Positive Medicine
Positive Medicine
What is Positive Medicine?
Positive Medicine enables a radical shift in the way that health is delivered. It transforms the way we see health, life and happiness. This innovation in health and medical practice has two key features: control and empowerment.
It is based on the new definition of health: Health is the ability to control our lives.
Integrating and enhancing the physical, psychological, emotional (relationship) and spiritual aspects of health results in long-term, enriched health and quality of life outcomes. Health, motivated by purpose, joy and wellbeing, is sustainable. Grounded in Te Whare Tapa Whā – the Māori model of health – Positive Medicine champions the synergy and efficacy of a whole person approach.
Positive Medicine supports a change in the social contract between medical professionals and their communities, enabling better health outcomes and wellbeing for all parties.
Empowerment provides the fuel for change. Intrinsic motivation and autonomy get people firmly in the driver’s seat and Positive Medicine maps the way forward. We help people to understand that their health is theirs to own and manage.
Positive Medicine Programmes lead people through an explorative process to identify an inner voice and personal understanding of intrinsic health. What does good health mean to you? This is less about meeting standard parameters and traditional measures of health and more about core values and identifying what is meaningful to an individual.
Positive Medicine
Designed with doctors in mind.
Positive Medicine programmes for doctors help doctors take care of themselves, as well as taking care of others. Around the world, burnout, stress and exhaustion affects 50% of doctors at any given time. This must be addressed. This is not a crisis of caring, this is a crisis of responsibility. The basis of the current system, that doctors fix patients, is wrong. Doctors help create the circumstances for people to heal themselves.
Positive Medicine programmes for individuals and communities support people to become experts in their own health and take control of their lives.
Positive Medicine reinforces what doctors already know: diagnosing and treating illness and disease is only one element of health. Doctors understand that guiding their patients to help themselves is key, and that incorporating all aspects of life is fundamental. Positive Medicine provides the framework to help doctors implement a whole person empowerment model based on behaviour change science.
Positive Medicine is the framework doctors have been waiting for.
Positive Medicine
Disrupting the Future of Medical Practice?
In his Book, David describes the learning of 40 years of medical practice and what has led him to develop the concept of Positive Medicine over the last 20 years.
This is a very personal journey which also explores his own ill health and experience as a patient, the journeys of other patients and other doctors and their realisation that the current system does not enable good health and happiness. This call for system change has been vehemently made by many people since the 1970s.
David explores the opportunity for radical change to a system that works for everybody, and provides a structured response and framework for implementing this empowerment model of health.
Positive Medicine
Join the movement.
Positive Medicine Institute is a Charitable Trust set up to support the delivery of health empowerment programmes to communities in New Zealand.
If you or your business would like to sponsor your own or other communities, please connect with us here.
If you would like to be involved, contact us.
Ready to be part of the change?
If you are looking to take control of your heath or the health of your business or community, visit the Positive Medicine website.