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The Library

Where ideas and stories about the intelligence of healing take shape.

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Medicine

A case of myasthenia gravis — and the end-point it was hiding

A man of forty-nine, told his diagnosis would kill him, arrived looking for a deeper insight than the drugs could offer. The label was real. Behind it lay a range of causes no label could name.

Dr Bernard Brom · 14 July 2026 · 3 min read

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Medicine

Controversy: lowering the risk of coronary heart disease (part 1)

Most doctors know the risk factors for heart disease. Far fewer act on the one that matters most. A professional look at where the conventional story and the evidence part ways.

Dr Bernard Brom · 14 July 2026 · 3 min read

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Philosophy

The illusion of causes

Every effect must have a cause — it is almost a canon of modern science. But a living system is not a row of billiard balls, and the search for single causes may be the wrong search entirely.

Dr Bernard Brom · 14 July 2026 · 4 min read

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Poetry

Tim Noakes

A tribute to Professor Tim Noakes — the scientist who, in Bernard’s reading, blew open the door to another way of eating, and of thinking about health.

Dr Bernard Brom · 14 July 2026 · 1 min read

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Poetry

Zavik’s initiation

A poem for a man in our block who had stopped drinking for five hundred days when it was written — one of the verses Bernard writes to be, in his words, alchemic, and to open the heart.

Dr Bernard Brom · 14 July 2026 · 1 min read

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Health & Healing

Towards a new scientific world view: bringing consciousness back into medicine

Science has moved through three great phases — the knowledge of indigenous experience, the machinery of Newton, and the strange world of the quantum. Medicine is still living in the second.

Dr Bernard Brom · 1 March 2022 · 3 min read

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Medicine

Mammograms – do women need them?

The US Preventive Services Task Force reviewed the breast-screening guidelines and concluded the benefits before 50 were too small to justify universal screening. The controversy that followed says as much about medicine as the evidence does.

Dr Bernard Brom · 1 January 2011 · 6 min read

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Medicine

The burden of mothers

Mrs G walks in carrying her mother, her children, her husband and her own weary body. The window is still there, and I know it, because we have been along this journey together many times.

Dr Bernard Brom · 1 September 2009 · 3 min read

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Medicine

Bringing Spirit Back into Medicine — introduction

Many years ago I began writing these short stories to capture the spirit present in the consulting room — where the appointment becomes a meeting, or dance, between two magical beings. I like to think of them as my songs.

Dr Bernard Brom · 5 May 2009 · 1 min read

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Journey

Finding one’s passion again

Judy had lived for years on antidepressants — stable, but an observer of her own life. “I have lost my passion,” she said. “I want to feel connected again.” A story about the courage to feel.

Dr Bernard Brom · 4 May 2009 · 3 min read

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Medicine

The eye of the soul

Strange how the eyes can reveal the soul, and tell stories the body cannot. Mrs Marcus would not let me see hers — and I needed to, to know how to treat her.

Dr Bernard Brom · 3 May 2009 · 2 min read

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Journey

Choosing love or friendship

Mrs GM respects the husband she has lived with for twenty years — but the sparkle has gone, and her deep feelings are no longer with him. Friendship, or love? A doctor sits with a choice that is not his to make.

Dr Bernard Brom · 2 May 2009 · 3 min read

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Medicine

Let the music play on

Mrs Krige never forgot my birthday. Ten years of small gifts and shared laughter — and a reminder that medicine is not an exact science but a dance in which two beings find a song that works.

Dr Bernard Brom · 1 May 2009 · 2 min read

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Medicine

Integrative medicine

A reply to SAMA's policy statement on Complementary Medicine. Few doctors using natural medicines would call themselves complementary any more: the term is obsolete, and what has replaced it is a genuine integration rather than a mixture of systems.

Dr Bernard Brom · 1 January 2007 · 14 min read

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Health & Healing

Improving health: Acne

Acne appears on the face, and sometimes the neck and shoulders, but integrative medicine doctors believe it is only the outer manifestation of a much deeper problem. Like all diseases it is multi-factorial, and each case requires an individual approach.

Dr Bernard Brom · 1 January 2005 · 5 min read

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Health & Healing

Menopause

It is over-simplistic to say menopausal symptoms are due only to the fall in hormones. Menopause signals a much deeper process of entering another phase of a woman's life, and may signal not deterioration or ageing but maturation into the full blossoming of grandmotherhood.

Dr Bernard Brom · 1 January 2005 · 9 min read

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Philosophy

The limits of medical science

If there are limits to what can be known, then we need to be very cautious in believing that what is known is the whole truth. And if it is not the whole truth then it may even be untrue, and just a good story that seems true under certain specific circumstances.

Dr Bernard Brom · 1 January 2005 · 14 min read

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Medicine

Medicine at a crossroad

Can a change in diet, optimum nutrition, the power of love and compassion, simple massage and exercise do more for a person's health than all the sophisticated approaches? There is no easy answer, and perhaps there never will be: each human being is a very unique individual.

Dr Bernard Brom · 1 January 2004 · 8 min read

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Health & Healing

Depression

Is depression a chemical problem or a psychological one? Conventional medicine tends to give the impression that the more severe depressions have a chemical cause. I think the issue is more complex, and that even in those there are deep-seated psycho-spiritual issues.

Dr Bernard Brom · 1 January 2003 · 6 min read

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Health & Healing

Low back pain

An estimated 70-80% of people have lower back pain at some time in their lives. What treatment you receive depends entirely on the kind of practitioner you consult, and X-ray abnormalities often have no association with the pain at all.

Dr Bernard Brom · 1 January 2003 · 5 min read

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