Graduate Spotlight
Abdul-Rahman Abdulla Bu-Ali, Ph.D. in Natural Health
In a recent letter to CCNH, Abdul-Rahman Abdulla Bu-Ali thanked his alma mater for an academic program that he described as “challenging, stimulating, interesting and most rewarding...a wealth of knowledge and enlightenment.” His letter went on the say that he shares Clayton College’s philosophy and commitment in making our world healthier, cleaner, and more peaceful.
His incredible credentials indicate that he is just the man to do it.
Bu-Ali was elected as the president of the International Hospital Federation (IHF) for the years 2003-05. Previously, he twice served the IHF governing council: from 1982-88 and again in 1996-2000. The IHF works in close cooperation with the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland. Together, IHF and WHO form a brain trust that is helping to define global healthcare policy.
These groups are, indeed, helping to solve the world’s healthcare problems.
Bu-Ali sees global healthcare challenges and crises as opportunities for health organizations to gain mutual understanding and the strength of association while learning from each other. Happily, he also sees a world that is slowly remembering its natural wisdom, its indigenous ways of healing.
“In Japan, the average life expectancy is 84,” he says. “In Bahrain as recently as 1950, our average life expectancy was only 50 years. Now it is 74.5 years.”
For 32 years Bu-Ali has worked as both expert and ambassador — a champion of integrative healthcare. Within his kingdom’s Ministry of Health, he has been CEO of a tertiary-care medical center and was serving as its commissioning officer when Salmaniya Medical Center became his country’s first teaching hospital after establishing the College of Medicine and Health Sciences in the Arabian Gulf University.
Most recently, he served Bahrain’s Ministry of Health as under-secretary for six years. In this capacity he was second in command, overseeing and influencing an organization of more than 6,000 employees.
His latest health-affirming project is to establish a holistic resort, the first of its kind in Janabiya, the most fertile land of Bahrain. The resort occupies a lush garden of 50,000 square meters with date, palm, mango and chicko trees. It has a facility of 22 luxuriously furnished villas in addition to a treatment and a consultation block. His mission emphasizes prevention not intervention, education not medication, and care not cure. In this wellness resort, all healing therapies will be practiced under one roof.
Bu-Ali counts nurses among the most important teachers of holistic health. “As nurses teach mothers, more babies will begin life with good nutrition rather than spending their lives trying to change bad habits,” he says. Bahrain’s birth rate is among the highest in the world, and approximately 57% of its population is under 25. “There are wonderful opportunities to help shape young people’s lives through effective health education. Clearly, nutrition is the medicine of the future!”
With its “Health for All” (HFA) initiative, almost all primary and secondary treatment within Bahrain’s public health system is free to citizens and foreign residents. “The public’s duty toward this move is to prevent health problems by living a healthy life,” he says, “and healthcare starts with self care.”
To further assist his people’s health and healing, Bu-Ali writes an ongoing column, in both English and Arabic, to promote mind/body/spirit health. He is an advocate of fasting, for spiritual health as well as physical health, of meditation and rest breaks as well as adequate sleep every night, and of course, making intelligent dietary choices with each and every meal.
“ ‘Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food’ is Hippocrates’ wisdom which we should all follow,” he says.
Whether he is speaking at a worldwide summit, teaching medical students, or leading a community group, Bu-Ali urges bridge building to close the gaps between treatment and prevention, to achieve outer health as well as inner peace. “A healthy mind can exist only in a healthy body,” he says.
“People should realize that the mechanism and the healing power to fight disease are within their own bodies. What we need are measures to build up our immunities,” says Bu-Ali. Then, quoting the prophet Mohammed, he concludes: “Conserve your youth to preserve your old age. Conserve your health to increase your reserves during sickness”.
 |
|
 |
|
|
|