Holistic Healthcare:

The BHMA, a membership charity since April 1984, is a front runner for the practice and promotion of compassionate, holistic medicine & healthcare.

But what is holistic medicine & healthcare? And what, more generally, is Holism?

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Our 3 P’s:

We want to ensure that in the future, medicine and healthcare work for Practitioner, Patient & Planet.

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What we do:

We aim to support you, our healthcare colleagues, and provide spaces for you to connect with one another.
We share resources such as our Journal of Holistic Healthcare & Integrative Medicine. And support your education as a holistic practitioner with our course.

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Health and healthcare are in crisis.

The challenges humankind faces are fueled by a planet-wide crisis that will soon affect all species. Although there has never been greater potential for us all to flourish together, simply to survive now requires deep adaptation. This process of change will force us to rethink health and healthcare. Struggling with diseases caused by poverty and unsustainable ways of life, the NHS is becoming non-viable. Nor, as the COVID19 pandemic has shown, are our political and medical systems fit to meet the oncoming public health disasters that will follow climate change. Our way forward is uncertain, but it is sure to include empowering individual and collective resilience and compassion.

Why is the BHMA needed?

Being human is complex and seems to become ever more so. When ill health strikes us, the medical response of making a diagnosis and prescribing treatment can be life-saving but on its own, it is rarely enough. Too often, it involves ignoring or brushing aside the uniqueness of the individual and the contexts of their life. This is where the deeper meanings are found – hidden within and around the immediate issue. If we do no more than attaching a simple name to the suffering, and then applying the remedy that goes with that name, we risk misunderstanding and focusing on the wrong problem.

Healthcare systems across the developed world are struggling to cope with both the human task and the economic cost. It is often said that this is because we are living longer and medical treatments are becoming more complicated and expensive but this is only part of the reason. Non-communicable diseases triggered by lifestyle and environmental factors, such as Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, certain cancers and autoimmune diseases are on the rise and one in six people in the UK now have a mental health problem We believe this is, in part, due to patients feeling increasingly disconnected from their own self-care and wellbeing and doctors becoming less able to focus on individual needs in a pressured system.

Part of the solution must be a more holistic, more personal and less industrial approach so that people can both better care for themselves and be better cared for by others.

The human spirit glows from that small inner doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain and injustice.  

Saul Alinsky (Rules for Radicals)

It is precisely in a broken age that we need mystery and a reawakened  sense of wonder: need them in order to be whole again.

Ben Okri (A way of being free)

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of 
meaning and purpose.

Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)

The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge of lesser things.

Saint Thomas Aquinas (in Paths to the Divine: Ancient and Indian by Vensus A George)

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust (La Prisonniere)