Meet the woman who brought holistic healing to the UAE

Dubai: Dr. Ludmilla Vassiliev spent years as a cardiologist before deciding that modern medicine was only telling half the story. Today, she is one of the pioneers of holistic healing in the UAE, which is a field she helped legalise and regulate both in the country and Ukraine more than three decades ago.

Vassiliev was the featured speaker at Connect Generations today at the Toda Theatre in Madinat Jumeirah, a forum held and organised by Hidden Hero and People of the Future, a company founded by documentarist and first Russian female diplomat in Japan Olga Sapozhnikova. The event brought together speakers from across generations to discuss what families pass down and what gets lost, including everything from generational trauma, preserving lineage and family and healing.

After her talk, Vassiliev sat down with Gulf News to explain what drew her to holistic healing, and why she believes the future of medicine lies not in treating sickness, but also in maintain energy.

The distinction between modern and holistic medicine

Vassiliev grew up in a family of doctors, in an environment she describes as having shaped her from an early age "It was not a profession," she said. "It was passion. When you grow up in an environment, you get infected by it."

As a child, she was sent to a school for physics, which she was not interested in. But it was there, she said that she first began to think about the body differently "Can your car function without fuel?" she asked. "It is the same with life. Modern medicine know how to build the body. It does not know how to build energy."

And this is exactly what made her get into holistic practices with roots going back some 5,000 years, compared with what she calls the roughly 70 years history of modern medicine. "Modern Medicine is very good at suppressing and controlling sickness," she said. "Holistic medicine cares about the flow of life energy. How it moves through the body's meridians, the way blood moves through veins,"

Healing is focus on energy

When Gulf News asked her what the first step in a person's healing journey should be, Vassiliev answer was to pay attention to energy.

"When energy is blocked, that is pain and inflammation, which can show up as diabetes, blood pressure problems and more. When there is not enough energy, that is when fatigue, depression and aneamia shows up," she said.

According to her there is tendency, which she is critical of, where people try to treat those imbalances with peptides and different supplements rather than addressing the flow of energy.

Holistic healing in the UAE

Holistic medicine has now been practiced in the UAE for around 34 years, and Vassiliev focus is currently on pushing for what she calls "universal health income", which is a system that would reward and support people for staying healthy, rather than the current model, in which insurance and healthcare spending are triggered by illness.

"Right now modern society pays for sickness," she said. " I want to change the law again, so the at people are rewarded for health."

And this is something she already practices at her own clinic in Dubai, where her staff work under contracts that hold them accountable for maintaining their own health. "Health is a human responsibility. Nobody teaches people how to care for health."

Other voices at the forum

Vassiliev's session was the centrepiece of the forum, but several other speakers addressed related themes, including world's youngest speaker Kiara Kaur, bestselling author Nadine Chammas spoke on guiding young people's talents, writer and psychologist Aisulu Akhimova said that quantity time is more important than quality time, entrepreneur and marketing expert Matteo Pittaluga said shared values  not shared hobbies keep families together, while chief commercial officer Igor Karpikov summed up his approach in one line.

 "Do everything with passion."