can be carefully designed and statistically persuasive while still failing to capture important qualities that were removed to make the subject measurable. What we choose to isolate, what we decide to measure and what we leave outside the frame all shape the answer we receive. In this sense, science can sometimes “prove” the question it has constructed while missing the larger phenomenon it intended to understand. The result can be an incomplete truth presented as though it were whole.
A similar problem can occur in medicine. When an intervention is designed to alter one pathway, symptom or biological mechanism, its effects do not necessarily remain confined there. The human body is an interconnected system, and changing one part can produce consequences elsewhere. Some of those consequences present as adverse effects, which may themselves require additional intervention and can contribute to further cycles of treatment and illness.
Many Indigenous healing traditions have long approached the human being as something more than a collection of separate physical systems. Plants and other substances derived from the natural world may be used in their whole form, and the medicine itself can extend beyond the substance. Ritual, prayer, touch, story, relationship and participation by family or community may all belong to the healing process. Physical and spiritual well-being are not necessarily treated as separate concerns, because the person receiving care is understood within a larger web of body, spirit, community and place.
Contemporary practitioners have sometimes arrived at similar whole-person approaches through very different traditions. One example was the work of osteopathic physician Dr. John E. Upledger, whose teachings led me to think differently about trauma and the artificial boundaries we often draw between mind, body and spirit.
Upledger’s path to medicine was itself unusual. As a Coast Guard medic in the 1950s, he once performed an appendectomy aboard a ship caught in the eye of a hurricane, guided by an onshore surgeon over the radio. He later described this as a life-changing experience that led him to become a physician. In 1970, as an osteopathic physician assisting during spinal surgery, he encountered another experience that would redirect his professional life. While trying to hold the membrane surrounding the spinal cord still for the surgeon, he observed a rhythmic movement he could not account for through the medical explanations available to him at the time.
Rather than dismissing what he had observed because it did not fit the prevailing model, Upledger pursued the question. His investigation eventually took him to Michigan State University, where, from 1975 to 1983, he worked as a clinical researcher and professor of biomechanics and led a multidisciplinary research team examining cranial and dural movement. From that work, he developed what became known as CranioSacral Therapy.
His inquiry did not remain confined to anatomy. Upledger later developed, with biophysicist Dr. Zvi Karni, SomatoEmotional Release, a method grounded in their belief that physical trauma and emotional experience could not always be meaningfully separated. The work incorporated touch, movement, imagery and dialogue, allowing the physical and emotional dimensions of an experience to be approached together.
His work has had a lasting influence primarily because he was willing to study what was previously unexplainable, not to fulfill his own expectations or those of the established medical community. His work is possible because he was able to see the person as a whole.
What Can Be Reclaimed Through the Ancient Ways
Holistic approaches to health are not the inheritance of any one people. Indigenous cultures, Asian medical traditions and the ancestral healing systems of Europe and elsewhere all developed ways of caring for human beings long before the emergence of contemporary Western medicine. Their philosophies and practices differed enormously, but many shared an understanding that health could not always be separated neatly into physical, emotional, communal and spiritual parts.
According to Dr. Eduardo Duran, a clinical psychologist whose work has focused on Indigenous healing, historical trauma and the “soul wound,” harm can also occur when Western scientific methods become the only acceptable means by which these traditions are permitted to demonstrate their value. A healing practice may have been observed, refined and passed through generations for centuries or even millennia, yet still be regarded as lacking legitimacy because its knowledge was not produced through the methods modern science recognizes as evidence.
Duran poses the deceptively simple question: “Traditional healing methods have been in our communities for thousands of years. Why aren’t those evidence based?”
Traditional Asian medical systems, for example, have existed and evolved across thousands of years, supported not only by written traditions but by generations of practitioners and the people who continue to seek their care. Indigenous healing knowledge has likewise survived through observation, practice, relationship and transmission across generations. To dismiss all of that accumulated knowledge because it does not arrive in the form of a randomized controlled trial is not necessarily scientific rigor. It may instead reveal how narrowly we have chosen to define evidence.
What happens when a system designed to help begins privileging its methods, institutions, or definitions of evidence over the needs of the person receiving care?
The principle commonly expressed today as “first, do no harm” reflects an enduring ethical commitment within medicine. In the Hippocratic tradition, physicians pledged to avoid actions that could injure their patients, to refrain from administering deadly medicine, and to conduct themselves without deliberate wrongdoing.
At its core, that tradition of medical ethics rests on two enduring principles: care should be directed toward the good of the person who is ill, and the needs and dignity of the patient should remain central to that care, including the protection of privacy.
A Harvard Health article examining the principle of “first, do no harm” argues that some degree of harm is often unavoidable in medicine. Surgery injures tissue in order to repair or save the body. A biopsy can cause pain or bleeding in the effort to discover disease. The Harvard Health author therefore proposes a more practical standard: physicians should recommend interventions when their potential benefits outweigh their risks.
Yet perhaps the deeper question is not simply how much harm we are willing to accept in exchange for benefit. It is whether we have considered the full range of ways in which benefit might be achieved.
When traditional, holistic or culturally rooted healing practices are dismissed before they are allowed into that conversation, the calculation itself becomes incomplete. A medical system may find itself repeatedly choosing among interventions that carry significant risks while overlooking approaches that could support the person before, during or after surgery, trauma, illness, or emotional and spiritual injury. Excluding entire bodies of healing knowledge can itself become a form of harm.
A method intended to protect patients can itself become harmful when allegiance to the method outweighs responsiveness to the person.
The problem is therefore larger than one physician’s interpretation of the Hippocratic principle. It is a question of what modern medicine permits itself to draw upon. If our understanding of care included more of what humanity has learned across ancient and contemporary healing traditions, we might not need to accept the same degree of suffering as inevitable. We could ask not only whether the benefits of an intervention outweigh its harm, but what other resources might assist, buffer or strengthen the healing process itself. A health system that asks that broader question has the possibility of producing something more than survival from illness. It can support greater health, resilience and human productivity throughout society.
Harm can arise not only from what medicine does, but also from what its framework prevents it from seeing. This is not to deny the extraordinary value of contemporary medicine or surgery. Modern medicine can be lifesaving, even miraculous, particularly when it is needed and used appropriately. Yet holistic medical philosophy, by its own principle of wholeness, does not require us to reject one form of medicine to embrace another. Quite the opposite: the healer’s arsenal should include all that is available to us and appropriate to the person who needs care.
The same principle applies beyond the medicinal plant. A therapeutic practice may likewise contain elements that cannot simply be removed without changing the medicine itself. A ritual or ceremony welcoming a Warrior home, for example, can be necessary to the healing process. Community participation, recognition, storytelling, spiritual meaning and the formal acknowledgment that the Warrior has crossed from one state of being into another may themselves be fundamental components of the medicine.
The Warrior offers an especially powerful example. Across many traditional Warrior cultures, returning from battle was not understood simply as the physical act of arriving home. The community participated in the Warrior’s transition out of the war world and back into communal life. The Warrior was acknowledged, received, sometimes purified, listened to and given a recognized place among the people once again. When those elements disappear, a significant part of the healing work disappears with them.
The whole human being returns from war: body, mind, spirit, identity, memory and relationship. How the Warrior understands what happened, how the community receives what has been done and endured, and how that society supports the transition back to civilian life cannot easily be separated from recovery. Treating only the brain or mind, or providing medicine only to the body, risks overlooking the human need for recognition, belonging, meaning and communal care. The Warrior may have returned physically while some part of the person remains caught between the world of war and the world to which he or she has returned.
Ancient societies were no strangers to prolonged suffering. Historical accounts describe anxiety, sadness, grief and the psychological and spiritual consequences of combat, including sleep disturbance, low mood and experiences resembling what we would now recognize as post-traumatic stress, long before the language of modern psychiatry existed. What differs is not the existence of human distress, but the framework through which it has been understood.
Many traditional healing systems responded to suffering through combinations of plants, food, touch, movement, prayer, ritual, relationship, spiritual practice and community. Contemporary medicine has given us another extraordinary set of resources: pharmaceuticals, surgery, emergency medicine, sophisticated imaging, neuroscience, psychotherapy and an increasingly detailed understanding of human physiology. Why discard either?
Modern life may also expose human beings to forms of sustained activation that differ in important ways from those experienced by our ancestors. Threat does not always end when the battle ends. Financial pressure, isolation, constant information, disrupted sleep, occupational demands and repeated psychological stress can keep the human system responding long after there is an immediate physical danger to escape. Contemporary science has given us increasingly sophisticated ways of describing these relationships between stress, physiology and health, but these descriptions are not the same thing as healing.
If we study chronic stress only through individual mechanisms and then attempt to alter those mechanisms one at a time, we may once again be repeating the problem of the isolated plant. The person experiencing the stress remains whole. The body, mind, spirit, relationships, environment, sense of meaning and place within a community continue to act upon one another whether our research model measures them together or not.
This is where ancient and contemporary medicine have an opportunity to meet. We do not need to abandon surgery, pharmaceuticals, psychotherapy or neuroscience to reclaim what older healing traditions understood about plants, ritual, touch, relationship, community and spirit. Nor must traditional practices be dismantled into isolated pieces before they are allowed to contribute. Ancient and contemporary healing do not need to become the same to work together. Perhaps the more complete medicine is one willing to draw from the whole healer’s arsenal.
Self-Healing
Healing is not an art or a performance, nor is it something for which we receive an award or certificate of completion. It may be the work of a lifetime, or it may occur in relatively brief moments of profound correction. What remains remarkable is the human system’s continual movement toward balance.
We can carry scars, old wounds and degeneration within our bodies without living continually in pain. We can lose a limb and remain whole human beings. We live among, and even harbor within our own bodies, viruses, bacteria, genetic vulnerabilities and the biological imprints of generations before us, yet we are not sick from all of them all the time.
Why? It is because the human body is not merely a passive recipient of its environment. It possesses an innate capacity to adapt, compensate, reorganize and correct. It can overcome or override signals of injury, cruelty, abuse and deprivation, whether those signals arise from within us, from our surroundings or even from the care designed to help us. Upledger understood this movement toward self-correction as fundamental to the healing process.
Bessel van der Kolk famously reminds us that the body keeps the score, yet the body does more than remember what has happened to it. It also knows how and where it needs to go in order to heal, continually attempting to find its way toward greater organization and balance.
Ancient wisdom passed through generations lands with us in many forms: traditional healers, families, communities, physicians and teachers such as Upledger and van der Kolk, as well as our own bodies. By using a sufficiently broad healer’s arsenal, we can choose what works for us and leave what does not.
The Warrior can become the healer, designing his own powerful arsenal that he may use at any time. Ritual, community, plants, medicine, surgery, touch, movement, dialogue, spiritual practice, psychotherapy, relationship and knowledge of his own body are all tools available to him whenever he reaches for his weapon of choice, for his own development and evolution. For he already does have everything he needs inside of him. The tools are just instruments. They show, cue, hint, support or, in a healing crisis, sometimes command his attention to where he needs to go.
Perhaps this is where traditional healing wisdom and contemporary understandings of wellness can most meaningfully converge. We do not have to choose between ancient knowledge and modern discovery. We can draw from both without dismantling either.
In our endeavor to become well, integrating ancient wisdom and modern knowledge might allow us to become even more powerful than we imagined before the trauma ever occurred. Through knowing ourselves and trusting our instincts, we can initiate extraordinarily positive changes in the human system, in our relationship with the external world and in our relationships with others. By supporting the entire human system, we can introduce balance as a concept of holistic wellness, or being whole, without forcing or expecting limited outcomes. When we are knocked off balance, we may still have faith that we can return.
Sources
- Natural Products as Sources of New Drugs over the Nearly Four Decades from 01/1981 to 09/2019, by David J. Newman and Gordon M. Cragg (Journal of Natural Products, 2020).
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jnatprod.9b01285 - Synergy and Antagonism in Natural Product Extracts: When 1 + 1 Does Not Equal 2, by Lindsay K. Caesar and Nadja B. Cech (Natural Product Reports, 2019).
https://doi.org/10.1039/C9NP00011A - The Key Role of Ceremony, by U.S. National Library of Medicine (Native Voices: Native Peoples’ Concepts of Health and Illness).
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/exhibition/healing-ways/medicine-ways/key-role-of-ceremony.html - A New Kind of Pulse, by John Greenwald (TIME, April 23, 2001).
https://time.com/archive/6690522/a-new-kind-of-pulse/ - Frequently Asked Questions, by Upledger Institute International (Upledger Institute International). Includes John E. Upledger’s 1970 surgical observation and Michigan State University research history.
https://www.upledger.com/index.php/clinical/faq - What Is SomatoEmotional Release?, by Upledger Institute International (Upledger Institute International).
https://www.upledger.com/learn/what-is-somato-emotional-release - Healing the Soul Wound: Trauma-Informed Counseling for Indigenous Communities, by Eduardo Duran (Teachers College Press, 2019).
https://www.tcpress.com/products/healing-the-soul-wound_9780807761397 - Eduardo Duran on Psychotherapy with Native Americans, by Deb Kory, PsyD (Psychotherapy.net). Interview with Eduardo Duran.
https://www.psychotherapy.net/perspectives/articles/eduardo-duran-on-psychotherapy-with-native-americans/ - Traditional Medicine, by World Health Organization (World Health Organization, Nov. 28, 2025).
https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/traditional-medicine - The History of the Hippocratic Oath, by Laura McPherson (Northeastern University ABSN, June 3, 2015).
https://absn.northeastern.edu/blog/the-history-of-the-hippocratic-oath/ - First, Do No Harm, by Robert H. Shmerling, MD (Harvard Health Publishing, updated June 22, 2020).
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/first-do-no-harm-201510138421 - Veterans Tackle PTSD with Traditional Indian Healing, by Amy Lifson (Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, January/February 2015).
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/januaryfebruary/statement/healing-spaces - Nothing New under the Sun: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders in the Ancient World, by Walid Khalid Abdul-Hamid and Jamie Hacker Hughes (Early Science and Medicine, 2014).
https://doi.org/10.1163/15733823-00196p02 - The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk (Viking, 2014).
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/313183/the-body-keeps-the-score-by-bessel-van-der-kolk-md/ - Dr. John E. Upledger Documentary: The Man Behind the Mission, by Upledger Foundation (Touch, Upledger Foundation).
https://www.upledger.org/media/video.php - Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan, by Carlos Castaneda (Washington Square Press (February 1, 1991).
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Journey-To-Ixtlan/Carlos-Castaneda/The-Teachings-of-Don-Juan/9780671732462
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Emily Ireland is the founder and CEO of Hardcore Healing, Inc., inventor of Light Touch®, and a Diplomate of the American Institute of Stress. She brings more than two decades of experience in craniosacral therapy, functional anatomy, integrative movement, and wellness research, with a focus on nervous-system regulation, resilience, and recovery. She also leads the Hero Resilience Initiative, which works to expand access to Light Touch® for first responders, veterans, and others in high-stress service communities.
As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.
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