Anthroposophic perspectives in primary care

A core challenge of contemporary medicine is to integrate the technological successes of biomedical science with a comprehensive under-standing of the physical, psychosocial, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of health and illness. Toward this end, bridges are being created between conventional medicine and alternative systems of healing which reflect a holistic model of the human being. Even when both conventional and complementary approaches are used side-by-side in the same patient, they remain separate in their basic assumptions and goals. Today\u27s mechanistic disease model is cut off from such notions as life-energy, consciousness, and spirituality, so integral to many alternative paradigms. Anthroposophically Extended Medicine (AEM) is a comprehensive healing system that successfully integrates biomedicine with a more complete understanding of human reality. Originating in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, AEM has its roots in the Western, scientific worldview. By expanding this worldview, anthroposophy offers the clinician new possibilities for scientific investigation; it also creates bridges to the wisdom of older healing traditions of both East and West

Food systems sustainability : an examination of different viewpoints on food system change

Global food insecurity levels remain stubbornly high. One of the surest ways to grasp the scale and consequence of global inequality is through a food systems lens. In a predominantly urban world, urban food systems present a useful lens to engage a wide variety of urban (and global) challenges—so called ‘wicked problems.’ This paper describes a collaborative research project between four urban food system research units, two European and two African. The project purpose was to seek out solutions to what lay between, across and within the different approaches applied in the understanding of each city’s food system challenges. Contextual differences and immediate (perceived) needs resulted in very different views on the nature of the challenge and the solutions required. Value positions of individuals and their disciplinary “enclaves” presented further boundaries. The paper argues that finding consensus provides false solutions. Rather the identification of novel approaches to such wicked problems is contingent of these differences being brought to the fore, being part of the conversation, as devices through which common positions can be discovered, where spaces are created for the realisation of new perspectives, but also, where difference is celebrated as opposed to censored