The team of very young professionals that gave birth to the Paracelso Institute in 1971 deeply believed that traditional medicine could have a new life inside the modern clinical practice. They believed that close cooperation among doctors and scholars inside one organization could accomplish the objectives of developing scientific research as well as giving professional training to future doctors and health professionals in a discipline still subject to skepticism and distrust.
Facts reveal their foresight. On the basis of a wide ambitious program whose fundamental pivot has always been the group communion and cooperation, in over 50 years a considerable bulk of work has been made in the fields of study, research, dissemination and clinical application of important and by now qualified branches of traditional medicine.
The quality and level of this activity, backed by the peculiar features of traditional medicine, brought to the achievement of important results also in incorporating the human sciences into the medical practice, especially bioethics. Fifty years of deep study on the doctrinal features of traditional medicine brought to the in-depth awareness that the ethical supervision nowadays applied to medical practice and scientific research is an inadequate solution, since ethics should be incorporated at an epistemological level, when the science’s essence and orientation take form. In traditional medicine, ethics is at the heart of the medical act, overcoming all the difficulties raised by the application of ethical and moral principles to depersonalized medical acts.
The Paracelso Institute, Italian Centre for non-conventional medicines, acknowledged as an NPO by the Act D.M. 15/4/96 of the Italian Health Ministry, is a scientific and cultural not-for-profit organization whose scope is elevating the concept of health by acting essentially in the field of traditional medicine, in relation to social medicine.
The Traditional Medicine
Traditional medicine is a legacy of mankind, whose contents have been selected, sedimented and distilled in the course of millenniums across a wide variety of territories, ethnic groups and cultures. A precious heritage preserved inside tales, traditions, experiences, writings, hidden in the folds of customs and practices of all the peoples of the world. An immense treasure of experience that has matured throughout the fight against disease and that today is largely fragmented, scattered or lost. A heritage built up throughout a path of study and meditation on the laws that regulate the mutual transformation between disease and health as well as an incomparable platform for developing a life science.
However strong is the appeal of the ancient, the diverse and the mysterious, sometimes one can feel frustrated by this effort, yet can also be sure it’s worth it. Results are always largely rewarding, expectations duly satisfied.
The Paracelso Institute is fully committed to this task, as much as allowed by its resources and capacities. The decision to move in this direction had been determined by the belief that this job can be useful to human beings and to their history, which is by now widely proved by the experience collected in over fifty years of activity.
Traditional medicine can continue to play an important role of health-protection not only in developing countries but also in advanced societies. It has widely demonstrated a good level of effectiveness against diseases, also under scrutiny of modern investigation. It has the capacity to respect human beings and to make them the key players of their fight against the disease. Its countless methods of therapy have no impact on the environment. Its low cost makes it a precious instrument to overcome the financial problems of national health systems in all countries, also in advanced countries, which probably are the ones that can derive maximum benefit.