In a recent issue of the journal Homeopathy In Practice, themed around the above three issues, Dr. Rob Verkerk, an international sustainability scientist with many research papers behind him and with 35 years experience in food, nutritional and environmental agriculture, has taken a long hard look at our modern world to examine the main obstacles that humankind has recently faced and the nature of some of the challenges and stressors that we are all likely to be grappling with in the not too distant future.
Against a background of Covid 19, lockdown and long Covid, Dr. Verkerk has pointed out that on top of these assaults on our collective health and immunity, we are also going to have to deal with “coercive vaccination policies, silencing of scientific dissent, threats of reprisals for dissenters, sidelining of medical ethical principles, a transition towards authoritarian rule, collapsing health systems, cost of living and energy crises, an environmental crisis, as well as wars in the world.
Against that daunting scenario, Verkerk is underlining the fact that we as a species are going to have to mobilise our powers of resilience, tenacity and endurance. Particularly our resilience.
Although Verkerk’s analysis is a challenging one, personally we are heartened by our own families, who went through two world wars as well as the great financial crash of 1929. They seemed to cope and even to thrive.
Recently in a review of “From primitives to zen” a book by the French anthropologist, Mircea Eliade, we noticed a reviewer’s comment that “The message of this book is that not only can we live on the volcano’s rim, but that we can live creatively on that rim.”
No doubt resilience will be part of our volcano experiences. Many of us as clinicians, will hear patients commenting that they no longer keep up with world news because of its negativity. It may be that keeping up with the news helps us to strengthen the resilience that we are all going to need on our volcano.
Complementary and alternative medicine is likely to be playing a significant part in strengthening our need for more resilience, tenacity and endurance and here at the Glasgow Complementary Medicine Centre. We are keeping our shoulder to the collective wheel and are here for you.
Please contact us for help with weight loss or stopping smoking – thank you for reading and remember, stay resilient!