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 body?

The current medical model in the United States is restorative, based and focused on 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 close to or similar to 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 ability of the body, giving it room to grow into a new dimension of health and well-being long-term. And as we have seen in the last 10 years or more, focusing solely on a restorative approach just doesn’t work anymore.

The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), estimates that, of the annual medical budget in the United States (i.e., $2.4 trillion in 2008), the overwhelming majority goes toward treatment of ill patients, and less than 5% goes toward keeping Americans healthy, 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. 

So what needs to be done? People need to be aware of and open to a new health paradigm. A more expanded vision for health care is reorganizational healing, and picks up where restorative healing leaves off. It focuses on a holistic approach to health, prevention, and empowering a person to seek meaning in an injury and use it as a tool for growth. This is vastly different from a restorative model that often places blame around long-term sickness and injury, which is very detrimental to the overall healing process.

The reorganizational model is also based on the connections between medical issues, symptoms and causes, and is very focused on prevention. This approach to healing is more comprehensive because it takes into account the mind and body as part of the healing process, and how outdated thought patterns and beliefs may be causing road blocks physically. It’s especially helpful when faced with recurring symptoms that don’t seem to subside after consistent treatment.

Most importantly, a reorganizational approach to healing invites us to look at our every day living habits and gives us the chance to examine if we are giving ourselves the level of self-care we truly need – without feeling guilty about it. The power gets shifted away from focusing on what’s wrong, and puts it towards making healthy preventative choices we can feel good about, helping us change behavior.

So, are you ready to embrace reorganizational healing?

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