Our group is doing a documentary on eastern vs. western medicine. We plan on looking at both the good and bad of each division of medicine. The plan is to show fairly the ups and downs of each choice, and whether or not one is better than the other, or if a combination of the two is the best method to approach healing of traditional chronic illness.
To do this we plan to show the different treatment of the same illness by western and eastern and compare the results and best we can. This will be done by following Cassandra into her treatment of her illness. She sees both traditional western doctors and also sees doctors like chiropractors and people that do acupuncture. We’ve also lined up a lady who does reiki. Reiki treats your energy through touch and non-touch. It uses your aural energy, the basic energy field of the body. The practitioner then taps into that energy and clears blockages or applies healing where needed through their energy. If at all possible we plan on filming a session with a camera that captures the body’s energy field to show how the process works.
Also, we are going to show the way in which the West lives that contributes to their illness and how that lifestyle is in direct connection with the treatment. So for instance we are going to shoot people downtown at night and the way they binge drink and stuff hotdogs and taco bell down their throat. This kind of behavior among others can lead to obesity and even diabetes or heart disease. So diet will be a part of the documentary. Cassandra knows a person in Maine who does a diet which is meant to keep you very healthy and detoxify you. It is a lifelong diet however. So not only will we show the way that ailments are treated, but also some of the ways western society directly contributes to those ailments we then seek treatment for. The diets will be a large part of that, but only because we want to show how in the west the ailment is treated and the east the body is treated as a whole with the ailment in mind.
We will also cover different religious view of healing. From Christian prayer, to Buddhists envisioning the medicine Buddha, there are many cultural and religious differentiations to healing. This will connect because in the east many of these healings came directly from spirituality. But in the west it seems it came more empirically without the mix of religion and healing. That is of course unless you consider prayer, which we will. But that doesn’t directly affect any of the healing methods itself, but merely is designed to call upon divine intervention which is a far cry from the spiritual role in eastern medicine.
Finally, we will concentrate mostly on Cassandra and her experiences, however we will expand outside. For instance for the reiki session I might volunteer as an outside opinion. That way the documentary won’t seem as one opinion based as it does consider the facts, respectively. We hope to critique each side of medicine for its faults and find the benefits in each. In the end we will not only have a good overview of what each type of medicine is, but a story within a story dealing with a personal story of recovery with Cassandra.
