E2 S2 | Bringing a Historical and Personal Lens to Medicine and Healing: Author and Professor Ed Cohen Discusses What Medicine Doesn’t Know in His Book Titled On Learning to Heal

Sick and Seeking Episode 2 of Season 2 features author and professor Ed Cohen who shares all about his new book: On Learning to Heal - What Medicine Doesn’t Know. 

At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility.

In On Learning to Heal, Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing’s role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.

Topics Discussed:

• Ed’s Crohn's Disease diagnoses over 50 years ago at the age of 13 
• His self-proclaimed “adolescence on steroids” when he was treated with high doses of prednisone 
• His life-changing healing trances that spontaneously occurred while severely sick and recovering in hospital 
• Ed’s 40 year quest to understand why medicine knows a lot about being sick, but not a lot about getting better and healing
• How healing is our birthright, and in our culture we don’t give healing the respect that it’s due 
• How we are made into an ‘anybody’ for medical purposes when really each disease is particular and specific to each person 
• The idea that medicine is a fee-for-service enterprise, and it sells itself to us as being the best treatment by using diagnosis and prognosis
• How medicine was first considered an art of healing, and one way this was practiced was through Asclepion Temple Healing 

“And then when I finally got out of the hospital, I had an exit interview with my surgeon and he said this thing that just seared itself into my brain. He said: You were the sickest person I've operated on in five years who's still alive and I have

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Transcript

Leslie (00:01.302)

Hello, Ed, it's so great to be with you today. It's such a pleasure having you here on the Sick and Seeking, okay, I gotta start again, because I just stumbled my words. I won't do this again. All right. Hi, Ed, it's so great to have you with me today on the Sick and Seeking podcast.

Ed Cohen (00:04.45)

Hello, Leslie.

Ed Cohen (00:20.259)

Oh, thank you for having me!

Leslie (00:23.21)

It's such a pleasure to be able to talk to you. When I read about three of your passions in life, I was pretty gobsmacked because if someone asked me what are my interests, I'd say gardening, cycling, and dancing. And if I am correct, you have very similar interests of me.

Ed Cohen (00:42.786)

Oh absolutely, those are at the top of my list for sure.

Leslie (00:47.178)

Yeah, I can't wait to talk about all of that and more. But first, I invited Ed on today because we are here to talk about not only his book on learning to heal or what medicine doesn't know, but also to hear about Ed, his story, and what it's been like living with Crohn's disease. And then obviously we'll jump into so many other cool places, but I think that's a great place to start and just hear from you, Ed. What's it been like being diagnosed with Crohn's disease?

Ed Cohen (01:16.81)

Oh, small topic. Well, just to begin, this is my well, it's actually, it's the end of my 50th anniversary of having been diagnosed. I was diagnosed, it's not going to be 51 years in November. So this has been my golden anniversary. Woo! So I've been celebrating all year.

Leslie (01:38.218)

Hahaha!

Leslie (01:41.785)

Yay!

Ed Cohen (01:43.754)

And I actually have been celebrating in the sense of, I am very happy to still be alive, which was not at all clear a number of times in my experience. And certainly when I was first diagnosed, yeah, the prognosis for Crohn's was less clear than it is now, although it is still entirely unclear.

in case people don't know about Crohn's disease, although it's become an increasingly mediagenic inflammatory bowel disease, among inflammatory bowel diseases, you can see ads for the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation on TV, and also for the number of the monoclonal antibodies that people now take. But Crohn's is...

considered to be an autoimmune illness, although there's controversy about that, that causes inflammation anywhere in the digestive tract from your mouth to your anus. And there are lots of different kinds of manifestations, but generally diarrhea, various kinds of cramping, pain, intestinal obstruction, fistulas, they're all secondary characteristics. There's all many, many kinds of issues with Crohn's.

But I first was diagnosed when I was 13 after being on a cross-country trip with my family where I basically became incontinent. And becoming incontinent on a cross-country trip where rest stops are few and far between, not the most ideal place for this to happen, but nonetheless.

That was my special experience. And when we returned from that trip, I had wasted so much that when we arrived back at my grandmother's apartment, she completely freaked out and started screaming. And after that, I had to start going to a lot of doctors. And first I went to my pediatrician who legitimated that this was not your ordinary diarrhea.

Ed Cohen (04:06.118)

Then I went to an internist at a local hospital who did a bunch of x-rays and tests and whatever and gave me some weird foam to inject up my anus that did nothing. And then I was sent with my whole pile of x-rays, because this is in the olden days, where you actually had to carry your x-rays, so in big manila envelopes. And then I went to Johns Hopkins. I lived near Baltimore.

Leslie (04:27.314)

Hahaha

Ed Cohen (04:35.634)

to the world famous gastroenterologist who then acknowledged that, yep, this was acute and I was very sick at that time. I was supposed to be starting high school and instead I went to the hospital. And then I was in the hospital for a number of months. I mean, the olden days, again, the insurance companies would allow you to be diagnosed. Also, I was acutely ill, so I was on...

The, it's called TPN, it's a kind of food without food that you get intravenously. And they did bazillions of tests, like I like to say, no orifice was left unprobed. And finally they came to my room and it's a teaching hospital, so there's always a team. It's never just a doctor, it's a doctor and a team.

and they came in to pronounce what they have discovered. I refer to it as like when you watch like HGTV, the reveal. So it's like the reveal of my diagnosis and they're like, oh, you have Crohn's disease. And of course like Crohn's, when I first heard it, I didn't know who Dr. Crohn was. I thought Crohn like an old lady. I was like, how do I have an old lady disease?

Leslie (05:41.986)

Ha ha.

Ed Cohen (06:00.646)

No, it's just some Jewish guy. And then they tried to explain to me what it was, and they said, oh, it's an autoimmune illness. And I was 13, I had a rather large vocabulary at the time, but autoimmunity was not one of my words, so they had to kind of break it down for me. And so they said, well, first they said, well, it's like you're allergic to yourself. And I was not really getting that concept.

And then they said, well, it's like part of yourself is rejecting part of yourself. Again, not terribly clear. Um, so finally they said, oh, well, it's like you're eating yourself alive. Okay. Now I could understand that. Yeah. But I have to say that is not a good way to explain an illness to anybody, let

Leslie (06:37.666)

Mmm.

Leslie (06:49.784)

Yeah.

Leslie (06:58.427)

No.

Ed Cohen (07:00.838)

who is severely ill, not a good idea. But that's what I took in, that explanation, and just parenthetically having then subsequently written a lot of scholarly works about the history of immunology and autoimmunity. And it's not even a halfway decent explanation of what autoimmunity is. I mean, it's just horrible. But then they immediately began to do what all

Ed Cohen (07:31.074)

all responses to anything diagnosed as an autoimmune illness. There's only one response. Because autoimmune illnesses, all, there are now 60 to 80, no more, 80 to 100 conditions that are considered to have auto-ediologies. All of them are incurable, there are no cures in illnesses, and they don't know why they're caused, they don't know what...

Leslie (07:54.48)

Mmm.

Ed Cohen (07:57.61)

why they happen, when they happen to the people that they happen. The only thing that they can do is what a recent medical review article that I use this phrase that I love. All they can do is use what is referred to as the sledgehammer of immunosuppression. So beautiful. And so I was immediately put on high, high doses of prednisone.

Leslie (08:18.946)

I'm out.

Leslie (08:24.727)

Mmm.

Ed Cohen (08:24.974)

And if any of you know, your listeners have had the joy of being on Prednisone. Uh, Prednisone, I mean, first of all, Prednisone did save my life. And at the time that was all there are now. There was now there are these monoclonal antibodies, Humira, Remicate. I mean, there's a whole bunch of them now and they're more specific. And so, and they are more targeted and have somewhat fewer.

Leslie (08:30.929)

No.

Ed Cohen (08:54.214)

fewer side effects. But prednisone was the first massive immunosuppressinants used. They still use it for people, everything from poison ivy to brain tumors. I mean, it's just, you know. But it has a lot, a lot of side effects. Physical side effects. So I became incredibly obese. I had what's called a Cushoid phase.

Leslie (09:03.147)

Yeah.

Leslie (09:08.823)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (09:25.2)

There's a lot of secondary effects like skin thinning, so like I have stretch marks from 40 years ago. Now I have cataracts because of the perineum. So that's one thing, but the main thing is that it also causes all kinds of emotional and psychological side effects.

Leslie (09:39.441)

No, well...

Leslie (09:49.983)

Mmm.

Ed Cohen (09:50.914)

So it causes depression, anxiety, mood swings, you know, all of that. And, but none of that was mentioned to me. I was never, or to my parents, nobody, like now, you know, this, because this was 1972. So it's before the internet, before anything, you know, now, you know, anybody who is put on prednisone or anything, you know, we always go to Dr. Google, right?

you know, you look it up and you're like, oh, look at all, I mean, like now, literally, you go to drugs.com, you put in Prednisone and it gives you the whole list of like all the insane side effects. There's so many side effects. But at the time, no, nobody mentioned any of them. I mean, literally, I went to my gastroenterologist like a year after, you know, I'd been on Prednisone and I had bloated up. I had, I became, I lived really obese. And my mother said to my gastroenterologist, well, you know, we're a big concern.

Leslie (10:37.122)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (10:44.862)

that he's put on so much weight. And my gastroenterologist said, oh, don't worry, he's big boned. And I'm like, look at these wrists. These are not big boned wrists. I'm like, sorry, better snap. But the worst was, not even that, the worst was the psychological side effects. Basically, I was having a drug induced mental illness, but nobody mentioned it.

Leslie (10:52.378)

Oh gosh. Oh my.

Leslie (11:11.17)

Boom.

Ed Cohen (11:14.082)

And you know, because basically, and then everybody just, my parents, everybody just attributed it to adolescence. They're like, oh, he's moody, he's depressed, he's anxious, he's an adolescent, hey! And even when I knew something was wrong, and I said to my father, I was like, send me to therapy, can I go to therapy? My father, who was very good at the zinger,

Leslie (11:23.323)

Ah, yes.

Yeah.

Leslie (11:33.048)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (11:44.222)

Instead, you've seen too many Woody Allen movies. I was like, oh, great, thank you. So basically, I refer to that now as my adolescence on steroids.

Leslie (11:51.214)

I'm sorry.

Leslie (11:57.578)

I mean, what I will say about prednisone, even I've been put on it for Lord knows why, I don't remember, and it was only like a very small dose for like three days, but I have to say, Ed, when I was reading about this part in your book, I had so much, I don't know if it's compassion or empathy or both, but I felt miserable from those three days. I was like...

this drug, whatever this is, it took care of the issue. But I was like, whoa, this is like an atomic bomb. And I just feel so out of sorts. So I can't imagine that how you were on that for 10 years, but wow.

Ed Cohen (12:33.35)

Oh, and so I have had to then be on it because there's a, so when we say Crohn's is a particular disease it makes it sound like there's like a very specific set of symptoms, but actually there's all autoimmune illnesses are often co-related in all kinds of ways. So for example, secondary effects of Crohn's are often arthritis. So I have like

hip replacement, all kinds of things. But I also have skin things, like eczema. And so I've had huge eczema thing. And as you say, you get five days of prednisone on a moderate dose. I was on massive, massive doses for 10 years. Nobody would be on that. Of course, at the time, that is what one had to... That was all...

Leslie (13:18.296)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie (13:23.783)

much.

Ed Cohen (13:30.918)

But you know, and the cause, so I have osteopenia and I've, no, I mean, you know, but yeah, but the psychological things both being on it and then coming off it, because then, so this is, I lived like this for 10 years and then I got really sick. You think I was already sick, but no, I got really sick. I mean, I had, you know, so, you know, any of these autoimmune illnesses,

Leslie (13:41.88)

Oh yeah.

Leslie (13:50.922)

Yeah, right.

Ed Cohen (13:58.058)

you know, like with MS they call it recurring relapsing. But, and so when you, they, they refer to it as flares. You get a flare, which you know, for Crohn's makes a lot of sense. It's cause like, that's what your ass feels like when you're having an attack. Like, Oh yeah, it's flaring. But, uh.

Leslie (14:05.451)

Yeah.

Leslie (14:12.042)

Oh gosh, oh gosh.

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (14:22.214)

When I was in my early 20s, when I was 22, I was in graduate school getting a PhD at Stanford in modern thought. And I started having a very acute period. And they just kept increasing my doses of prednisone. And then at a certain point, I had a small bowel obstruction.

uh... because that's one of the things that happens when the information gets too great your actually your intestine seal off right and then and i happen to be visiting my parents at the time my parents live in rural maryland and there wasn't a really well there wasn't really a hospital there was a little clinic where there were doctors and i was taken there and you know basically what they do is they just give you demoral they give you like massive painkillers until

the flare subsides and your intestines open up again. But there was no gastroenterologist and they didn't do anything. Well, it turned out that actually my bowel had perforated, but that was undetected. And so as a result, all of the bacteria in my gut were released into my viscera. And you know.

One of the things, we're warm, we're moist, we're like high-end spas for bacteria. They're like, oh yeah, let me go there. So, a little did I know, so fortunately, I went back to graduate school, which I was at Stanford, so that was really good, because I was at the best hospital in the world, basically. And after a month or so,

The bacteria had flourished enough that they created these huge abscesses on the, on a blood vessel on the outside of my small intestine, but it wasn't really, they weren't easy, easy to, they were undetectable until I had my first bleed out, where I ended up in a pool of blood on the floor in my bathroom with blood coming out of my anus.

Leslie (16:34.082)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (16:40.962)

and then had to, was taken to the hospital. And then they did all these tests. This was 1982. So again, it's not now, but you know, they were a lot of tests. No, again, no orifice was left unproved. And, but they couldn't really detect anything. Cause actually the way the main abscess was on the outside of the intestine. So it was sort of like not visualizable. And.

But then, you know, I was just getting increasingly sick. So I was scheduled to have emergency surgery, but what happened was that I had another bleed out before that could happen. And that was very extreme. And fortunately I was in the hospital, but I started having a near death out of body experience. I kind of left my body and was up somewhere looking down

what was going on, which was trying to stabilize my blood pressure enough to rush me into emergency surgery. The last thing that I remember was that I was being raced on a gurney down the hall to the OR and I was flying above myself and I could see everybody holding the bags of the fluid. Next thing I know, I woke up in the ICU.

And then I had a small bowel resection, so they had to cut out a big portion of my small intestine. Turned out I also had huge liver abscesses that were then drained, and then I was highly toxic. So basically after that, I had to be in the hospital for another couple months on IV antibiotics, and I had to be like weaned off of prednisone, which I'd been on for 10 years. So that...

Leslie (18:32.874)

Mm-mm.

Ed Cohen (18:36.33)

Neither of those things is a good thing. Having both of them happen at the same time is really not good, and especially if you're really, really sick. But then something weirdly happened in that process that really did change my life, which was that while I was in the hospital receiving these IV antibiotics, and obviously I was on drugs, I spontaneously started going into trances. Like,

Leslie (18:39.283)

No.

Leslie (18:44.608)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (19:05.082)

I could lie on my hospital bed and put on my Walkman and listen to music and go into like some place. I don't, it wasn't the hospital, it was peaceful, it was very light filled and somehow I could like gather up the light and then I could sort of use it. I could pack it around the parts of my viscera around, you know, that had been cut open and were trying to knit themselves back together.

you know, I just, in my head, it was just pain management. And then once I was, you know, able to do that, then I could go into some peaceful place. And then I would just like go elsewhere. I was not in the hospital. At first that freaked out the nurses and the doctors, cause they would come in and they try to talk to me. And, you know, from their perspective, I was dead to the world, which in a hospital is not a good thing. So.

Leslie (19:55.053)

No.

Ed Cohen (19:56.53)

But then they figured out, oh, just shut off the music, he'll come out of it. And then after that, nobody thought much about it. I didn't think of anything about it. Nobody thought about it. I didn't. And there was nothing in my life that would have led me to think that this was a thing. I mean, I grew up in a family. My father's a physical chemist. My mother was a communist. They're both atheist Jews. In my family, matter was all that mattered. It was not a, I was not, I had no intention. It was not like I wasn't calling on spirit. I wasn't doing anything. I was just.

Leslie (20:08.846)

Yeah.

Leslie (20:24.97)

Mm-hmm.

Ed Cohen (20:26.042)

like lying there doing whatever. And then when I finally got out of the hospital, I had an exit interview with my surgeon and he said this thing that just like seared itself into my brain. He said, you were the sickest person I've operated on in five years who's still alive and I have no idea how you got better so quickly. Now that was crazy for two reasons. One of course, because it cut through

my denial about how sick I'd been. I mean, even though I had the whole out of body thing and all, I mean, you know, I was 22 going on 23. I mean, I wasn't like considering my mortality, you know, I was in denial. So I was like, ooh, okay, I guess I was really sick. And, but the other part where he said, I don't know how you got better so quickly. So first of all, it's the first time I heard a doctor say, I don't know. And second of all, I was like,

Leslie (21:10.147)

Yeah.

Leslie (21:24.203)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (21:26.53)

well, why, well, how come you don't know about getting better? Like, you know a lot about the getting sick, but you don't really know about the getting better. And that really was just the beginning of a whole new adventure that I've been basically on for 40 years, trying to understand, you know, on the one hand, why doesn't medicine know this? So that's why I've written this book called On Learning to Heal or What Medicine Doesn't Know. Like, why doesn't medicine know about healing since-

Leslie (21:35.574)

Yeah.

Leslie (21:41.332)

Mm.

Ed Cohen (21:55.282)

for more than 2,000 years, healing was what medicine was concerned with, was supporting and encouraging the natural power of healing. Until about 100 years ago, less than 100 years ago, that was all that medicine could do, really. There was no curing, there was only supporting healing. So I was like, what happened? Why did nobody ever mention healing to me? That was a, so I wanted to know why didn't medicine know? And then, you know.

Leslie (22:09.774)

Mm-hmm.

Ed Cohen (22:24.478)

How can we support and encourage this natural power that is every one of our birthrights, everyone who's alive today, and I assume since people are listening to this, they're alive, knows something important about healing. But most of us don't know that we know because we've outsourced that knowledge to medicine. And then we rely on doctors and other healthcare professionals to take care of it for us. And you know, I mean them, they're just, obviously I would have been dead without them, but.

Leslie (22:38.464)

Yeah.

Leslie (22:47.595)

Yep.

Ed Cohen (22:52.326)

The reality is that when we rely on medicine to take care of us, we often take in its ways of thinking along with its remedies. And as one of the great historians and philosophers of medicine, George Kangiam, underscores, he says, and this is, he says, of all of the objects treated by medical thought, healing is the one that doctors have considered least often.

Leslie (23:22.341)

Mmm.

Ed Cohen (23:22.526)

And I'm like, whoa, okay, maybe we need to redress that. Like, maybe, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm glad medicine has developed the resources it has. I'm glad that, you know, it's been able to utilize certain kinds of technological and scientific advances. But maybe they threw out the baby with the bathwater. You know, I mean, that sort of.

Leslie (23:27.894)

Yeah.

Leslie (23:45.982)

Yeah, you absolutely, I'm just so glad that I was connected to you and I got to read your book because you were the one who really went into all the history of how we got into this sort of dominance of biomedicine and how it all happened. So I really appreciated that because you did all the hard work of doing all the research and finding all the like, the scholar that you are went in and found...

Ed Cohen (24:01.374)

Thanks for watching.

Ed Cohen (24:09.43)

Oh

Leslie (24:12.95)

all the people have been writing about, you know, how medicine has shifted and looking at the history of medicine and you are also the one who reminded me that medicine is not an exact science. I mean, that was like mind blowing to me. And you, you know, cataloged exactly how it shifted and what happened. And I love this quote from, you shared it with Henry Atlan, that medicine does not know and indeed refuses to know its own ignorance. You know, it, that I just, I appreciate.

all the hard work you did in this book. You laid that out, so thank you.

Ed Cohen (24:44.291)

Oh, thank you. Yes, no. Well, that's I mean, my work in general, I mean, as I mentioned briefly before, my PhD is in something called modern thought. And what my scholarly work, my teaching in the academy is really about is like, how did we come to have certain ideas that now seem to us as self evident, such that we don't even question them, we don't

there was another possibility. And yet, the historical reality is that they were invented at a certain point by certain people to address certain problems that were presented. And they contain certain assumptions that may not necessarily be true or may not be required. And yet, and that's why I was saying, when we take in medical,

remedies we often take in its ways of knowing as if they are the truth and that's not always the case and so sometimes a lot of times we begin to make assumptions about what's possible for us based on what physicians and other healthcare professionals tell us and they're not trying to you know Deceive us or anything. It's just they

into the way that they have been trained. You know, the primary dogma of contemporary medicine or what we could call biomedicine that's based on bioscience is what's called biochemical reductionism, which means that they assume that all of the functions, all of the...

uh... events that take place in the living organism can be explained at the level of uh... physics chemistry biochemistry and cellular uh... processes so basically at the smallest level we can take break things down and then we identify you know what like in like in autoimmune illnesses

Ed Cohen (27:03.774)

oh well there's certain kinds of cells, you know, immunological cells or certain kinds of cofactors or cytokines or whatever that facilitate this like, you know, catalyzing this reaction. And which isn't to say that is not an accurate description of something that may be going on, but it doesn't mean that that's the cause, right? It's like the question is like, well, why did that start happening then?

Leslie (27:28.895)

Hmm.

Ed Cohen (27:32.998)

You know, like, and they're like, well, it's genetically informed, but then there has to be some immediate catalyst and then, and then I'm like, you know what, like, okay, we've had the same genome since we were conceived. Right. That was not a new thing. So why suddenly when I'm 13 or like for people with MS when they're in their thirties or like a friend of mine was just diagnosed with dermomyositis, which is a very serious, you know, pulmonary, whatever. And

Leslie (27:45.895)

Hehehe

Ed Cohen (28:01.046)

he's 60 whatever and suddenly it's like, well, he had those same genes for 60 years and none of these things ever happened and suddenly now this has happened. So, you know, like the idea that everything can, you know, in our existence as a living organism can somehow be attributed to and understood causally in terms of, you know, these, I mean, even biophysics,

the way that molecules resonate and how they... I mean, amazing stuff. I'm fascinated by it, but that's not a full explanation. There is, as like one of the chapters of my book says, we're more complicated than we know. We're more intelligent than we think. That knowing is a really vital resource for human beings.

Leslie (28:37.486)

Hmm.

Leslie (28:49.922)

Yeah.

Leslie (28:53.878)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (28:58.478)

Like in an evolutionary sense, it's part of how we've gone on living. But it's not the highest manifestation of our intelligence. I mean, as organisms, and that's what I discovered when I went into these trances and then had this kind of radical healing experience. Like, there was nothing in my knowledge base that at all, in fact, everything in my knowledge base said nothing like this could ever happen.

Leslie (29:22.168)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (29:27.854)

And yet there did happen. I had no intention, there was no will, there was no agency, it wasn't about me. It was like something more than what I identified as me. I mean, it was an aspect of my capacity as a living being in the world. And that's the thing about healing is that healing is our birthright. Every living organism since the first cell that sprang into existence.

Leslie (29:28.039)

Mmm. Yeah.

Leslie (29:37.12)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (29:56.262)

has shared this vital capacity. Life itself would not have gone on. Biologists will tell you. And then, you know, I mean, it's very hard to define what life is. I mean, first of all, let alone what constitutes a living organism. But there's a general agreement that living organisms have to be bounded, but the boundary has to be permeable. So things have to be able to come in nutrients from the environment.

and toxins have to be able to be released. Organisms have to be able to reproduce themselves in time. And the other thing is that they have to be able to repair themselves. Without those functions, there is no living organism. And you know, so this is very fundamental. And yet in our culture, we don't really give healing the respect that it's due.

Leslie (30:37.557)

Mmm.

Leslie (30:50.488)

Yes.

Leslie (30:53.858)

Absolutely. That's what this podcast is. One of the aims of this podcast. I mean, again, you writing it out, it seems so obvious to me, but you're talking about not only our body's natural tendency to move towards healing, but also then you talk about even both having the desire and value in healing. It's just concepts that they seem so obvious, but I needed to have them written down by you so I could read them and dive in with you. And

The fact that our body is always repairing and healing. And like you said, for you to not even have an inclination to go into a trance state or put yourself into a meditative state and to visualize or what have you, I just thought that was one of the most brilliant things I'd ever heard. It was just like, whatever you wanna say, the greater powers that be, your internal spirit, whatever it is, it just sort of knew what to do. And it was, it's just remarkable to hear a story like that.

Ed Cohen (31:53.498)

Absolutely, no, and that's, you know, that's what, as you mentioned, you know, what I try to do both in my book and then I, you know, I have a therapeutic practice called healing council that I work with people mostly with chronic and life-threatening illnesses, although healing is not only physiological healing happens in many ways and it includes emotional, psychological, spiritual.

But it's also collective. You know, let's face it, look at the world now. It's like our communities, our cultures, our nations. Our planet need healing, and healing is a vital possibility in that way. I always give the example of the ozone layer. In the late 20th century, there was a big hole in the ozone layer, and then people realized, oh, fluorocarbons are causing that. And then there was a...

a ban on fluorocarbons, and guess what? That hole in the ozone layer is healed itself. It's closed. You know, it's like, so there, it's a, healing's a tendency. It's not a necessity, and there are many things, there are many countervailing tendencies, right? That's the thing about a tendency. A tendency is not a guarantee. It's not determinate. It's an inclination. It's a possible direction.

Leslie (33:05.198)

Yeah.

Leslie (33:14.286)

Mm-hmm.

Ed Cohen (33:20.818)

You know, it's a potential, you know, but in order to realize it, to actualize the tendency, you know, if we first of all desire, well, first of all, yeah, if we desire it, if we recognize it, if we desire it, and we value it, then we can build resources that support it and encourage it, like banning fluorocarbons or stopping smoking or, you know, I think, but.

Leslie (33:23.182)

Yeah.

Leslie (33:47.519)

Mm.

Ed Cohen (33:50.59)

until we have the intention, we don't pay attention, right? And so we often then just remain tense. So, you know, my work in general is very, it's very simple to bring out these very simple things that I think should be self evident, like, why don't we know this?

Leslie (33:56.342)

Yeah.

Leslie (34:03.982)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ed Cohen (34:19.714)

And then part of my work is to explain, oh, well, there's a good reason why we don't know this. That the history of the development of the technologies that we rely on also have baked into them certain kinds of limitations that are intrinsic. I mean, and that's true of any way of knowing always has limits, right? And that's inescapable. So it's not to denigrate or say that this...

Leslie (34:24.876)

Yep.

Leslie (34:39.202)

Mm.

Ed Cohen (34:47.066)

way of thinking is completely wrong is just to say, it works for this, but not for everything. Or it works in a particular way under certain circumstances. Or like this is what we hope, I wished that we had learned from the COVID, right? Like.

Leslie (34:51.692)

Yeah.

Leslie (35:04.846)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (35:08.262)

If we had paid attention, COVID actually challenges so many foundational assumptions about our way of thinking about what it means to be living beings in the world. I mean, at a very basic level, what I'd like to say about the COVID is COVID demonstrates that the idea that we are

individuals separated from one another and kind of self-defining autonomous is biologically counterfactual. That we are entangled with each other all the time. And a really simple way of thinking about that is when the COVID was first happening and they were trying to figure out ways of mitigating transmission, one of the first things that we were asked to do

along with wearing masks, which made some people insane, was we were asked not to touch each other. And that was really amazing because practicing not touching really made it clear how much we touch each other, like all the time. Like you have to stop yourself. It's like, oh, okay, we actually are touching. And in fact, you know, the word contagion means touching together, right?

Leslie (36:30.538)

Hmm.

Ed Cohen (36:31.29)

So, you know, at a very basic level, you know, something like a pandemic indicates that this very fundamental political, economic, psychological, sociological way of thinking about what it means to be a living being, that we are individuals, is actually not completely true. That it's a historical artifact that emerged in relationship to certain kinds of political and economic and technological.

Leslie (36:52.279)

Mmm.

Ed Cohen (37:00.082)

developments beginning in the end of the 17th century. And it, and it works for some things, but it doesn't work for pandemic. You know, it doesn't help you. You know, and then even like thinking about what diseases, you know, like we have this idea, like, so then I say COVID and we're like, oh, that's a disease. Right. Like we have a, but then think about it. It's like, well, what is, what is COVID? Oh, well, some people, some people are exposed.

Leslie (37:13.184)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (37:29.406)

to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, nothing happens. Some people actually, it incubates and proliferates and they're asymptomatic. Some people get a little flu. Some people get a pneumonia. Some people get like heart involvement, kidney involvement, brain involvement, my favorite was toes. I don't understand the toes, but whatever. Some people then...

Leslie (37:33.427)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie (37:51.934)

Yes. Yeah.

Ed Cohen (37:57.49)

have in response to these very acute symptoms, have immune responses that then become dysregulated, what were called cytokine storms, that then cause even more damage, you know? And then like, especially early on in the epidemic, the way that they were treating them was, I love this, was turning people over. Like that was like the main technique, let's turn them over, you know?

Leslie (38:22.038)

Mmm.

Ed Cohen (38:25.714)

So some people are then on life support, some people die, some people get the long COVID, right? Like that's all supposed to be one thing, like we have one name and as if it's the same thing. I'm like, that is not a really accurate way to think about what illness means. Like, why would you say this is one phenomenon? It's not.

Leslie (38:40.492)

Ehh

Leslie (38:48.747)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (38:54.066)

But we say it's one phenomenon because of the way that medicine has developed its thought processes about what diseases are. It's developed an idea of what's called ontological theory of diseases that, you know, basically a disease entity exists apart from the people who have it, who are subjected, you know, who have symptoms, and that if it manifests, it's the same in every person who has a manifestation.

The consequence of that is like what a philosopher like calls anybody-ization, which is that when we say somebody has a disease, it's a disease that could affect anybody. So it's not that it's your body. When you are diagnosed, you become an anybody. Like who you are, the particularity of who you are is not significant.

Leslie (39:40.355)

Yeah.

Leslie (39:45.747)

Mm-hmm.

Ed Cohen (39:51.798)

in relation to the diagnosis. The diagnosis could pertain to anybody. And when you get a diagnosis, you become an anybody in relationship to what medicine is going to do. So the example of that people are probably familiar with is like cancer stuff, right? Where...

Leslie (39:57.538)

Mmm.

Leslie (40:04.514)

Hmm.

Ed Cohen (40:16.85)

They, when you're diagnosed, you know, when people receive a diagnosis of some kind of malignancy. So first of all, cancer, we use the word cancer as if it's one thing, there's no such thing as cancer. There's a bazillion kinds of metastatic phenomenon, you know, some of which become a problem, some of which don't, you know, they don't even know, you know, some people have tumors when they die, you know, they do autopsies and they've caused nothing, they've done nothing, you know, so we don't, so anyway.

Leslie (40:41.326)

Mm-hmm.

Ed Cohen (40:46.578)

cancer, oncologist, they're gonna give you chemo, radiation, I mean basically, and they're still, now they have some, you know, immunosuppressing things, but, you know, basically it's like, they're gonna poison you, they're gonna slash you, they're gonna burn you, right? They're gonna, you know, they're gonna give you chemo, they're gonna do surgery, they're gonna give you radiation. Well, the way that, you know, oncologists talk to you about it, they'll say, well, there's like a 30% chance of this or the other thing, there's a...

Leslie (41:00.994)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (41:16.306)

60% chance of this, you know, okay. Those are statistical evaluations that apply to anybody, right? Not to you, that there's no particularity. You know, it's not about how you will respond. It's making you into an anybody for medical purposes, right? And we've, you know, people have known this as a problem.

Leslie (41:25.386)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (41:46.022)

at the very beginning of the kind of move towards making a scientific medicine, which happened at the cusp of the 18th century and took like basically a hundred and some years to really take hold. But the counter to that was homeopathy. Heinemann invented homeopathy at the end of the 18th century. Yeah.

end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century, because he disagreed with his any bodyization. And he was like, no.

Leslie (42:20.962)

Mm.

Ed Cohen (42:23.426)

If illnesses happen, they're particular to you, where you are now. And it's the same thing with say acupuncture. Acupuncture is not an any body technique. It's like, no, what's going on in this body? And that's why they do pulse diagnosis, or looking at your tongue, or doing all these things. It's like the specificity of what's happening for you at this moment, and then in relationship to the environment. Like,

Leslie (42:26.39)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (42:52.558)

Is it hot? Is it cold? Are you eating properly? Are you getting rest? Are you not? All of all of those things are part of the manifestation of whatever it is that's presenting itself to you that you in your life define as a problem. Because until we define it as a problem, we don't seek treatment. Right. It's only a problem insofar as in some way it's impeding.

Leslie (43:16.423)

Mm.

Ed Cohen (43:21.426)

your own ability to do the things that you consider to be valuable, right? So, from the very beginning of medicine, we knew this any bodyization was a problem. People were trying to suggest alternatives to it, and that's what we call alternative medicine now. But, bioscientific medicine...

Leslie (43:26.499)

Mmm.

Ed Cohen (43:47.262)

took on this other trajectory and it developed very, very powerful tools. Very, and you can see why it would be persuasive, you know, and why, and literally, and why we would buy into it. We do, we buy into it, we pay for it, you know, and it has many, many gifts. I mean, many, but we also buy into the fantasy that it's the only way. And that's what medicine does.

Leslie (43:53.091)

Mm-hmm.

Leslie (43:59.894)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (44:15.418)

insofar as medicine is a fee-for-service enterprise, it tries to sell itself to us as being the best treatment. That was an explicit policy statement that was made in the first part of the 20th century when medical education was transformed and became routinized in the way that it's now conducted in terms of pre-meds have to take

Leslie (44:21.378)

Hmm.

Leslie (44:26.7)

Yep.

Leslie (44:39.283)

Mm.

Ed Cohen (44:43.698)

physics and biochemistry and calculus and whatever, not just because those are weeding out people, which it is, that's part of the problem, but because that is the assumption that these are the necessary knowledges that people who have become trained as physicians need to know in order to understand how the body works. Well, yes, you can understand a lot of things. Mostly what you understand is what a dead body, what makes a body a dead body.

That's why in medical school, the first year, the rite of passage still for all medical students, although some of it is being changed to virtual, but is an actual autopsy. And that's one of the things that modern medicine is predicated on doing autopsies. That's the beginning of modern medicine at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. It's like what they call opening up a few corpses.

Leslie (45:14.756)

Mm.

Leslie (45:27.246)

Mmm.

Leslie (45:41.975)

Mm-hmm.

Ed Cohen (45:42.726)

and to look to correlate lesions that were identifiable in dead bodies and then tracking them back to the symptoms that were presented by the living body before it died. And then saying, oh, well, that must've been the cause of the symptoms. That's what's called clinical medicine. And that's, you know, and it's great. Dead bodies can tell us a lot about pathology. That's absolutely true. But dead bodies tell us nothing about healing because healing is a capacity of the living body.

Right. And so medicine, it's strength. And the reality is that medicine strengths are much more evident the closer you get to dying. Now, if you're in a terrible accident, if you need life, medicine, that medicine is, medicine is great in a crisis. I mean, that's it's.

Leslie (46:25.942)

Mmm.

Leslie (46:37.847)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (46:40.126)

And that's from the very beginning of medicine. Medicine was first invented 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece. And crisis, cryi, that's a Greek word. And it means a moment in which a decision is called for. And that's what made medicine for over 2,000 years, is that moment of crisis in which a decision is called for. And that physician tried to make a good judgment call in those moments.

In medicine, the ER, like you have to go to the ER, go to the ER, right? But like in terms of chronic illnesses, no, they're not, they're no, you know.

Leslie (47:18.046)

Mmm. Oh, I'm just so glad that you're again, pulling back the curtain and sort of like, I don't know, I'd say exposing the truth maybe a little bit. But the other piece, where was I gonna go with this? Gosh, so many things I could say on this. Well, I had a place I was going, but I totally forgot. So I'm glad that you pulled back the, this is what editing's for.

Ed Cohen (47:42.826)

Oh. Ha ha ha.

Leslie (47:46.654)

I'm glad that you've pulled back the curtain on this. This is really important. Because like I said, I haven't done this research. I don't think I could do it quite to the quality that you've done. So I really appreciate you sharing all your knowledge on this. Because I never had the words, nor did I have the knowledge. And you bring up this idea around healing in your book. You talk about how healing used to be an art form.

And I've always been very curious about, I hope this is how you say it, the Asepian, Asepian temples? Is that right? Aesculepian. I knew I was missing a consonant or something in there. The Aesculepian temples. I came across that a couple of years ago and I was super fascinated. And so for you to mention it in your book, I was like, ah, tell me more, tell me more, Ed. And I thought it was so beautiful because you had written that these have been around for

Ed Cohen (48:13.775)

Mm.

Ed Cohen (48:20.143)

Oh, Escalapian.

Ed Cohen (48:30.266)

No.

Leslie (48:41.154)

thousand years, these temples, these places that people would go to and called on this sort of healing and through sort of like a dream incubation. And you said it was a sort of encounter with naked and immediate event of healing itself, or you said that, or someone else you quoted said that. And I thought that was really incredible to hear that story. And I'd love for you to share a little bit more about these.

healing temples or about how we've kind of moved away from the art form and just focus more on the science.

Ed Cohen (49:14.094)

Absolutely. So what I was saying just before when medical training became codified and legally codified, so in order to be licensed, physicians now have to undergo, they have to do pre-med, they have to do med, then they have to take all those exams, and there's a whole structure of licensing. And that was intended to foster the idea that medicine was a science.

Prior to that, medicine was always considered an art. Medicine was the art of healing. As I mentioned before, medicine first emerged in the fifth century BCE in ancient Greece. And it coexisted, there were lots of different, there's always been kinds of therapeutic practices, many, many different kinds of therapeutic practices. And medicine was invented,

Ed Cohen (50:12.642)

in order to, well, I don't know, in order to, when medicine was invented, it had to compete in the therapeutic marketplace. It had to prove its value relative to magicians and prophets and temple healers and herbalists. I mean, just the wide variety that you find in many, many cultures, right? And so, medicine became medicine by inventing

Two technologies that we are still highly familiar with, one is called diagnosis, and the other is called prognosis. And diagnosis means by way of knowledge, diagnosis. And prognosis means knowing in advance. So Hippocrates, who's considered to be the father of Western medicine, and so, you know, young doctors who, you know, when they finish their training, all have to take the Hippocratic oath, that's still, even though medicine is not Hippocratic,

in any sense other than this, but still there is an acknowledgement of Hippocrates as this founding figure, and the way that he became the founding figure is he won a contest, literally there was a contest, for who could diagnose the best, and he turned out to be the best diagnoser. So diagnosis is simply a way of applying knowledge to what's being manifest.

in a particular person. And then perhaps in relation to that, suggesting what the future manifestations will be. So in fact, there's a Hippocratic text from 2200 years ago where it's basically like a PR for medicine where the author, the Hippocratic author says,

if we can predict, if we can name what it is that the person has and in their presence, say things about what's happening to them that they didn't report to us and then kind of predict what we think is going to happen, we will be able to convince them that they should pay us rather than go to other people. I mean really, 2200 years ago it was like the PR statement of all medicine.

Ed Cohen (52:38.962)

Simultaneously, however, and you know, there were other ways of healing that medicine was competing with. And one of those was the Escalapian temple healing. And what's interesting is that they actually emerge at exactly the same time. And they coexist for over a thousand years from basically the fifth century BC until about the fifth century AD.

Ed Cohen (53:10.451)

And physicians recognized that there were limits to what they could do. And if they were not able to diagnose or if they were not able to treat, they were like, well, go to the temple. You know, you can go to the temple. And so these temples, the Escalopian temples,

They existed throughout the Mediterranean basin. There were over 900 of them. And basically, through the course of the millennium that they existed, they became like very high end spas, sort of like Canyon Ranch kind of thing. And they oftentimes were built around hot springs. And over the years they got.

elaborated. They had their like the main temple was in Epidaurus in southern Peloponnesia and it had you know there was a temple, there was a bathing thing, there were concert places, there were stadiums for gymnastic you know competitions there. I mean it was a whole complex of things and people come and they would

have ablutions, they would be in the water, they would be like whatever, you know, they would be massaged and oiled and whatever, you know, they could go listen to some music or go to a play or whatever. And then the healing rite was they would go into the temple and in the temple there were these dormitories, they were called Abbaton, and they would go in with everybody else,

and they would go into the dormitory and they would go to sleep and they would ask the god to receive, Escalapius, to receive a healing dream. And in their dreams, some people were healed in their dreams, some people were given protocols, you know, in their dreams to what they should do, you know, and some people had, you know, as dreams are, you know, confusing dreams.

Ed Cohen (55:24.502)

And then the role of the priest was basically to be a dream interpreter to help you figure out. And they seem to work because there are thousands of carved stone stelae, these little figures, to give thanks to the god for healing for all different kinds of things. They're very specific.

Ed Cohen (55:54.21)

And also the fact that these temples became pilgrimage sites. So people from all over came to be together in the service of asking the God for healing. Like they came together because they desired healing and because they valued healing. They've made long journeys to get there. And many of them had actually, you know,

Leslie (56:13.793)

Mm-hmm.

Ed Cohen (56:23.622)

beneficent effects. And we might still know about them. In fact, we do. I mean, the punchline of my book is really the symbol of eschalopian healing. Actually, everybody pretty much knows what it is. You see it everywhere, right? People mistake it for what's called the caduceus, but it's a rod with a snake entangled around it. It's on pharmacies, it's on...

ambulances, it's on, you know, it's everywhere, but nobody knows what it means. It's the sign of Asclepius. So it's like, it's like the shadow of medicine, like medicine has appropriated the symbol, but forgotten what it means. And, and it might still have continued, except that in the early part of the first millennium, when the Christ cult, you know, was developing and

Leslie (57:04.735)

Mm-hmm.

Ed Cohen (57:19.054)

asserting its supremacy over every other kind of God practice, because the ancients had many different gods. Escalepius was the main rival of Jesus. All of the healing things that Jesus does, curing the blind, raising the dead, all of Escalepius did all of that stuff beforehand.

Ed Cohen (57:52.22)

the new Christians in their dogmatism destroyed the Escalapian temple practices. And so it's basically gone underground for, well, say 1500, 1600 years, but it has gone underground because it couldn't be eliminated, you see.

because it's something that happens. And Christianity did appropriate it, so Christianity has these healing sites, lords, places of pilgrimage. And Christianity, and they do prayer, and they do, you know, and now even like there are, you know, in medicine, there are all these studies about the healing power of prayer, whatever, whatever. You know, which I'm not in any way discounting, it's perfectly plausible to me. It's just that.

that it was an appropriation of a more generalized practice that wasn't in the name of one specific God who ruled over them all, but it was like a practice. And then to think about, well, it's not even really necessarily about what the God does or doesn't do. It's like who comes together in the name and what happens when that gathering together happens.

Leslie (58:53.559)

Mmm.

Leslie (59:12.363)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (59:12.55)

you know, in the service of creating a value, which is that healing is something that we collectively desire. Can we create the circumstances in which we can support and encourage it? And you, you know, like, yeah, spa, spa's gonna like encourage that kind of thing. Yeah, you take that time out, you go lie in some water, you listen to the music, you go to the play, you do some exercise. Sounds like it's a healing thing to me, you know? But, you know.

Leslie (59:28.47)

Hahaha

Leslie (59:36.686)

Thanks for watching!

Ed Cohen (59:40.486)

But we've lost that. So instead what we get is treating and curing. And we're like, and instead of the idea of like healing is a process we get, if you're sick, it's your job to get better, to get back to work as soon as you possibly can. So that's a long way of saying yes. Asclepian temple healing, it was a different modality.

Leslie (59:45.058)

Mmm.

Leslie (59:55.015)

Mmm.

Ed Cohen (01:00:08.646)

that did not oppose Hippocratic medicine. It was conjunct with, it was not in conflict with and it only became such because of a historical circumstance in which the development of Christianity as a church, Christianity invented the possibility of something like a church. There never was a church before, right? There were many kinds of...

Leslie (01:00:36.972)

Mmm.

Ed Cohen (01:00:38.65)

So by appropriating the power for the church, Christianity suppressed the kinds of practices that Escalopeus represented. And that's why I like to say, what I'm trying to do in my work is to reclaim subjugated knowledges. Like knowledges that exist, that people...

know about, utilize, and familiarly are aware of, and might do things, you know, like you would call folk remedies or whatever. Not just like, or women's medicine, or like historically African American medicine, or indigenous medicine, or all of those things that are kind of denigrated, you know, they're like, well, they're not really real. They're not medicine. They're kind of like, uh.

Leslie (01:01:13.57)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yep.

Leslie (01:01:21.07)

Sure.

Leslie (01:01:25.131)

Yeah.

Leslie (01:01:33.879)

Yeah.

Ed Cohen (01:01:34.562)

You know, and it's like, no, those are subjugated knowledges. Those are practices that people have worked for people, you know, and you know, that's the problem with the making scientific of medicine is the misapprehension that science is, it speaks to a kind of universal understanding that science tells us something fundamentally true about the way the world is. And that's...

Leslie (01:01:38.275)

Mmm.

Leslie (01:01:41.495)

Yes.

Yes.

Ed Cohen (01:02:04.41)

I mean, I won't go into the history of science for you, but that's fundamentally not true.

Leslie (01:02:10.66)

Yeah.

Well, I was going to say, Ed, we're coming up to the hour. And all I can think in my head is, I feel like we're going to have to have another conversation in the future if you're open to it. Because we didn't talk about any of the different therapeutic modalities you yourself have done over time. As well as I would love to jump down the rabbit hole of more about this subjugated knowledge and even the different.

Ed Cohen (01:02:23.794)

They're off-carts.

Leslie (01:02:36.878)

practices or tools or techniques that you have yourself researched or that you work with your clients. So I personally am really fascinated by that. So I feel like we've got more time that I would love to dedicate in the future. And I will say it's almost like you gave my future aspirations the most perfect plug because one of my goals here with the Sick and Seeking Podcast is to create a community of people who are desiring, wanting healing and actually go to places where they can...

foster and support that process. And one of my dreams is to go to really relaxing places where you're floating in water, or we get to go walk in the fields, or we go to beautiful concerts. So I had to giggle because I'm like, God, I just found those breadcrumbs and it seems like I'm on the right path. So I appreciate you talking about the different forms of healing. And yeah, I mean, when you're relaxed, when you're taking a moment to try to feel good in your body, which I know is not always the case or easy.

Ed Cohen (01:03:08.263)

Mm-hmm.

Ed Cohen (01:03:23.301)

and

Leslie (01:03:34.774)

but it really can sort of switch on that different sort of system that rest and digest and repair. And so I'm really passionate about that. But before we close, I wanted to know if you wanted to say a little bit more about healing counsel or about where people can find you and your book.

Ed Cohen (01:03:51.078)

Absolutely. So, well, first of all, thank you for this opportunity. And yes, so healing counsel is a practice that I've developed over the last 20 years. Actually, probably before that. That is really works to try to do exactly what I was talking about, which is to support and encourage people who are desiring to heal. And to try to provide them or

help them develop resources that will enable them to move towards ways of organizing their lives that will enhance this kind of intrinsic possibility. And I think it's important for me to say, when I talk about healing, healing is different than curing, right? Healing doesn't imagine.

that we can erase our experiences of illness to go back to the way we were before we got sick. I mean, in life, there's no going back, right? There's only going forward. But also on the other hand, healing doesn't preclude dying. That sometimes dying is healing. And in my world, I mean, it would be amazing if dying always was healing.

Like that would be an amazing thing if we were thinking about death as a healing phenomenon, which is in fact actually, in the case of very famous Platonic dialogue on the death of Socrates, the last thing Socrates says before he dies, and it's like one of the foundational statements of Western philosophy, he says to one of his followers, Credo, he says,

Ed Cohen (01:05:47.478)

You know, we owe a bird to Escalapius. Don't forget. Like that's the last thing he says before he dies. You know, and so there's this way in which healing and dying have always been bound up together. But you know, what I try to do is, and I work with people with chronic and life threatening illnesses, you know, to try to create contexts in which whatever's happening will be the occasion.

for growing and changing. Because as far as I can tell, those are two things that life, those are two possibilities that life offers us that it's unfortunate if we short circuit them. We're always growing, we're always changing. And so my work in Healing Council is trying to help people who are in

Leslie (01:06:35.124)

Mm.

Ed Cohen (01:06:44.966)

circumstances in which they feel challenged to be able to develop skills and resources that enable them to move towards a more healing, more growthful set of transformation. So you can get in touch with me through my website, which is called healingcounsel.com. And on my website there, on the contact page, you can drop me an email. I'm happy to be in touch with you. I am happy to talk.

people for 15, 20 minutes to see if it's a practice that might be of interest to you. Also on the website you can buy my book, which is called On Learning to Heal or What Medicine Doesn't Know. It's also available widely, Amazon, wherever you buy your books. I'd be happy to hear from you.

Leslie (01:07:32.686)

Yeah, no, great. Thank you for sharing that information, giving us some insight into the type of work that you do. And this has been very illuminating. And I just really appreciate learning from you. And thank you for this fabulous book that you wrote and hoping that our paths continue to cross in the future.

Ed Cohen (01:07:54.746)

Absolutely, thank you Leslie, it's been a pleasure.

Leslie (01:08:01.11)

Wonderful.