What is attentive medicine?

Attentive medicine began as a question –
what causes the body to change?

It is the part of medicine that I feels we do not give enough space to: looking, listening and questioning.
Its first movement is not to repair, but to understand.

Attentive medicine does not exclude relieving symptoms.
But before any intervention, it asks:
why, here and now, has the body changed in this way?

Illness is not a defect to be corrected.
It is a language through which the body speaks –
the expression of a disturbed vital relationship.

We live only through relationships:
with environments that surround us such as the air we breathe, the water we drink,
the organic matter that nourishes us, people around us – but also with ourselves.

When one of these vital relationships is neglected,
our vitality diminishes and is signaled with fatigue –
sometimes through discomfort,
sometimes through illness.

To listen to these signals without fear or haste
is the beginning of attentive medicine.

It is not a replacement for medical care –
it is an invitation to understand before intervening,
to accompany life in its movement rather than to control it.

Since then, I have published the Attentive Medicine booklet
to share this approach more widely
and to honour those who have inspired it.