Welcome to the Rata Foundation.

We are a Foundation that is dedicated to education and research in the field of complementary and alternative medicine, and to the creation of a holistic health care system through the integration of orthodox and complementary medicine. We are based in New Zealand, where the name of the Foundation comes from (click here for more information about the name), and we have strong links with the United Kingdom.

Our leadership comes from people with senior experience in the UK National Health Service, the New Zealand health care system, and in academic education and research. However, our vision is quite radical.  We see that the growing collaboration between orthodox and complementary medicine can only lead in one direction - towards a scientific and cultural "revolution" that will place the new holistic paradigm at the heart of health care.  Hospitals and health centres will become places of healing, offering a wide range of interventions (from the conventional to the more esoteric), so that an individual's needs for therapeutic intervention, recovery, guided self-healing and health maintenance can be provided from one place.  The "blueprint" for meeting an individual's needs will come from an understanding of his/her unique soul development, combined with an appropriate selection of orthodox and complementary diagnostic and therapeutic techniques. (More details about our vision can be found here.)

Other models of orthodox/complementary collaboration (e.g., models that are generally described as "integrated medicine") tend to be more limited.  They often restrict this collaboration to "bolting on" a small number of "acceptable" complementary therapies to the margins of conventional health care, leaving the bulk of conventional health care largely unchanged.  This is not what we need, because it prevents the true value of the complementary and alternative therapies from being realised. Every encounter between a patient and a healthcare professional can (and should) be transformed into a holistic encounter, in which the needs of the mind, body and spirit are equally considered and met. What are currently labelled as the "complementary and alternative therapies" can help in any health care context, even when the primary need is for a more physical intervention (such as surgery).

Finally, we subscribe to the key principles of the UK National Health Service, which includes making health care both free at the point of use and based on need rather than on the ability to pay.  The heart of health care delivery must be empowerment of the individual, and help must be given to each individual with love, compassion and soul-centred healing, without the limitations and constraints of the "market-place". However, we do acknowledge that the private provision of alternative and complementary therapies is a necessary transitional phase until the therapies can become part of a universal and free holistic health care system.