There’s probably a better word for this, but it’s that I’ve been an archivist, someone who recorded the information. You know, they talk about Samuel Johnson and about Boswell. I feel more like a Boswell than a Johnson. There is a better word, a scribe. I’ve been the scribe.

So if you think about your textbook, Fundamentals of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which I agree has the depth and breadth to accurately be called fundamental, would you say that its contribution has been in terms of informing health practitioners about the broader context within which they operate? So that they can see beyond their specific neck of the woods, their specific discipline as a chiropractor or acupuncturist or naturopath or holistic medical physician, to see the whole forest more fully?

Yes, and allowing those who want to see a better future to envision what it might really look like. So it isn’t just about the past. It’s about carrying forth these timeless values, these timeless aspects of health and healing, carrying them forward. It’s one thing to say that I wish things were better, I wish things were different. I think this book gives people some tools to really be able to create, in a legitimate way, a construct of how things can be made better.

When we look at the past and gaze across the broad sweep of the centuries in the healing arts, we see changing boundaries and changing definitions of particular professions. Sometimes people living now, and particularly living now in the United States, see the current lay of the land—with medical doctors, osteopaths, chiropractors, podiatrists, massage therapists, acupuncturists, and so forth—and assume that this will be the form in which things remain indefinitely. But if we look back 150 years or so, most of these professions didn’t yet exist. When people look forward, should they expect further changes in the nature of the professions?

Absolutely, that’s what the history tells us. The scribe’s role is to say, “Here is the evidence of how things have been different, here’s what has changed, and here’s what has been timeless.” And therefore, within that perspective, you can begin to conceive of different ways, so that we’re not actually stuck within this paradigm that we happened to grow up with in the post-World War II era, which to some extent is an aberration.

In earlier human societies, the role of healer was not even a profession per se. That’s also true in a lot of Third World societies today. I have recently been using some of my knowledge to put together a training program for traditional birth attendants in Iraq. So this is very contemporary in terms of current needs and contingencies. We’re about to pull out of Iraq, and I give credit to the Army, which has civil affairs people and medical people. They don’t want it all to just collapse and so they’re really trying to put some tools in the hands of the Iraqis. I mean, they don’t need a Harvard Medical School; they need to train emergency medical technicians, they need to train traditional birth attendants, and they need to train people in first aid. This is what American forces have found out there over the past seven years.

So I have been asked to put together an orientation to take medical faculty from over there, and give them tools to train traditional birth attendants. That way, the births that can be safely done at home should be done at home, and the ones that need to go to the hospital can be identified. This goes back to some of the work I did in Southeast Asia 30 years ago. So, this perspective is being translated right now to training EMTs, traditional birth attendants and first aid responders in Iraq, where there is a hole in the medical system, just as there is a hole in most other things in Iraq.

In these societies, there are people who have been identified, outside of the Western model of education, as people who have the attributes of a healer. This has nothing to do with training or education. Instead, it’s by a process of divination, where the elders see a spirit in this child, which says that you have the qualities of a healer. This is the way it’s done all around the world by people in traditional societies. The notion is that being a healer is not a profession or something you learn to do; it’s something you are. So you get the medicine man, the shaman. A woman, in these societies, can be a traditional birth attendant or an herbalist. In the Middle Ages, you got burned at the stake for that, as a witch.