[Savage]

Healing in Norway Source
by Else Egeland, RN

Healing has been part of traditional folk medicine here, as in all cultures. Healing has also been an important part of the Norwegian Sami culture. Both the medicine of the Sami people and Norwegian folk medicine in general suffered under pressure form the church and the medical profession for several hundred years, but has still survived up to our time. We estimate there are about 50 healers practicing healing full time (in a nation of only 4 million people, with lots of space for each of us), and several hundred healers working part time. Approximately 4 % of the population has visited a healer.

Healing is legal in Norway. We have no legislation directly regulating complementary medicine. Since 1936 there has been a 'quackery law’, which restricts anyone other than medical doctors from advertising the ability to treat or cure specific diseases. The law also reserves exclusively for doctors the treatment (including diagnosing or giving advice) of cancer, diabetes, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, dangerous anaemias, epidemic diseases and goiter. It is actually illegal to pray for these people to get well, if the healing of the exclusive condition is the main issue of the prayer. The medical monopoly might, after pressure from the medical lobby, be extended to all "serious disease". At the same time, holistic therapies like healing do not treat isolated symptoms. We treat whole living beings. We now openly receive e.g. people with cancer, but do not promise any effect on specific medically diagnosed disease.

The Norwegian Healers Association was founded in 1994, and has been working to set a minimum standard for healers, and to make healing acceptable as a natural, valuable and health promoting therapy with a rightful place in our society. As in most countries, healing has been ridiculed and generally given a less positive focus in the media. Healing has been seen as mysterious to the larger part of the public, even to healers themselves, and was usually the method they use only when all else had failed. Attitudes are changing, though. Since 1994 the media has begun to express a more positive and open-minded attitude to healing, and we have more and more people consulting healers.

Many are attending healing workshops to awaken their awareness and develop their own healing potentials. There is a growing interest in holistic views on health and disease, and in our self-healing abilities. The biomedical model is increasingly seen as only one of many different paradigms, even in the health sciences. Healing is "taking off" in Norway and will, hopefully in the near future, be acknowledged for what it truly is -- one of the most potent and cost effective health-promoting therapies known on this planet.

Until recently, the medical profession generally showed little interest in healing. In 1997 the Norwegian Medical Association published a report on Alternative Medicine. They stated that, even though healing produces demonstrable effects, the results have to be dismissed because there is no rational (i.e. biomedical) explanation for the effect. "In the medical profession we want what we do to be both true in terms of rationally and logically understandable, and useful", (Alternativ behandling 1997). However, Doctors in general practice are usually more open-minded and accepting.

Under public pressure, and following a unanimous request by the Norwegian parliament, the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs in April 1997 appointed a Committee to report on various aspects of Alternative Medicine. Their report was published in 1998. Though the committee was dominated by the majority of medical doctors and included no healers, they still concluded that healing was one of the three methods that had some degree of scientific evidence of effects, according to their very strict criteria. (The other two were acupuncture and homeopathy). This was a shocking discovery to many of the members of this Committee, we were told. Their conclusion on healing was that "The efficacy of healing cannot be dismissed, but no effectuation mechanism is known. The method is deemed conceivably effective, but it is not possible to say anything about the effect on specific diseases or groups of diseases."*. Interesting formulation, I think, but though a great move forward from 1993, when the health authorities proclaimed war on us.

As a result of this report we now practice in peace, and a few healers have even been employed in hospitals and social care institutions. A hospital in Northern Norway has employed a healer. I was myself employed a year on a project to offer healing at a day-center for heroin-addicts. The Norwegian Cancer Society appointed an advisory board on complementary medicine two years ago; and one of the members is a healer. The Cancer Society arranged a major conference on complementary medicine in cancer last year, and one of the lectures was on the benefits of healing to people with cancer.

The Ministry of Health and Social Affairs has recently established a center for studies of alternative medicine under the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tromsø in Northern Norway. Healers will now have possibilities for research funding from both the Cancer Society and the official Norwegian research council.

I believe that we need to educate researchers from the healing profession, to be able to contribute with our acquired experience and insights and, hopefully, to contribute to the coming birth of a new paradigm in health and medicine.

References

Alternativ behandling. Den norske legeforening, Oslo 1997, page 107 (my translation).

Alternative Medicine; NOU 1998-21: Link to English summary of the report:

http://odin.dep.no/shd/norsk/publ/ut...d005-b-n-a.asp

The Norwegian Healers Association: www.healing.no

Else Egeland, RN has been a practicing healer since 1983. She was co-founder of The Norwegian Healers Association in 1994, secretary the first year, and chair from 1995-1999. She is studying health science at the University of Bergen. She is engaged in the foundation of a European umbrella organization for healers, and is interested in developing contacts with other healing organizations internationally.