Qi Gong Healing? Or Medical Qi Gong? In truth there is no difference between true healing and true medicine, but there is often a difference between healing and modern mainstream medical practice. People rightly look to age-old healing traditions, the old ways in their many cultural and regional forms, to deepen their understanding of what healing and what medicine actually entail; that is, beyond the limitations created by the modern materialistic scientific worldview. But just how scientific is that materialistic worldview, really? Whose interests does its limiting beliefs and exclusions primarily serve today?
What has become mainstream science and medicine needs to evolve to encompass a broader and deeper comprehension of the whole human being and her or his earthly and cosmic environment. This larger context has been investigated and understood over thousands of years, and continues to inform many shamanistic traditions among the indigenous peoples of the world, traditional Indian Ayurvedic medicine, truly traditional Chinese medicine, and Western esoteric medicine (e.g., the spagyric medicine of Paracelsus, the homeopathic medicine of Samuel Hahnemann, and the Anthroposophic medicine of Rudolf Steiner).
Please consider the words of the Qi Gong Master teacher, Kenneth Cohen, who has a highly impressive biography:
>> Since the 1950s, it has become popular in China and, recently, in the United States to speak about Medical Qigong. This term was a political expediency, a re-labeling of longevity and wellness techniques (originally known as yang sheng, “nurturing life”) to make them more acceptable to Communism and to western medicine. I prefer the term “Healing Qigong” to “Medical Qigong”, as qigong aims to treat the whole person, to establish energy balance and spiritual harmony rather than to focus on disease (the realm of medicine). It is healthcare rather than sickcare. <<
I would qualify Mr. Cohen’s statement regarding disease being the realm of medicine. I would submit that qigong healing has been found useful in both preventive and curative healthcare. Qi Gong Healing — along with other forms of spiritual and energy healing and natural therapies that have brought good results over centuries, in some cases millennia — addresses the causes leading to disease conditions as well as treating the momentary symptoms. How these results are obtained can often not be measured using the thinking, research methods, and instrumentation predominating in modern medicine. However, there is a long unbroken history of positive experiential results from many healing/medical traditions around the world.
© Joseph Michael Contrada, 2017