The Barefoot Healer

This was the view flying into the island..... The inviting and luxurious baggage collection area, grin! Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

landed on Wednesday evening, and the first sign that I'm now in a different world was the airport! Barbed wire surrounding a runway with a basic office, and the new addition of a roof overe the baggage area so you don't get soaked waiting for your luggage! I spent the first 2 nights at the "young doctors house" where the juniors and the medical students get to hang out, and the finally ( after some juggling around of who was supposed to go where, claimed one of the flats behind the medical centre as my own little cave for the next month. A fifties motel room throwback within a nice metal cage...against hurricanes? Angry natives? Beer shortage riots? Who knows....but it has fans, air conditioning that I turnoff most of the time and a decent size flat screen tv that gets ABC, SBS and imparja... I'm supposed to be working in the mining town clinic, which sees mainly white people, but the last 2 days I ended up being sent over to the neighbouring town which is indig...

r the journey so far After 7 years of frustration, I decided to escape the insanity of suburbia and accept a one month contract working as a nurse on a remote island up in the Northern Territory of Australia. This is my story. Day One Three days of education and being holed up on my own in a lonely hotel in Darwin...hot and pleasantly muggy outside, and arctic freezing as soon as you enter a building! Every shop seems to be competing to see who can turn their air conditioning up highest...I ended up switching off the one in my hotel room and opening the window so I could listen to the sounds of the evening rain. First day was cultural education....Richard, a seriously interesting bloke with "one little arm and one big one" as he put it... a traditional land owner of the Larrakia people (which has a lot more significance than I realized at first...I had the uneasy feeling all along that I was listening to someone I should really be paying attention to...kept on being caugh...

There are so many different Healing and Medical modalities nowadays... "Conventional" modern medicine on the one hand and a vast array of other disciplines which all get lumped together under the heading "Alternative". Personally, this really annoys me. Because it implies that the kind of medicine that is offered in modern day hospitals is "proper" medicine, and that any other approach is some kind of new fangled "alternative" to it. The other thing that really gets my goat, is the concept I am constantly hearing from conventionally trained doctors, that modern medicine is the only "scientific" discipline, and everything else is merely a whimsical or spiritual thing that can at best have an aplication in providing some kind of emotional support to a patient while they are being treated with "proper" modern medicine. In reality, medicine and healing comes in many many different shades and teachings. Some of the so called ...