What does health mean? What does wellness mean?
You’re probably familiar with the white coats and stethoscopes, but how much do you know about non-allopathic healing practices?
- The Archive of Healing promotes the democratization of healthcare by creating a space for discourse about medical practices, sharing knowledge directly to users, empowering individuals to collaborate with their own healing practitioners (allopathic and non-allopathic), and encouraging the exploration of diverse healing modalities. A primary goal of the site is to challenge Western medical conventions and emphasize the complementary nature of allopathic and non-allopathic remedies.
- Yeah, we know. Some of this stuff is weird. Some of the data might not sit right with you. Some data certainly prompts a clinical dissonance. We feel the same way! In the interest of knowledge sharing and collaborative learning, the Archive publishes many pieces of medical literature that allopathic medicine has disproven or has not yet recognized; the Archive serves to prompt critical thinking, more questions than answers.
- Keep in mind that all information on this site has its own historical and geographical context(s). Some language used will be outdated and therefore offensive to contemporary audiences; conserving the verbatim language of this historic data sheds light on the relationship between linguistics and medical literature which, like all institutional knowledge, is rife with flaws.
- Because the Archive functions as a scholarly database and not a medical platform, no aspect of this site provides clinically verified professional advice for immediate health concerns or chronic ailments. Please seek professional counseling from a licensed healer (allopathic or non-allopathic) rather than implementing information, opinions, or advice offered by the Archive and/or community members.
- We have developed a site that has a solid foundation with many possibilities for growth. We are working on those consistently. The aim was to not only provide information (which any archive could do), but also build community. To reach that aim, we are developing a more robust profile page for users with messaging and contact sharing possibilities; we are soon to allow commenting on cards and the sharing of individual search results on social media; and a portal for the submission of new data is in the works. Stay tuned for more!
A Brief History of the Archive
The core data of the Archive of Healing (AH)™ was collected by a team of researchers at UCLA, working under the direction of Dr. Wayland Hand and then Dr. Michael Owen Jones. They spent over thirty years collecting data on healing from over 3,200 publications, six university archives, as well as first-hand and second-hand information from anthropological and folkloric fieldnotes. The collected data spans over two-hundred years and seven continents. Originally named the “Archive of Traditional Medicine,” the Archive of Healing™ is now under the direction of Dr. David Delgado Shorter. Since 2016, Dr. Shorter has worked with a team of students to curate the data into data types, which include both shareable and now private content.
You can learn more about the Archive of Healing™ in this article or in this YouTube video.