Whilst I found James T Hanson’s article (therapy today, October 2007) on the relationship between counselling and healthcare interesting, it seems to me that he is trapped in the very dualism he highlights. This dualism started well before Descartes. It is central to the writings of St Paul in his separation of the spirit and the flesh. I suspect that the seeds of it can be found in the first moments when mankind started to cultivate plants and conceived the idea that power over nature might lead to a day when the gates of Eden would be taken by force and mankind lay claim to the Tree of Life and immortality.

The consequence of this mindset is that we are at war with nature and, by extension, with ourselves. The internal war is reflected in the external world: the war on terror; the war on drugs; the war on disease. In the terminology of war, the question is: what do diseases do to us? This might be phrased differently as: ‘What do diseases do for us?’ Disease and mankind are as old as each other. Rather than seeing them as enemies, it might be interesting to consider them as living in symbiosis? Just as the lion is not at war with the wildebeest, we humans live in a creative symbiosis with extraordinarily versatile and adaptable bacteria and viruses which constantly challenge us to grow and to better ourselves. But we have turned this symbiosis into a war, and part of our need as warriors is to seek out ever more virulent opponents.

I came to this realisation after half a lifetime of battling with the common cold. One day I noticed that a cold would always follow on from any serious emotional shift; that the symptoms seemed in some way to mirror physically the emotional upheaval. The idea came to me that the cold was maybe my friend rather than my enemy.

It was a shocking notion at first. From a medical standpoint, the idea made no sense; and I knew that it was true. As I relaxed my fight against the microbe, colds became less frequent, and passed by much quicker. Illness is never pleasant, but I came to see that most of my suffering came from my resistance. Once I allowed the illness to ‘do its stuff ’ it would come and go so quickly that sometimes it was over almost as soon as the symptoms first started. It will be no surprise therefore to find that I agree with Joanna Moncrieff (therapy today, October 2007) when she questions the medicalisation of psychiatry. But I would argue, further, that the ‘war on disease’ means medicine itself has become medicalised. By this I mean that medical practitioners have become so fascinated by the technology that they have lost sight of the essence of medicine, which is healing. When Rogers talks about the actualising tendency, he is not concerned exclusively with mind or psyche. Body, mind and soul are all part of one selfhealing entity. If the healer – whether doctor, surgeon, therapist or shaman – has a role, then it must be to assist the client/patient to connect with their inherent ability to heal.

Taking this one step further, I would suggest that disease – or dis-ease – far from being the enemy to be defeated, is itself part of the healing. We in the west have become so used to the idea that we should always be comfortable that we have lost touch with the creative value of discomfort. Pain, whether psychic or physical, is itself an essential part of the healing – the body shouting for help. When we take painkillers or antibiotics, we stifle the voice of our healing. This is not to say that technology does not have a role to play. Sometimes the pain really is more than we can bear. I would certainly not advocate doing hip replacements without anaesthetic. Prof. Hanson’s suggestion that medicine and psychiatry or counselling can be separated from one another doesn’t, I think, make a great deal of sense. Clearly they are linked, in a way that, however we try to manipulate it, accountancy and medicine – to cite his analogy – are not. Like him, I do not want to see therapy sucked into the gladiatorial struggle that medical science has largely become. On the other hand, it is not enough for therapists simply to distance themselves from medical practice. Medicine needs to rediscover its roots, so that the two can work together in harmony. Maybe that is an invitation that we can offer to medical practitioners, rather than, however subtly, perpetuating the war between our two camps.