Medicine in Curative Education and Social Therapy
The working group Medicine in Curative Education and Social Therapy brings together anthroposophically oriented therapeutic professionals from various disciplines who are working in the Council’s fields of activity.
If you are interested, please feel free to contact us.
Coordination of the working group: Gabriele Förster
celticsunset@posteo.de
Coordination from the leadership team: Sonja Zausch
s.zausch@inclusivesocial.org
Latest report, March 2023
Gabriele Förster, doctor of the Camphill Dorfgemeinschaften Lehenhof/DE is in conversation with a group of doctors from Italy, England and Scotland.
They have met twice digitally and decided to hold monthly training sessions, a kind of “self-peer learning group” as a start before anything bigger can come of it.
Initially the work will start in English and they plan to invite more colleagues in the future, interested ones are from Taiwan, England and Russia.
Loosely planned is to meet in Scotland perhaps in the summer for a workshop.
Unfortunately, it was not possible to offer a working group at the upcoming Medical Section Annual Meeting, as all working group offering opportunities were already full.
Text: Sonja Zausch
Report October 2022
During the International Conference in Dornach in autumn 2022, a group of interested colleagues met for an exchange. There were people striving to continue the working group during the Covid pandemic. A joint working meeting at Lake Constance 2020 on the main topic of autism had to be cancelled due to the pandemic.
Various aspects became visible at the meeting:
- How do we manage to keep the focus on the health of the person with assistance needs according to the anthroposophical understanding of the human being in good interdisciplinary cooperation with therapists, nurses, doctors and house managers in living communities and other accompanying professionals from curative education and social therapy?
- How can we connect to existing training and strengthen and professionalize the focus on people with assistance needs? E.g. in the training of doctors and nurses. Could a focus module on “curative education” be added here?
- Should more medical knowledge also be taught in the training courses for curative education/social work?
- Could continuing education modules be offered on focused topics that would then be appealing and appropriate for all of the above professional groups?
Gabriele Förster, doctor of the Camphill Village Communities Lehenhof/DE, has agreed to take over the further coordination of the working group.
Text: Sonja Zausch
Report April 2021
Due to the pandemic, among other things, it is unfortunately not possible for the working group “Medicine in Curative Education and Social Therapy”, founded in 2019, to further deepen its work at the moment. The aim was to develop and implement a further training course for colleagues in medical professions to deepen their knowledge of curative education.
In joint consultation, we have now decided the following:
There is a very nice new dynamic in the Council with a larger group of younger colleagues working together regularly on future impulses in curative education and social therapy.
The encounter between the various health professions that we are striving for plays a role there insofar as the Council’s International Autumn Conference at the Goetheanum in 2022 (October 5–9 – Save the Date!) will be dedicated to “Medicine, Care and Therapy” in a larger sense.
Therefore, we feel it is healthy that this working group initiative gets integrated into this conference and that it remains open to what will come out of it in terms of content and socially after the meeting, to then make a new joint grip.
We would be pleased if the contributors of this working group would get involved in the preparation of this conference and concretely contribute their professional knowledge.
In the summer of 2021, we will launch a first call, addressing all colleagues from the areas of nursing, therapies as well as physicians. For this purpose, we will also rely on the network of the Medical Section through IKAM.
Report October 2019
Johannes Weinzirl reports at the Meeting of the Council’s Delegates in October 2019 about the increasing concern of several younger physicians since spring 2019 to re-impulse medicine within curative education and social therapy, from which a beautiful work together with nurses, therapists and curative educators/social therapists has emerged.
The meeting with the delegates at the meeting served to get to know each other and to work together in small groups on the question:
Which human-ities concepts and practical tools have proven themselves in everyday work in order to meet the special needs of people in need of assistance? What approaches to anthroposophical human studies have proved their worth and should be taught in further education?
Among the feedback in plenary, the following helpful notes and topics were particularly helpful:
- Focus on training sensory perception.
- What is a child-friendly development or, in general, the question of the biography of the individual people, “How do you become?”
- Clarification of the understanding of roles and cooperation in the therapeutic community towards the development of a common basis of trust.
- How do you bring the diagnosis to life? What gestures and emotional forces are behind the classical diagnoses?
- Occupation with R. Steiner’s lecture on the unleashing of the self and its effects (GA 174 / 14 January 1917)
- No matter which human-knowledge concept (4-division, 3-division, 7 life processes or 12 senses) is used, a language is important for the mediation.
The initiative group will meet again in spring 2020 and will continue to work on a concept of continuing training with an interdisciplinary approach.