Integrative Medicine seminar, Helsinki 21st of May, 2024
This is a reflection on a seminar I attended last week in Helsinki: Integrative Medicine, Visions for 2030, as part of a bigger event called Radical Health. An afternoon of lectures and networking during breaks. Some 150 participants.
My first thought was positive. Great to see so many people, clearly from within the medical establishment trying to build bridges between contemporary medical paradigm and complementary alternative methods (CAM). This was my initial reaction, but as the afternoon went on, a confused voice grew too, or a voice aware of challenges, and as I was driving home, I tried to catch some of what was rising up in my awareness. I’m a big-picture person, observing trends and shifts in collective consciousness and the culture which is borne out of field.
As I sensed into my discomfort, and have done so this past week, I had to initially admit to myself, that I’ve strayed far from this kind of buzzy/busy business type events, having left that world some 25 years ago. My nervous system became a bit frazzled, consciousness slightly out of the body and my waters were uneasy as the day proceeded. Wisely I did some grounding, deep breathing on the parking lot before hitting the road home.
Sometimes it’s good to go back to something, just to see how evolution has taken you to a whole different place and the “old” world just feels off. Yet, I am immensely grateful for the people who are trying to change the system from within the system. I had myself tried to change systems in the world of international industrial manufacturing from the inside, with some successes and equally some failures, I know it is not easy. The question is still the same - is it possible, if the foundations wherein the system exists stay the same? Or does the answer rather lie in building a parallel more holistic system, and in due course, thus making the old system obsolete? Begs the question!
The association “Integrative Medicine” hosting the event is still young, formed a few years ago and this was, I believe, their first major event.
We heard opening words from Finland’s EU parliamentary representative Sirpa Pietikäinen. What struck me most was her alarming comment, that the gap, between traditional medicine and CAM (complementary alternative medicine) is greatest in Finland. Many other European countries have many practices where medicine and CAM collaborate successfully and therefore support the overall holistic health of the patient/client. I remember this from my years in Scotland as well. Cancer patients were offered all kinds of alternative methods, energy medicine to alleviate the side-effects of the heavy cancer treatments. They worked side-by-side. In Finland, people also seek these out, but have to do so privately and not everyone, sadly, can afford this route.
In Sirpa’s slides Covid-19 was still presented as a zoonotic virus & pandemic, having come from a wet market in China. I would have expected a parliamentary representative to be more informed and up to date with her information. Clearly, she has not followed the alternative media, nor the many congressional hearings and parliamentary discussions in the US & Brittain. This debate has been going on the past 4 years. The consensus today, 2024, is much more leaning towards a lab leak, i.e. gain-of-function, bio hack and therefore human origin. The spike protein has features, that are impossible for a natural explanation. I had just the previous day followed a congressional hearing from Washington DC where this fact was finally also admitted, under oath, by Francis Collins, former director of NIH (National Institute of Health in the US). I expect truth from a parliamentary representative, or at least the recognition that the question is still open, hence not settled. The question about excess deaths all over the developed world, also in Finland, is alarming, and they tend to show up 4-5 weeks after a booster campaign. We know far too little about the long-term effects of the mRNA-gene therapies, I refuse to call them vaccines, injected during the pandemic (still ongoing).
Finland is a very bureaucratic and technocratic country. Hearing Sirpa enthusiastically presenting an EU-wide health data-system in the making in some sub-committee in Brussels, run chills up my spine. More bureaucracy behind which to hide. Finland has such a system, Apotti, which has not, to date, delivered its promises. It was introduced in 2018 and has created a situation where doctors and nurses spend more time with data-systems, their failures, the system’s incapacity to “talk” to other data-systems etc, than with their patients and/clients, let alone developing the human element, collaboration and motivation of personnel at the workplaces. People with technocratic mindsets, who develop such systems, seldom take into account the unexpected consequences of their “brilliant” work – one of which is the unexpected consequence of the human being her/himself. Please notice the sarcasm. I should know, I spent several years facilitating engineers from 5 different countries on three different continents in the biotech industry. My job was to help them understand each other, to be open to share information, best available practices and learn from each other. The observation I made was that the technocratic, expertise language (+ cultural differences in this case) in itself often presented the hindrance – I found myself doing a lot of translation in order to help greater collective understanding to emerge. It is not farfetched to draw parallels to the medical establishment and the expertise hurdles there. Too much left-brain, hardly any right brain skills. This left-brain dominance is overall one of the greatest challenges for the western world at this time. I wholeheartedly recommend the works of psychiatrist professor Ian McGilchrist, his books “The Master and his Emissary” and “The matter with things”.
EU is a centralizing force, yet for the freedoms and rights for constitute individuals’ members in all EU states, it should curb this tendency to the minimum. If it does not do this, creativity, new innovation, also in the field of integrative medicine will be stifled.
Next, we heard from doctor & biohacker Olli Sorvijärvi who specializes in and has a company selling, self-directed gadgets to measure all kinds of health measures. Oura rings, watches, bracelets coupled with apps on your mobile to follow every and each vital force in your body. A market that has exploded the past 10 years and is doing so increasingly. My sense of this new market is that it enables individuals to take more responsibility of their own health by following vitals on their own and noticing when unhealthy life-style choices have a negative impact. Anything that helps people take responsibility for their own well-being is welcomed. Yet, even here, a danger lurks. So far, we are talking about external gadgets you wear on your body (and can take off if you choose to), but soon – actually already happening, we entertain computer chips inserted under the skin, in the brain, even on babies in order to give them a competitive advantage – as if that was the most important thing. Here the boundary between in-organic and organic gets violated in a way that seems scary and potentially dangerous. Anything that violates sacred soul-life, of which the body is purely a vehicle, will eventually fail. The transhumanists are playing with fire, declaring a Silicon Valley based God-like religion for the new human totally separated from nature. A new hubristic transcendentalism, this time of un-natural origin.
Olli was followed by Hanna Voutilainen a functional nutritional therapist. So much is wrong in our food systems, we can listen to Zach Bush to understand the width of the problem, without healthy soil we cannot have healthy food. During the past 100 years the chemical industry has poisoned our soils with the introduction of the monocrop industry and pesticides. Today we have foods that have lost all or most of their nutritional value. As a counterbalance to this western industrial catastrophe, nutritional therapists are sorely needed and their field of work is enormous. Correcting the gut-biome will be crucial and introducing a healthier organic life-style essential. The gut is after all the third brain, together with the brain itself and the heart – all three must be in balance.
In the ancient Finnish folklore Kalevala, when interpreted spiritually and psychologically, the three bad boys, Rujo, Rampa and Perisokea (Barbarous, Cripple & Blind) – representing jealousy, greed and ignorance -created havoc in the world and eventually the sacred oak-tree (tree of life) had to be taken down in order to build a new world. Maybe we Finns should pay attention to our ancestral wisdom and start to figure out how that healthier new world tree, in good/custodian relationship with all the kingdoms of nature could be built. For sure the first thing that must be remedied – related to the themes of this seminar - is to bring a better balance to the reductionist, atomizing, left-brain emphasis countering this with the more holistic, whole-picture, creative right side of the brain.
We were also presented with a dialogue between three long-term doctors, experts in their field, who reflected upon how medicine has evolved the past 40-50 years. The most important comment that stuck in my awareness was Markku Partanen, he stated that we should not have listen to Descartes way back at the start of the enlightenment era, rather Spinoza would have been a better choice. I agree, as Spinoza includes the spiritual dimension whereas Descartes does not.
Maybe because we’ve just come out of the corona-pandemic and its subsequent lock-downs and restrictions, all speaker talked about community, the need for dialogue, human connection and the possibility to exchange ideas face-to-face. There is a yearning in the field for human connection – understandably. We are after all social beings, in need of mirrors and in need of validation and challenge in order to develop into the fullness of who we are.
This was in stark contrast with the last exercise, where the audience was invited to participate in the visioning process. Instead of facilitating human contact and dialogue, putting us in groups of 3-4 people to discuss the presented areas, a bar-code appeared on the screen and we were guided to answer a questionnaire on our mobile phones. This was such a flop, I almost walked out of the room. This could easily have been done later, as an aftercare, sent to the participants with a feedback sheet and a possibility to, in your own time, answer the questions with more time to reflect. We spend way too much time on our mobiles as it is, and an obvious opportunity for genuine human dialogue was missed. A mistake many seminar organizers do is they try to cramp in too much into the available time, maybe this was an example of that.
But back to the question, can the system be changed from within? We are all, in one way or the other, dependent on the current capitalistic, market-oriented system in the west. Even during Olli’s talk, I was wondering: “is he selling something to me?” We have mortgages, loans, children to raise and put through school and pensions to think about. The competition is fierce and I have no doubt it creates all kinds of blockages for the free flow of creative new ideas. The expertise status of the medical professionals, pharmaceutical scientist and pharmacists and the associations protecting their social status and gained benefits, may well be a greater hindrance in a small country as Finland. Cliques of experts protecting their own areas, is common in Finland in other areas too, the market is small and everyone is competing for grant money or lucrative collaborators. The risk for corruption is well known and let’s say, it would have been refreshing if presenters would have declared their stakeholders and interest groups. Especially after the pandemic public trust in institutions has plummeted.
The crisis of the past 4 years, pandemic coupled with the revamping of the whole social medical system (SOTE) in Finland may well present an opportunity to break down some of the old structures. Yet so far, I’ve seen only a tendency to build more bureaucracy, administration and more hierarchical systems being built within the centralized big hospitals. Only time will tell if a total breakdown of the system finally forces the change – the change that puts the patient in the fore front again. From the viewpoint of the outsider and potential client, it looks to me as the primary task of the medical system is lost. I hope I am wrong and the situation isn’t as bleak.
I will turn 70 this year, so already in my crone years, but luckily healthy, knock on wood! I only take some supplements like Vitamin D, C etc. My own receipe has for past 30 years been the postulate which states: “all disease is the inhibition of soul-life”. The soul energy, when embodied is the ultimate healer. It works not just on the physical level – the main area the medical establishment functions on today, but includes the etheric, emotional, mental and spiritual levels of the body. We are electro-magnetic beings, a soul having a human experience for a short time. Electro in this sense represents the outward going masculine energy and magneto the inward going feminine energy. Finding the balance, this has nothing to do with gender, is key and as everything is interconnected this balance when reached, flows outward as a blessing and inward as a healing agent to organs, molecules, cells, atoms and quarks creating wholeness of health and self-correcting healing.
The current paradigm shift will, kindly or more forcefully through crisis, present this vaster vista for humanity eventually and medicine as we know it today, will change.
I wish all the best to the association of Integral Medicine in Finland and hope that your efforts will benefit the many and build the bridges that are needed.
much love to all…..Micaela
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