The Alternative Health Guides
Healthy Resources for Body, Mind & Spirit ~ Serving Vermont and New Hampshire
CLICK HERE for the ONLINE Guide Directory -
not just the Upper Valley but including, Southern, Central and Northern regions
in Vermont and New Hampshire
PRINT VERSION
Pick up a copy of the new print version of the Guide at the Upper Valley Food
Coop, Coop Food Stores, Lebanon Health Food Store, Women’s Health Resource Center, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, Gifford Hospital,
Mt. Ascutney Healing Arts Clinic, the Tip Top Building, and Practitioner
offices throughout the extended Upper Valley Region
Announcing the NEW Alternative Health Guides Store
where you can purchase a wide variety of books about health.
The featured books are highly recommended - some are geared more towards
practitioners, others for laypeople.
Please click on the SHOP link here or at the upper right of every page to browse the book offerings.
These will be updated and added to regularly.
buy gift certificates for Amazon
Health News
The Center for Sustainable Medicine
established by local homeopath and acupuncturist,
Didi Pershouse, is framing a new (and old) paradigm for personal and planetary
health. Visit the website:
Sustainable Medicine Manifesto
1. Sustainable Medicine recognizes that we are part of something larger than
ourselves: a complex system, known to us as the universe, the ecosystem, the
web of life, or Gaia.
-This system seeks balance through interdependence, and constant change.
2. Sustainable Medicine sees the body as its own ecosystem, and recognizes that
all parts of a system are linked and collaborative.
-Our bodies are a micro-system, reflective of and included within the whole.
3. Sustainable Medicine teaches that the health of the environment is
intricately linked to the health of our bodies.
-Therefore, to care for the environment is part of caring for ourselves and
others.
4. From the perspective of Sustainable Medicine, connection with the ecosystem
is essential to health. Disease is a manifestation of lack of connection.
-Each disconnection that occurs leads to a loss of power, integrity, flexibility
and energy—both for that part and for the whole system.
-This lack of connection separates us from ourselves, each other, and the source
of our life.
5. Therefore, to create health, one must restore connection.
Sustainable Medicine does this by:
-Acknowledging that networks, relationships and communities exist at every
level.
-Facilitating deep communication, understanding and cooperation within and
between them.
-Respecting the integrity and wisdom of community networks by using local
medicines and knowledge whenever possible and appropriate.
-Reconnecting people with the inherent wisdom and support of the social and
natural communities that surround them.
6. Sustainable Medicine operates best in environments that are fertile, rather
than sterile.
-It does this by encouraging honest, open-hearted, and evenly-balanced
relationships between healers and the communities they serve.
-And by recognizing that healthy communities are built through relationship,
including cross-pollination of ideas, populations and coping mechanisms to
create the diversity and flexibility that ensures survival in times of crisis.
7. Health depends also on our ability to honor wildness, which has its own
wisdom and integrity.
-Sustainable Medicine therefore seeks to restore the integrity, power and
sanctity of wild places—from the internal flora and fauna of the body, to the microorganisms of the
soils, to the vast tracts of wilderness that plants, animals and fungi depend
on for survival, diversity and well-being.
8. Sustainable Medicine is pattern-based in its thought and action.
-When disease occurs, Sustainable Medicine gathers information from the whole
system, looking for patterns and cycles, not just individually occurring
symptoms.
-When looking at a single part, it looks deeply: for within each part, the whole
is reflected as well.
-In its treatments, Sustainable Medicine works within the patterns and cycles of
nature, recognizing that the system, when allowed to move freely and without
obstruction, will naturally flow towards balance.
-Sustainable Medicine also respects and accepts that cycles of growth, decline,
transformation, and regeneration are natural and essential to the health and
balance of the entire system.
9. Sustainable Medicine is inherently sustainable.
-It does not deplete resources or excessively drain one part of the whole to
benefit another.
-It does not add to the toxic waste stream, creating further illness.
-It is affordable to learn, to practice and to use.
-Care is available to all parts of the system
10. Sustainable Medicine is “slow” medicine.
-It begins with deep listening and understanding.
-It allows time for deep and lasting cures.
–Didi Pershouse 2007
The Center for Sustainable Medicine
