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Health, Healing, and Flourishing

How can we help both providers and patients move from healing to flourishing, inside and outside the family doctor’s office? What are the core values of family and community medicine? What does healing look like from a patient’s point of view? How can light and the biofield therapies produce therapeutic effects? What is the impact of programs and policies on upstream drivers of health? These are the types of questions we’re asking as we examine ways to make primary care more comprehensive for both health practitioners and patients and to better understand the healing process. As we move from health to healing to flourishing, we’re also helping medical professionals identify mental health issues and offering evidence-based interventions to promote thriving and post-traumatic growth.

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Demonstration Projects

The Insight Collaborative for Mental Well-Being

Promoting solutions for mental health and emotional well-being
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Primary Care: From Fear to Flourishing

Helping providers and patients recognize and manage stress
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Innovation in Primary Care

Reimagining primary care to address the range of factors impacting a person's health
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Publications and Research

Featured Work

The Healing Journey

Based on pioneering work from John Scott and Nova Scholars Sara Warber, Paul Dieppe, David Jones, and Kurt Stange, the Healing Journey is online in an interactive graphic form.

This study was one of the first to explore healing from a patient’s perspective beyond the doctor’s office, taking into account the numerous other critical components to restoring personal wholeness, such as healthy relationships, inner attitudes, and feelings of safety and trust. This graphic visually articulates the various stages and nonlinearity of healing.

Learn about The Healing Journey

A Consensus Statement on the Use of Digital Twins in Medicine

August 4, 2025

Positive Childhood Experiences and Adult Health and Opportunity Outcomes in 4 U.S. States

July 31, 2025

Opinion: This is How Addiction Science is Saving Lives

July 30, 2025

The Big Minority View: Do Prescientific Beliefs Underpin Criminal Justice Cruelty, and Is the Public Health Quarantine Model a Remedy?

July 29, 2025

Opinion: How to Wreck the Nation’s Health, by the Numbers

June 30, 2025

Combining Community-Based System Dynamics and Design Thinking to Inform Public Health Intervention: A Case Study Optimizing Community-Clinical Linkage Design in Brooklyn, NY

June 13, 2025

Scholars and Fellows Working in this Area

Related Forums and Events

Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

  • Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
  • Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

  • Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
  • Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
  • Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad. 

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.) 

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

  • “Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
  • “Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.” 

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

 In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.” 

  • Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
  • Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
  • Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding. 

There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors. 

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.