ReflectionsWhat is “Healing”?: Reflections on Diagnostic Criteria, Nosology, and Etiology
Section snippets
“Diagnostic Criteria”: Definitions of Healing
So, again, the question is posed: what is healing? Upon close inspection, two distinct approaches to answering this question can be identified. One, which we might term the classical approach to defining healing, is based on prevailing usages within biomedicine, both clinical practice and the basic sciences. The other, which can be termed the alternative approach, derives from usages found within the CAM arena and within discussions from substantive areas even further afield, such as among
“Nosology”: Dimensions of Healing
These observations are conditioned not just by how healing is defined, but by how for years it has been typologized, taxonomized, categorized, classified, and generally cut and diced. For CAM, the laxity in defining healing, simultaneously, as an intervention, outcome, process, and so on goes hand in hand with the laxity in its application to describe resolution of every individual, interpersonal, or societal woe. Likewise, for biomedicine, the stringency in defining healing narrowly as just
“Etiology”: Determinants of Healing
To review, we have considered two broad conceptual approaches to the term “healing.” The first approach consists of a couple of usages confined almost exclusively to biomedicine: healing as the repair of tissue wounds, and healing as the recovery from a pathogenic (disease) state. The second approach consists of competing usages found almost exclusively in CAM: healing-as-intervention, healing-as-process, and healing-as-outcome. Moreover, in the CAM context especially, healing is considered to
Conclusions
To summarize, healing is a word and concept that has been and is still subject to a multiplicity of competing and often conflicting usages. In various contexts and by various authors, it may refer to an intervention, the outcome of an intervention, or the process by which the outcome occurs. Each of these is considered by some to define “healing.” One may observe different patterns of usage between biomedical scientists and clinicians, on the one hand, and CAM practitioners and New-Age writers,
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