Art for Healing
Julie Cunningham
Medicine as an Art of listening, responding, unearthing, guiding.
On a plane trip I met a rare doctor. His work revealed to me how far therapy can go in catalysing our own natural healing processes; it can also be effective for people suffering from conditions previously considered purely physical.
Through interviews with Dr Broom's expatients, these short films reveal how exploring a person's emotional story can trigger transformational processes.
Dr Brian Broom is both an immunologist and a psychotherapist - so he is an expert in both mind and body disciplines as well as authoring two books and leading a post graduate mind body course at AUT in Auckland.
He had just finished writing a book called "Meaning-full Disease" and was looking for an idea for a cover image. An idea came to me, he liked it and I ended up designing the cover and on reading it, I became further fascinated by his work and excited by its potential. Later I went to NZ and conducted interviews with the doctor, his colleagues and his expatients.
After adding psychotherapy to his qualifications he found often when patients came to him with chronic immunological diseases it was talk therapy that was needed and it would be through therapy that people would move back to health.