Our Goals
The BHMA is a charity and our charitable objectives are:
to explore, educate and inform doctors, medical students, other healthcare professions and members of the general public in the principles and practice of compassionate holistic medicine and health care.
We want to move away from overprescription
We believe a flourishing and sustainable healthcare service needs to move away from an increasingly unsustainable ‘overprescribe and fix’ model. In acute situations – infections and injuries for instance – we all need clinicians to be competent and fully in charge. But when illness is long-term, or when ‘fixing’ isn’t feasible, doctors may have to stand back and help the patient take decisions and manage their own self-care. As well as treating illness and disease, whole-person medicine aims to create resilience and well-being. We are interested not just in the biochemistry and pathology of disease, but the routes to ill health and to good health. Eventually, we all become patients: our aim is to co-create the kind of healthcare we all hope to be offered – care that uses technology well, but bears holism in mind. Healthcare that honours the importance of emotions, beliefs, experiences and relationships, and how family, community and the world around us support health or harm it. Sustainable holistic healthcare recognises the stark reality of health inequalities and the need to support healthful lifestyle choices by all possible means.
We want to underpin healthcare with core values
We promote twelve key principles (or dimensions) which we think should underpin all approaches in healthcare: compassionate, balanced, community-minded, connected, empowered, holistic, integrated, intuitive, meaningful, resilient, self-caring, and wise.
We want to support resilient doctors and nurses
Practitioners who cannot care for their own bodies and feelings will be much less able to care for others. All practitioners need to be aware that the medical and nursing professions are at higher risk of poor mental health and burnout. We want to help healthcare workers understand the origins of health, find time to attend to their own well-being and build resilience so that they can flourish.
