CIHS is at the forefront of exploring integral and alternative approaches to health. If you sign up for this course, you will get to take part in developing a comprehensive expansion of integrative medicine to include consciousness as a primary factor in our overall health. We’ve all found some unusual or uncommon approaches to helping people heal, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and want to share them with as many people as possible. We all have favorite ways of working with people to help them heal, and we love sharing our gifts with others. But how do we do that? How can we reach out to people in a way they can hear and understand?
This course will walk you through a new model of medicine combining the best practices of modern science with the insights and understandings of ancient wisdom traditions. While conventional biomedicine provides powerful and effective treatment options for thousands of people, it also kills thousands more. Receiving care from a conventional physician is the number one leading cause of premature death in the United States. Biomedicine seems to have forgotten the Hippocratic principle of “First, do no harm.”
Consciousness-based medicine (CBM) proposes a more compassionate solution, and you can help make it a reality. CBM turns upside down the materialist philosophical assumptions of conventional medicine, replacing them with the assumptions that we are conscious beings having a physical experience, and that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe giving form to our physical bodies.
If we acknowledge a fundamental role for consciousness in our human experiences, what then are the implications for medical care? We have to expand not just the types of treatments to use, but also expand our understanding of causative agents and diagnostic procedures. In this course you will get to map out entirely new territories in each of these domains.
What is medicine? In the Native American traditions, good medicine is anything that helps us grow or heal. Being with friends can be good medicine. Finding a beautiful place in nature is good medicine. Now we have plenty of good science supporting this way of looking at health. Biomedicine says medicine is what the doctor gives you, and everything else is just a placebo.
We know this isn’t true. We know it because we’ve seen for ourselves that some of these alternative treatments written off by conventional medicine have helped us and helped our clients. We’ve read the scientific literature on some of these alternative treatments and found the evidence compelling, and that what science says takes place matches our own experiences of what takes place.
Have you ever wondered how to go about making treatment recommendations when there are literally thousands of potentially effective treatment options to choose from? And if you have difficulty identifying ideal options, imagine how much more difficult is it for the layperson who doesn’t have your scientific background and experience with alternative methods!
CBM lays out a simple, 7-level treatment protocol to guide your selection of treatment options, prioritizing treatments that are most broadly effective and proceeding in a stepwise progression until the problem resolves or we have to use the conventional treatments carrying the highest risk. In this course we will consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of the model’s theoretical basis, the role of relationships in health, and opportunities for implementation. You will also get to develop a multi-level treatment plan for a condition of your choosing, and document the treatments’ likelihood for success through rigorous assessment of the best available evidence.
- Teacher: Randy Fauver, PhD