From Emergency Medicine to an Integrative Perspective
A personal journey towards a wider exploration of the living system
Before medicine, there were animals.
My mother once told me that, in a writing assignment when I was about seven years old, I wrote that one day I would become a horse veterinarian in Maremma.
I have no memory of writing it.
Animals were simply part of everyday life.
I drank milk straight from the cow, had a sheep of my own, bottle-fed orphaned lambs who slept in a little cradle next to my bed and, while our house was being renovated, sometimes had dinner in the stable with the donkeys.
Years later, when the time came to choose what to study, I felt drawn to medicine in a way that was difficult to explain. There was something almost reverential in the way I regarded it.
Perhaps I was carrying a somewhat romantic idea of the ars medica: medicine not simply as the treatment of disease, but as the art of understanding the living being.
And yet, something never entirely resonated with me.
I was fascinated by physiology, by the extraordinary complexity of the body and the relationships between its systems. At the same time, I struggled with a model that could feel highly compartmentalised and mechanistic.
Organs into systems. Systems into disciplines. Disease into diagnoses. Diagnoses into protocols.
Scientific rigour, evidence and reproducibility are fundamental — and they would later become particularly important during my years in Emergency and Critical Care.
A question remained in the background:
Is this really all there is to medicine?
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When I began working clinically, that question became stronger. I had acquired knowledge, diagnostic tools and ways of intervening on disease, yet I still felt that something about the individual as a whole was escaping the frame.
At the time, I could not even name what I was looking for.
Then, almost by chance, I found a different doorway.
A three-year programme in veterinary naturopathy helped me understand that what I had been searching for was not an alternative to conventional medicine, but a wider perspective from which to understand it.
From there, my professional studies began to intersect with a personal exploration of healing and contemplative traditions, meditation, yogic philosophy and different ways of approaching consciousness and the inner experience of existence.
Gradually, my understanding of health began to expand.
The physical body remained essential, but I could no longer see it as entirely separate from environment, behaviour, emotional experience, relationships and regulatory processes through which a living system responds to its world.
What resonated with me most was not one particular discipline.
It was integration itself.
I have never felt comfortable with the idea that one perspective must invalidate another.
Different models may answer different questions.
Different tools may illuminate different aspects of the same complex reality.
Emergency medicine taught me when immediate intervention matters.
Nearly a decade in Emergency and Critical Care has taught me the value of scientific rigour, decisive action and immediate intervention.
Everything I have explored alongside it has taught me to keep asking what may be happening before, around and beneath what we call a symptom.
Not away from science, but towards a wider exploration of the living system.
