The role of Teaching in Naturopathic medicine - The Best of Naturopathic Medicine

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  Feb-March, 2003  by Greg Garcia

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Teaching Naturopathic medicine is a passion and an honor. When done well it is of service to the Spirit within us and supports the evolution of both professor and student. Teaching is also one of the ways in which we as a Naturopathic community tend to the health and spirit of the profession. Teaching becomes a portal that allows students to see through the professor into their own future as practitioners. Students have a natural hunger and interest in what their future holds, and by looking through their teacher's words and mannerisms they imagine and see themselves as doctors. Likewise, a professor sees through the eyes of the student into his or her own past and remembers the stages of learning that he or she went through in order to teach with the most balanced perspective. A quality teaching experience is one that furthers the initiation of the student into the role of a practitioner in the healing arts.

For this reason, it is important that the teacher notice where the students are developmentally, in their process of becoming practitioners. The professor or clinical supervisor must judge what the appropriate role is in helping students achieve their next level of development and skill. Students usually know which areas of study are of no interest to them (e.g., minor surgery) and will have other areas they wish to pursue further than what they have been exposed to in the classroom or clinic shift. Invariably, however, students will have areas of knowledge or skill that they don't know. The particular qualities of these blind spots (shadows) in a student will affect how strong or well-rounded a practitioner the student can become.

By the same token, how an institution responds to these blind spots in students will be a reflection on its own strengths in teaching a well rounded holistic program. A key way that Naturopathic medicine is holistic is in the way it considers and allows the relationship between practitioner and patient to have a therapeutic role. As holistic practitioners in Naturopathic medical institutions, it is important for teachers to support and strengthen a student's intuitive and perceptive abilities as well as teach the more conventional knowledge-based methods of learning. It is the student's persona which over time will play the most meaningful role in his or her work with patients. The challenge in Naturopathic education then, is one of balancing the didactic needs of the students with their individual personas and personal evolution. Success in these endeavors helps assure a program remains focused on the individual student and is personal to them. Success for the student means they have a thoughtfully balanced blend of didactic and relational skills to maximize their development before and after graduation.

It is the students' hunger to learn Naturopathic medicine that motivates them to go forward in a challenging program. This comes with a significant price to pay in financial as well as psychic costs and is a significant factor in the creation of an initiatory experience. Many cultures have chosen healers and put them through what appear to be terrible ordeals in order to be assured that the healer will have the best interests of the people in heart and mind. These societies recognized how vulnerable an ill person is in relation to the healer and wished the healer to never forget what a privilege their position entails. I believe it was Arnold Mindell, one of the founders of Process Work, who spoke of a mythology where the culture or tribe would break the bones and burn the bodies of people selected to become healers and then wait to see where in themselves these people healed. The rejuvenated parts of the healers became the areas from which they were then allowed to heal for the tribe.

This rite of passage for healers can be viewed as a means of authenticating what they have to offer the tribe. Although the medical community has moved a considerable distance from the idea of healing in the full sense of the word, it is a part of what Naturopathic medicine aspires to philosophically. Particularly with Naturopathic students who carry the concept of healer to heart, this theme of initiation or rites of passage also emerges. In hindsight the innocence and desire that inspired them to change their life enough to enter into one of the Naturopathic schools also means there is a wounding they may have to reveal or experience mythically. One of the roles for the institution is to initiate students into the realm of the healer and recognize that they may have to work on themselves at various points along their education or career. In ancient history, it was simply put as: Physician, heal thyself.

One of the ways NCNM supported (for several years) this theme of initiation was during the first-year student orientation. A colleague and I used a fairy tale told over the course of a day with calculated breaks to engage the students in a dialogue with themselves and each other. The fairy tale tells of three sons who leave their kingdom one by one in search of a golden bird and only the youngest completes the search. Each of the sons fails in predictable and not so predictable ways. Each failure leads to greater challenges, with no hope of recovery until the arrival of a fox (commonly seen as a transformative power in myths or stories). We asked the students to look ahead and describe what their failures could be as well as what (or how) the fox could transform these failures. We also asked them to record their dreams and motivations of how they imagined they would be when they graduated. They placed these thoughts into sealed envelopes and our hope was to return the envelopes when they graduated and to hold a similar workshop near graduation to honor their success.