Details About the Panel Discussions
Purpose of the Panel Discussions
The purpose of the morning workshops is to honor Rita by discussing topics relevant to her work. The topics and panel members were selected with the intent of promoting stronger relationships between traditional healing methods and modern ones, for the overall well-being of the people and the community. Is it possible to create a new model for delivering healthcare that is based on a partnership between the old and the new? These panel discussions will attempt to address that question.
Jason Harmon, ND, described the issues in the Circle of Healing:
“As we come into the 21st century we face great challenges in medical and modern health care. We carry a legacy of a fragmented and divided approach to health and healing in this and many of the world's countries. We have experienced over the last 100 years phenomenal growth in advances of science and medical breakthroughs. With this growth a wider chasm has developed in relations to traditional, holistic and medical breakthroughs . Managed health care and pharmaceutical profit has in many cases dictated current day medical evolution. The results have been discouraging for patient and doctor alike. With this realization comes the acknowledgement that we must come together and work for a united approach to health and healing.”
Panel 1 Details
1. To honor Rita's life work and that of others who follow her path of Healing by exploring the origins, strengths, and contributions of their work.
2. To understand their efforts to bring healing to the people, and to explore the clinical, social, and procedural roadblocks that have been placed in their path.
Panel 2 Details
The goal is to explore programs that are making the effort to remove certain of those roadblocks and to suggest models for partnering traditional, integrative, and bio-medical models that can develop partnerships in healing between these medical traditions. We hope to demonstrate the possibility that by doing so we can improve diagnostic and treatment efficacy, assist the client in their ability to utilize treatment in a way that encourages them to be the center of their healing process, lower recidivism rates, and support a sense of wellness in the community.
Possible Panel Questions or Topics
The panels will likely be set up to allow ample discussion of the topics with branching into side topics as time allows. The questions and statements posed below are intended to stimulate a little thought about what is possible. These points are not intended to place any limits on the panel discussions. The panels themselves will ultimately decide what the panels discuss.
What is happening in the field of traditional medicine?
What does the road ahead look like?
What is our state of progress in building partnerships between various medical traditions?
What further needs to be done to open that up, develop it, so that traditional healers can work in hospitals on equal basis with physicians.
What's stopping MDs from paying attention to traditional healers' ability to make diagnosis and provide treatment?
The incidence of misdiagnosis, inappropriate medications, and malpractice remains as a limiting factor in Traditional, Integrative, and Allopathic treatment. How do we work together to overcome this problem?