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Sparkle (2)
When I decided to put my white coat back on, I committed to reclaiming what I love about medicine and ditching what I’ve come to despise. In fact, after leaving medicine - supposedly for good - I had to expand and redefine “health” and change the whole way I think about practicing medicine in order to feel proud of my MD title and rekindle my on-again-off-again relationship with health care. Now that I am working with patients again - in my own way - I remember how much I truly love medicine and how I felt the call to serve at the young age of seven.
Years later, the calling is even stronger, so I’ve finally dropped to my knees in service to the calling I’ve long heard and long denied. I thought I had to leave medicine until I realized I felt called to redefine it. Promoting health without encouraging others to seek wholeness is an exercise in futility. Not until we realize that our bodies are mirrors of our interpersonal, spiritual, professional, sexual, creative, financial, environmental, mental, and emotional health will we truly heal.
I am not supposed to leave medicine - I’m supposed to be a force in the revolution to change our broken, outdated, patriarchal health care system. I’m supposed to be a pioneer, blaze a new trail, and feminize and modernize medicine. I’m supposed to make it PINK and encourage patients, doctors, and countless other healers to do the same.
Image Credit:SoccerKrys
So What Is Pink Medicine?
Originally, I was toying around with calling this new revolution of healing “The New Medicine.” But the name wasn’t quite right, because it’s not exactly new - but it’s not exactly old, either. It’s a combination of the best of the ancient traditions and the latest in modern technology. It incorporates the loving, attentive, nurturing bedside manner of doctors from a century ago, the natural medicine of herbal healers, holistic practioners, the spiritual medicine of shamans, and the scientific advances of modern medicine.
So “The New Medicine” wasn’t quite appropriate because there’s something potently healing about the way health has been fostered and disease has been cured for millennia. Instead, I’m calling this new kind of medicine “Pink Medicine” - an intuitive, collaborative, heart-centered, empowering, feminine way to approach an expanded definition of health that includes not just physical and mental health, but also interpersonal, emotional, spiritual, sexual, professional, environmental, and financial health, all of which profoundly affect the health of the body.
Practicing Pink Medicine means you believe in the body’s capacity to heal itself. This doesn’t mean you reject traditional medicine. No - not at all. Pink Medicine doesn’t abandon the advances of modern science. While Pink Medicine practitioners believe in the body’s ability to self-diagnose and self-repair without external treatment, sometimes traditional medicine is necessary to buy the body time while we activate the self-healing superpowers that lie within us all. Our job as Pink Medicine practitioners is to support, nurture, educate, and collaborate with patients as they tap into their own healing intuition (I call it your “Inner Pilot Light”) and enable the self-healing process.
On the flip side, patients who receive Pink Medicine do not play victim or hand their power over to their practitioners so they can be “fixed.” Pink Medicine patients consider themselves equal partners in the healing process. They know their bodies better than anyone and count on their intuition to help guide the healing process.
For details about the Pink Medicine version of the doctor-patient relationship (healer-patient relationship, really, because this applies to any therapeutic relationship), read here. Pink Medicine practitioners are not just doctors, by the way. They may also be nurses, midwives, acupuncturists, massage therapists, homeopaths, naturopaths, Chinese medicine docs, yoga instructors, and countless others.
How Is Pink Medicine Different?
To check out what Pink Medicine is NOT, read this.
Pink Medicine is a movement among both patients and health care providers who long to reclaim the lost heart of medicine. It’s for those who believe medicine is a spiritual practice, those who know that, although science can cure, only love heals. It’s for those who practice love, with a little medicine on the side, but still have great respect for all that modern science has to offer.
Pink Medicine is not about denying the curative powers of drugs, surgeries, and other standard treatments, but it acknowledges that covering up a symptom or cutting out an organ isn’t the whole solution. Pink Medicine is about getting to the root of what ails you and healing it
