Support for Working through Flu (treatments which should help with coronavirus, too)
There are many small things we can do to help support each other through a flu. We can collectively work to understand “When I am sick, what is my body trying to accomplish, what does it need to do to get better?” and then we work to support those tasks. Fever is created by the immune system to physiologically aid the process of dissolving and clearing out what has become too isolated, too stuck, too cooled in our own body. Inflammatory reactions—also part of the immune system’s activity—work to recognize and remove those things that do not belong in us, which is why we get inflammations during infections with viruses and bacteria (even if we get a splinter in our finger). It is possible to guide and support the body to accomplish its tasks. The suggestions listed below are helpful for illnesses or influenza-type illnesses with strong fever.
A Fourfold Approach to Healing
There are a lot of different terms for describing therapeutic approaches that think differently from a conventional, Western-medicine approach. For a long time, they were considered to be “alternative” therapies—meaning something completely different and separate from usual medical practice. Then the term “complementary” therapies became popular—suggesting something still different from usual practice, but which could perhaps be used alongside standard treatment and enrich it. In the last few years a newer term, “integrative medicine” has come to the fore with the understanding that we need, more and more, to weave different therapeutic perspectives and healing streams together. This change in language reflects our evolving understanding, and broadening recognition that wisdom comes in many different forms.
The Integrated Care Package
There are currently places in the world where large hospitals, medical clinics and retreat centers are able to offer multi-disciplinary anthroposophic care (Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden), but the current medical model and insurance programs in the U.S. do not make this possible. This is a challenging moral quandary, as participation in insurance plans immediately creates oversight and rigid expectations around the kind of medical care that is being provided. Services must meet the “standard of care,” or practitioners face severe scrutiny, as well as potential punitive limits on medical practice and monetary fines. For these reasons we continue to make the decision that it is better to remain outside of the insurance system, recognizing that it is limiting access but it also allows us to provide a fully individualized, holistic approach to the healing process.
We would like to try to take one step towards healing that conflict.
Onions for Earaches
Every so often you encounter something that is so simple and effective, that you wonder why you didn't know about it before, and why doesn't someone put it in a “handbook” for life. One of the things that should most certainly be in that handbook, at least in the category of home treatments for common illness, is the use of an onion compress for an earache. Yes, it will make you or your child smell like onions, and it sounds ridiculously simple, but in the middle of the night it can really be your friend.
Is there a link between the body and the mind, the soul, the spirit?
This question strikes at the very heart of anthroposophic medicine, because the answer is: yes! This is done out of the fundamental understanding that the human being's physical body is indeed a miraculous structural and biochemical organization. But there is more to a person than the physical body with its bones, muscles and organs, and this “more” can be observed and worked with. This larger perspective is actually part of almost every healing tradition around the world–what makes anthroposophic medicine unique is that it is trying to bridge that broader spiritual understanding with modern scientific insights. Everyone who practices anthroposophic medicine has done a full conventional medical training, and then does extra study and training to incorporate a truly holistic picture (body, soul and spirit) into medicine.