Grand Rounds: Healing Wisdom for a Complex World

What makes for a truly Holistic Medicine?

True Holism in Health transcends any words that would try to capture it. How can it be any different for the truly Holistic? How then does one denote and describe a book that is written to defy description? How does one become prosaic about prose that are meant to be read as poetry? How does one deliver a straight line from a circle? This is the dilemma of my authorship. As such, I leave to you, the reader, a choice of description for this wayfarer’s guide book that best suits your own fancy:
1.Can it be that our modern obsession with disease is misplaced, taking our collective attention away from the real problem: disenchantment? Have you ever wondered how such diverse experiences and worlds as cybernetics, Bushmen healing, the modern ICU, gardening, complexity science, martial arts, Molluscan mating behavior, epistemology, orthopedics, improvised performance, radical constructivism, laying of hands, Chaos theory, jazz music, Greek mythology, paradox, hypnosis and psychosis, evolution and embryology, ethics, snakes eating their own tails, a fictional post-apocalyptic strategy game, a New Orleans funeral, and finger painting are intimately related to Health: including the health of you, the health of me, and the health of the world we live on? If you are the least bit intrigued, then know there is hope for us all. Join Dr. William Sutherland on this tour de force of tall-tale telling and let the “patterns that connect” embrace you as you begin your reintegration back into Wholeness. Welcome to the enchanted woods of Complexity Medicine, where one can truly see the forest through the trees.
2.A deeply embodied and thoughtful foray into the philosophy, science, and phenomenology of Chaos, Complexity, Holism, and Health. Take a transformative journey with the Doctor and be glad that you will never be able to see the world the same again!
3.Dr. Sutherland is about to prescribe you six words that you are unlikely to hear in any other doctor’s office but which are absolutely vital to your vitality: Service, Sensuality, Performance, Beauty, Ceremony, and Love. Intrigued? Just wait till you experience the Good Doctor’s healing ministrations in a metaphoric and mythological appointment that you will never forget.
4. Join the Good Doctor on a holistic journey starting with our species’ earliest healing expressions, then on through the ages to the emerging Science of Complexity; connecting the dots in between as we go. Grand Rounds is a healing balm to our collective individual, cultural, ecological, and evolutionary ails. Come and enjoy the magical & mirth-filled medicine that Dr. Sutherland has prescribed.
5.One word: Relationship.

From the Forward:
I have known Dr. Sutherland for many years, beginning when he asked to have a conversation with me when he was a teacher of the martial-arts. I have watched him make his life more complex by immersing himself in the arts, cybernetic thinking, ancient healing culture, and contemporary medical practice. I can testify that he is a damn good doctor and that his good doctoring is held inside a deeper holding than outcome studies based on simplistic probability theory. He stands on wisdom and fears not to encourage his colleagues to be more human and more healing in their manner and being. He goes past “primum non nocere” (first, do no harm) and moves toward “praescribens vitae” (prescribing life), acting so as to expand both the medical universe and the choices for action that may arise whenever doctors and patients face the mysteries of how life and death, as well as wellness and sickness, dance together.
Bradford P. Keeney, PhD