Dr. Manon Bolliger's Treatment Philosophy:

At HEALING WHAT IS questions abound:

• Can I heal?
• What can I heal?
• What method will help me most?
• Can my attitude and understanding affect the course of my healing?
• Is my pain the cause of my suffering or does my suffering precede my pain?”

I help each patient understand how their unique healing process occurs and the part they have to play in it. This goes beyond a cure for any single symptom. My goal is to help my patients discover that health is freedom not only on a physical level, but on an emotional, mental and spiritual level as well.

I begin with determining what the problem IS for you. Your reality is what is important to you and to us. If an ailment is psychosomatic or somatopsychic, the result is the manifestation of what IS, and what IS is what you are here for.

If Pain is the symptom, we begin there, with the full understanding that the process of healing that pain is as unique as the individual who wants to heal. If the initial problem, for example, is a frozen shoulder, that is where we go first. If the frozen shoulder proves to be the physical representation of the responsibility you have shouldered, we are looking at an emotional mismanagement. If “frozen” is the issue, we are looking at a mental misalignment: what is keeping you there; what are the unquestioned thoughts that reflect as holding patterns?

Treatment diverges from classic Naturopathic Medicine, which is based on the idea that the healing force is intelligent and that the body can heal on its own. Scientific observation, in fact, demonstrates the opposite. The body’s way of dealing with trauma or disease is usually what hampers it from healing.

The body does the best it can to protect itself from the trauma or the disease, but this defensive posturing is also its limiting factor. For example, immediately following an injury the body produces swelling and inflammation, limited range of motion and pain. The result is a protective/defensive posturing that contains and maintains the status quo and prevents further injury. But this defensive posturing also limits the body’s ability to heal. It is as if the pattern of pain gets locked in place, and it would appear that an outside stimulus is needed to derange this holding pattern.

This is where the Bowen Technique comes into play. Bowen is a language that speaks to the body and allows it to reset. It disengages the defense mechanisms so that the body can begin to heal itself.

Named for its originator, the late Tom Bowen of Geelong, Australia, the Bowen Technique is a mostly hands-off healing touch. Through a synchronized series of minute movements orchestrated in a specific way, a resonating vibration acts to stimulate cell memory and follow a healing pathway.

That healing pathway coincides with that observed by Dr. Samuel Hahnemahn, the originator of Homeopathy. Dr. Hahnemahn, a polyglot who spoke 15 languages and translated medical texts from around the world, spent thirty years of his practice in the mid-19th century observing how healing is governed by certain “laws of nature”. The operative principle behind homeopathy is ’like cures like’. The body needs an outside stimulus to activate the healing process. The healing process that ensues follows general guidelines that help us assess whether the process is ultimately curative or simply palliative.

These guidelines are:

• Symptoms disappear in the reverse order of their appearance.
• Mental/emotional issues are addressed in priority sequence to functional/physical complaints.
• Skin eruptions and elimination processes are the way the body rids itself of disease.
• Symptoms move from internal organs to external organs.
• Symptoms move from above, downwards.

In healing, it is as though the patient’s history replays itself, so that what has not previously been completely healed comes up for healing. It takes place on not just the physical level, but emotionally and mentally; we are a whole being whose parts cannot be separated.

GOOD HEALTH IS GOOD ECONOMICS: The Bowen Technique usually takes only three to five visits. Other treatments such as physiotherapy, massage and chiropractic manipulation are not required during Bowen treatment, and are in fact counter-productive and discouraged.

Unlike most naturopathic clinics, sales of supplements are minimal or usually not required at all. There is an emphasis on prevention and on removing obstacles to cure by helping you achieve a sustainable health attitude through Health Evaluation and Health Maintenance. By addressing the true cause of dis-ease, and by retuning one’s healing abilities, one can be more selective in the choice of what supplements are actually health sustaining and which ones can be removed once the person’s own vitality is back in full force.

HEALING WHAT IS provides an economic, effective choice for healing. And you do the rest.