Shifting the healing model: Restorative vs reorganizational healing

When you are in pain, recovering from an injury or struggling to maintain your health, you are focused on just feeling better. But how often do you think of the best way to approach healing?

The current medical model in the United States is restorative, treating disease in a way that returns people to their prior level of health. The idea behind restorative healing is pain relief: “fixing” and restoring the body to a place of functionality as close as possible to where it was before an injury or illness. This is a very necessary step for broken bones, accidents or times when it’s needed to save a life. It has its value and its place. However …

This approach doesn’t do much for expanding the body’s ability to grow into a new dimension of long-term health and well-being. Focusing solely on a restorative approach just doesn’t work anymore.

Of the annual U.S. medical budget ($2.4 trillion in 2008), the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that the overwhelming majority goes toward treatment of ill patients and less than 5 percent goes toward keeping Americans healthy. That’s according to a recent editorial written by Robert H.I. Blanks, Ph.D., called “Regoranizational Healing: A Health Model Whose Time Has Come.”

It’s time to provide people with the knowledge and tools to put their health back into their own hands.

People need to be aware of and open to a new health paradigm. Reorganizational healing is a more expanded vision for health care, picking up where restorative healing leaves off. A holistic approach to health and prevention, it empowers a person to seek meaning in an injury and use it as a tool for growth. It’s vastly different from a restorative model that often places blame around long-term sickness and injury — an approach  detrimental to the overall healing process.

The reorganizational model is also based on the connections between medical issues, symptoms and causes, and is focused on prevention. This approach to healing is more comprehensive because it includes the mind and body in the healing process, and acknowledges the ways outdated thought patterns and beliefs can create physical roadblocks. It’s especially helpful when faced with recurring symptoms which don’t seem to subside after consistent treatment.

A reorganizational approach to healing invites us to look at our everyday living habits and examine whether we are giving ourselves the level of self-care we need – without feeling guilty about it. The power gets shifted away from focusing on what’s wrong, and steers it towards changing our behavior to make healthy preventive choices we can feel good about.

Are you ready to embrace reorganizational healing?

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