Introduction, the problem

As a group of consecrated physicians, we are present and active on the two shores of reality: faith and science, both of which are necessary to live and appropriately face the complex challenges of our time.

If anyone who is reading this article “believes” as a “seeker of truth” (both Christ, the way, truth and life, and authentic science), and is interested in facing the future with the power of faith as well as the discoveries of science (particularly health science), this article is for him.

Just one premise before sharing our reflections. To seek truth, one must not belong to any pole in opposition to another. This is a trap (called dualism) that prevents one from seeing the complete reality and shows only one aspect of it; moreover, partisanship cages in a process of destroying the opposite pole and fuels violence. Instead, the correct method of searching for truth is the propositional one in which there is harmony between faith and science, with the same truth for starting and ending (cf. John Paul II, Fides et ratio, cf. A. Zichichi).

Life is fragile at the individual, familial, professional, ecclesial, social and international levels. It is useless to give statistics of how much both physical and psycho-spiritual illnesses are increasing every year on a national and global level. The ethical problems that violate the dignity of the person are giant and needed a statement by the Pope (Dignitas infinita, 2/4/24). Everyone knows about the demographic winter we are experiencing (the lonely and elderly sick, the pension problem in the West and the declining birth rate), and of those few young people in Italy, 50 per cent of professionals leave their homeland. It is also useless to talk about the deliberate and provoked crisis of the family, the Church, businesses and international political and military relations, lest we forget the crisis of hyper-modern culture (already for 30 years we have left post-modern culture) and the man who is born out of it (the alpha generation, those born after 2010) is incapable of living, fighting and dying (cf. Gille Lipovetsky). All this is amplified by news and documentaries, books, movies, YouTube videos, but especially by the most widely used social networks, which increase anxiety, worries, insecurities of all kinds about our future and an aggressive climate. A person who experiences such a cultural crisis and can neither escape from it nor face it and solve it (fight or flight) becomes ill (by distress or burn out at various levels (PNEI: psycho-neuro-endocrine-immune) in that helplessness caused by that kind of news. One cannot live with fears that something bad will happen or is already happening… This everyday strategy (think of how it was used in the COVID period) paralyzes entire populations and fosters totalitarianism or “one-way ideas” that always lurk and have done so much damage in the past.

What, we believe, is very useful for fight-or-flight is vigilance about the deeper causes of such crisis phenomena and possible personal and community measures. Let us search for them with faith and science together.

Deep causes

Diseases have internal causes (physical, biochemical, infectious, anatomical and genetic) treated with drugs and surgery and external causes which are contamination of the environment, unhealthy behaviours, and preventions not implemented in time. But the main external causes of both organic and psycho-spiritual diseases are two: mismanaged trauma and poor health education in the sense of lack of health education, i.e., lack of institutional training/information on preventive measures (families, schools, medical services, associations …) and a lack of proper management of one’s own health (a preventive measure that should be the self-management of the individual’s health). In addition, there is the problem of addictions/vices, which refer to a problem of lack of experience of knowing how to live freely. The problem of increased violence and aggression, starting at early childhood with the new nomenclatures in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (in its manifestations of impulsivity, agitation, mood swings, impatience, difficulty in interpersonal relationships), or in adolescent self-harm with cuts on the arms or body, or the cases of suicides and murders that increasingly crowd our news, newspapers or internet news… are expressions of a growing malaise that is often “buffered” when it has already fundamentally erupted.

Acting on health pedagogy, according to WHO, would reduce a country’s morbidity by 50 percent (cf. Maria Teresa Cairo); health sociology also has much to say about prevention today; with emotional and spiritual intelligence, knowing the multidisciplinary treatment of post-traumatic syndrome in the short and long term would reduce a great many physical, mental and social problems (cf. Bessell van der Kolk has demonstrated this).

Then the questions arise:

– Why is health care investment only in health care policies concerning beds, new health care facilities, centralized or decentralized, in health care workers, in new technologies and research in new drugs?

– Why is a (biomedical) health care system being promoted that has increased the average age of the population, but has turned it into an increasingly sick population with growing and unsustainable health care spending by governments?

– While is there no investment and no credibility on prevention (interdisciplinary and systematic), on “integrative medicine” (integrating complementary medicine), on health pedagogy and sociology, on the healing Church community (humanization, pastoral health and therapeutic pastoral work)?

– Why is there increasing discredit on these newly mentioned realities, as charlatans, just because they are not scientific-Galilean? Is it possible that we have to stop at Galileo and cannot advance into the future (cf. K. Popper)?

Catholic voluntary health care has been largely replaced by a million NGOs (third-sector entities), not to mention the immense health-related governmental organizations, with unimaginable turnover of money and movement of people within the sphere of human needs; there should be no more needy people of any kind … but instead? What is wrong with that? We believe that Jesus would tell us that we have mixed in sanity: mammon (god money) and the world (the powers of the earth “are mine and I give them to whom I will”). What is missing?

Personal and collective healing

How do we heal? How do we deal with a health care system that is so reductionist and highly commodified, closed to paradigms that are not material and biologistic? The health proposed to us from the academic world (universities) are in the hands of positivist techno-science (EBM, evidence-based medicine), open to object (material problems) and classical (quantitative) experimentation, but still relatively closed to quantum physics (bio-resonance diagnostic and therapeutic machines), closed to complementary and alternative medicines (more than 300), to psychosomatic, to PNEI (psycho-neuro-endocrine-immunology), completely closed and haughty toward the medicine of the subject (narrative, anthropological, symbolic, spiritual, humanized, medical humanities, artistic-cultural), and even more closed and dismissive toward that which wants to introduce the transcendent into medicine (spiritual healing, therapeutic theology, healthcare ministry, healing  ministries of the Church, healing church community).

– Why, in the face of the pandemic phenomenon, have so many alternative proposals for therapies been discredited and violently suppressed in order to support solely the vaccine therapeutic response?

– Why has this response been supported to the bitter end, despite the side and fatal effects demonstrated at the time and confirmed today (cf. Astrazeneca withdrawing its vaccine in May 2024)?

– Why are the texts about the lies of science (Cf. Federico di Trocchio) or the deceptions of the pharmaceutical companies (cf. Ben Goldacre), medical errors, heretics of science, buried to keep the myth (!!!) of science high? Or rather, is an idolatry being defended: scientificism?

Here then is a possible path as “persons” today toward prevention and healing (physical, mental and spiritual): integral education (cf. Claudio Naranjo); deep spirituality integrated with an authentic Marian, Christocentric and Trinitarian religiosity; working on individual and collective traumas with multidisciplinarity (cf. Bessel van der Kolk). There is no magic recipe, long life elixir or panacea for all ills, but research work that few like to do. One support to go through this process of healing the “person” is community. It is always easier together than alone. Healing Church community is a beautiful project of health ministry (cf. Luciano Sandrin) in the footsteps of Christ the physician (cf. Angelo Brusco, Bernard Tyrrell) where a community made up of small groups prepared and active in the integral healing of the person who learns to heal himself, others and the context (cf. www. integralisvita.com), spread this healthy, wholesome and salvific way of life.

The goal, in fact, is not to heal in order to heal, but, through a health-salvation paradigm, to be able to open oneself more to the grace of the Holy Spirit, to live by faith, hope and charity, to be converted to be freer, more able to love and seek the truth, happier and “children of light,” more builders of the Kingdom of God, where the Will of God dominates in fullness. In a word: to be more “persons” and less “things” or “inforgs.” Today’s medicine does not go in this direction and neither do those who follow it.

Partial conclusion

The overview presented is certainly not the most reassuring. While biomedicine and technology are moving ever forward, economics and finance do not seem to be following the demands of an increasingly pressing and necessary global demand for “life in fullness and health”; but above all in the ever-changing reference points there seems to be no health respected in its integrity.

It is as if the human being, made up of spirit (soul), mind (psyche) and body, is being fragmented into pieces to be cured (the same fragmentation of medical and surgical specialty schools), into single-payer reimbursements (economic fragmentation of the value of health and the value of the human person), into health policies designed to plug problems that have arisen, without often a preventive and breakthrough policy behind them.

One question still seems to have remained: Where is the integral care of the human being? It seems that ancient art of caring has been forgotten over time.

Fr. Dr. Petro Magliozzi MI