Healing guides: what our first full house taught me

Last Thursday, thirty people filled The Salon at Farmatuur to hear Dr. Anneleen Six speak about why we get sick. It was our first full house. For an hour, she brought Western and Eastern medicine into a thoughtful, intelligent conversation, and somewhere between her explanations and the questions from the audience, a few fragments that had been floating around in my head for months finally fell into place.

It comes down to one idea: doctors can play an incredibly important role in our society as health guides.

That probably sounds unsurprising. Maybe even disappointing, if you were expecting something radical. But let me explain why I think it is radical.

Living in a toxic age

We live in a time that can make a person anxious about their own body. Here in Belgium, PFAS contamination has become impossible to ignore. We hear about pesticides travelling far beyond the fields where they are used, even turning up in rain. Part of our drinking water comes from the Maas, a river whose neighbours have been campaigning for years for stricter limits on what may be discharged into it.

I am no expert in water treatment, discharge permits or toxicology. Reports and measurements exist. What I struggle to find is someone I trust who can help me understand what they mean for me: what they answer, and what they leave open.

I am not alone in that. Many of the people who visit our store are trying to make sense of the world they live in and what it might be doing to them. They tell us about symptoms and diagnoses, and about their search for someone who will look at the whole picture with them.

A system with little time

Their first point of contact is usually their GP, who may see thirty or forty patients in a single day. Within that reality, there is often barely time for lifestyle, context or the bigger story. There is a problem to tackle, a prescription to write, and the advice to come back if things get worse. If your stomach hurts and you also want to talk about your shoulder, that may need another appointment.

I don't write this as a reproach to doctors. Most of them chose their profession to help people, and they work incredibly hard within a system that gives them very little time per person. But it does mean that many people leave a consultation with questions they never got to ask, including questions about nutrition, stress, their environment or natural approaches.

And here lies an irony. Whenever anyone says anything about the possible effects of a plant, an extract or a herb, the advice follows straight away: talk to your doctor first. That is exactly right. But it assumes there is room for that conversation. A conversation in which you can ask an honest question and know you will be taken seriously.

I realise this is a sensitive subject, and I hesitated before publishing it. Much of what I describe comes from stories: things people share with us, things I hear on the radio or see in documentaries. They are not medical records or a representative survey, and you can rightly question their context. This is simply what I see at the moment. Perhaps sharing it is also a way of asking whether someone can show me what I am missing.

The evening in The Salon

What struck me most that evening was the audience. The questions were thoughtful, specific and clearly researched. You could hear the experience behind them: years of searching, of reading, of trying to understand their own bodies.

That evening, they found a doctor who took every one of those questions seriously.

Anneleen spoke about the systems in our bodies, about the signals of illness and about the frameworks of Traditional Chinese Medicine, alongside everything Western medicine has taught us. She spoke to people as people. She was not afraid to say what she doesn't know. She talked about medicine as though it were the most fascinating subject in the world, and suddenly we were all explorers, trying to understand something together.

She was our guide.

In my own words, the promise I heard was this: I will keep looking. I will keep learning. I will help you find your way.

She cannot remove the pollution from the world. She cannot erase the pressures of modern life or rewrite someone's genes. But she can help a person find their bearings within those realities, and that is worth a great deal.

Not an exception, but a direction

As we build relationships with doctors and therapists, we keep meeting people like her. People with a rigorous academic background and an almost unstoppable curiosity about healing. People who keep studying beyond the boundaries of their original training, because conventional medicine gave them a strong foundation but not every answer they needed for the person sitting in front of them.

They look at our biology more broadly: our genes, our environment, our relationships, the demands of our working lives. Their approach becomes more integrated, with more room for prevention, lifestyle and the conditions in which we actually live. Not instead of medicine, but within it.

This has nothing to do with age, and I would not call it a new generation. It has everything to do with vocation: an urge to understand the human body as fully as possible, within the messy reality of a human life. Sometimes I picture them as modern-day curanderos, carrying a calling that feels older than any diploma.

What illness can also be

Fear can drive a wedge between people and their own bodies. When fear grows loud, it leaves little room for a caring relationship with the body that needs our attention. We reach for quick fixes, or we hand all responsibility for healing to someone else.

When Anneleen spoke, I felt something different: connection, community, even the possibility of growth within the experience of illness. For a moment, getting sick no longer felt only like the end of the world. It also became an invitation to understand ourselves more deeply: our biology, our nature, and our inseparable bond with the ecosystems in which we evolved.

With a good guide beside us, perhaps we can become brave enough to take an active part in our own healing. Brave enough to sit with our bodies and really listen.

I remember thinking, sitting there: suddenly, the future feels a little less frightening.

The age of reconnection

A few days ago, I was helping my youngest son with his history homework. We were working through the eras, from prehistory to modern times.

It made me wonder whether people will one day look back on this as the rational age: the age in which we believed we were our minds, in which everything could be approached as a technical problem and even our bodies simply needed troubleshooting.

Perhaps it is an age we need to live through in order to learn how to reconnect with our biology. And perhaps, uncomfortable as it sounds, our world has become toxic enough to teach us how to heal it, and ourselves along with it.

To do that, we need people who spend years studying medicine without losing their curiosity, and who never stop learning because they are here to heal. They help us see our bodies in a wider context: the connections within us, and between us and the living world.

For want of a better name, I will call them healing guides.

Annelies and I have met a few of them so far, Anneleen among them. We are honoured to know them and to call them partners of Farmatuur. Knowing that these people exist gives us the energy to keep going.

Save the date: Dr. Anneleen Six returns to The Salon on Thursday 18 February 2027 with a new session about healthy eating, through the eyes of both Western and Chinese medicine. Reserve your place.

Have a question about your health? Always talk to your doctor or therapist, and if you are looking for someone who takes the time to look at the whole picture with you, ask us about the experts we work with.