Anthroposophic Medicine in the 21st Century

Digitalization and acceleration threaten to alienate life and isolate the soul. In anthroposophic medicine, the concepts of the etheric and warmth provide powerful tools and perspectives for individual healers and the therapeutic community.

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It may sound presumptuous to describe the tasks of anthroposophic medicine in the 21st century, and yet, as someone who shares responsibility for the Medical Section, I’d like to ask: What’s coming on the horizon? Where do we stand today in the history of medicine? Since the turn of the millennium, our medicine has been shaped by three developments that demand our full attention. First, economization, that is, the need to generate profits in the healthcare sector, has increased exponentially. With that comes the second development: the advance of technology into the realm of the living. The third is digitalization. These three developments began with the new millennium, have gained momentum, and are shaping all fields of medicine.

Rudolf Steiner, in the first chapter of Extending Practical Medicine: Fundamental Principles Based on the Science of the Spirit—a book whose contents he said would eventually become established science—describes the dramatic process of the human being’s spiritual entity permeating the human organism’s earthly materiality as the starting point for all understanding of illness and therapy:

Just as one can only understand the healthy human being by recognizing how the higher members of the human entity take hold of the earthly substance in order to rein it into their service and by also recognizing how the earthly substance changes as it enters the sphere of activity of the higher members of human nature, so too can one only understand the sick person by realizing the situation into which the whole organism or an organ or a series of organs falls when the working of the higher members becomes irregular. And one can only think of remedies by developing knowledge of how an earthly substance or earthly process relates to the etheric, to the astral, and to the ‘I’.¹

The earthly substance is thus transformed, “transubstantiated,” into the spirit entity of the human being.

Living in a Technologized World Created by Humans—from Nature to Subnature

Around the same time as this chapter—shortly before his death on March 30, 1925—Rudolf Steiner also wrote his last Michael letter, “From Nature to Subnature.”² While everything we find in natural phenomena and their lawfulness is still permeated by the divine-spiritual forces of the cosmos, all technology has developed purely from earthly-human thinking and has lost all connection with the cosmic-divine origin of the world. We are no longer dealing with nature but with a newly created subnature. This material, lifeless technological sphere is as clear to the human spirit as a crystal, while the God-created nature reveals ever deeper secrets the further one penetrates it with cognition. Cool, crystal-clear technology harbors no secrets at all; in principle, it is completely transparent.³ This nature, which has been emancipated by being deposited down below the divine sphere, is thus immersed in the sphere of Ahriman and “must be comprehended as such. It can only be comprehended if human beings ascend in spiritual knowledge as far to the supraearthly supranature as they have descended into the subnature in technology.”⁴

This will be the great task of our century, and the book Extending Practical Medicine is nothing other than a systematic instruction on how we can ascend far enough into supranature in medicine in order to counteract the impulses leading into subnature. What does the “descent into subnature” mean in regard to medicine? Let us first remember that true healing of the human being is a process in the etheric body with its formative and growth forces, which must be supported in the best possible way in the course of treating an illness. The physical basis of the activity of the etheric body, which takes place entirely in the liquid element, is the sculptural, semi-liquid protein substances from which our organism is built:

Protein is the substance of the living physical body that can be transformed in manifold ways by the formative forces of the body, so that what results from the transformed protein substance appears as the forms of the organs and the entire organism.⁵

The perpetually flowing movement of the etheric body, which incessantly “sculpts” the enlivened form of the organs in the protein substances from out of our fluid organism, can be grasped through the development of the Imaginative level of knowledge.

Over the past two decades, it has been possible to access and master these life processes “from the other side,” so to speak, through technology, at breathtaking speeds. This has been made possible by the convergence of two streams of development: rapid advances in molecular biology and digitalization. As a result, “biomedical engineering” can be used to reassemble the data obtained from an innumerable number of molecular biological details into a kind of “electronic image” (or “likeness”) of the organism. This electronic image contains various biological subsystems, which always have the suffix “-‍omics”: protein organism = proteomics; metabolic processes = metabolomics; microbiome = microbiomics, etc. “Multi-omics” refers to the “holistic” understanding of these biological systems in their complex interaction, with the ultimate aim of deriving an increasingly precise understanding of the physiological processes involved in human health and disease. The aim is to perfect so-called precision medicine with tailor-made, “personalized” medications for specific molecular biological abnormalities. This then leads to the concept of so-called electronic health—”eHealth”—defined as “multiomics-enabled precision health.” These computer models of physiological processes and specific disease mechanisms are already so sophisticated that they have been used to conduct clinical trials without any actual, real-life patients. A physiological, specifically a pathological process, is observed, simulated digitally, and then a specific medication is simulated and its effect tracked in the simulation. Research is no longer conducted on physical humans but much more efficiently on their electronic doubles.

One hundred years after its first publication, the book Extending Practical Medicine, in which Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman together developed the “system of anthroposophical medicine” from the viewpoint of the spiritual entity of the human being—our “supranature”—will now be written anew in the crystalline realm of healthcare technology’s subnature.

New Medications

The medications developed from this convergence of current trends in medical research interfere in various ways in the activity of the protein organism and especially in its relationship with the human etheric body. Proteomics research creates crystalline-looking three-dimensional digital models of certain proteins in their constant transformations within the living organism and in their pathological alterations occurring in a disease process, e.g., cancer. Following a precise 3D analysis of the protein structure in question, a suitable medication is “designed” to modify the pathological activity of this protein in the desired direction. These drugs are now used in oncology, in particular for many different types of cancer, and, in some cases, can achieve treatment successes that would have been unthinkable with only the conventional treatments of the past.

The Sick Will Be Called Healthy

The mRNA technology, which we first encountered during the coronavirus pandemic in the form of the novel vaccines, has an even deeper impact on the protein organism. It is not just a matter of modifying the body’s own proteins but of causing the body itself, through the externally supplied mRNA, to produce certain proteins that it would never produce on its own. In the case of the coronavirus vaccine, this is the now-familiar spike protein, but development is rapidly progressing toward treating other diseases (especially cancer and autoimmune diseases) with this technology, for example, by causing the body to produce proteins that can inhibit inflammation or cancer growth. These are being termed “medications” that the body produces itself. Since it is easy to produce a wide variety of mRNA in a very short time, this development also means an enormously accelerated development of new medications.

The ‘I’-organization of the human being permeates the etheric body, which, with its cosmic forces, “sculpts” the material substance of the organism in such a way that the physical instrument of the human individuality is always being formed anew in a manner appropriate to it. MRNA technology now employs the etheric body to produce forms that it would not form on its own and which naturally elude the grasp of the ‘I’-organization, since they have nothing to do with it in essence. A unique dynamic develops in the physical body that is foreign to the ‘I’-organization. The danger of alienation of the body through the new therapeutic procedures is immediately apparent, for our physical-etheric body is the basis of all our human development upon the Earth. If, in our future medicine, “healing” consists in compelling the etheric body (whose forces transform to become our thinking forces) to perform activities which, instead of expressing supranature (the ‘I’) in the nature of the body, shape the body according to technological principles of subnature, then the long-term prospects for healthy human development with the aid of medicine will be called into question.

In his lecture “What does the angel do in our astral body?”,⁶ Rudolf Steiner specifically points to the year 2000 (when the above-mentioned developments in medicine actually began) and describes the possibility of harmful medicine, where “harm will be called useful” and “the sick will be called healthy.” These developments in medicine are truly problematic, but, on the other hand, they do also, in part, demonstrate unparalleled therapeutic success and must be taken fully into account in the treatment of serious, life-threatening illnesses. This raises the question of forming a judgment against the backdrop of the patient’s individual destiny and a deep understanding of anthroposophic medicine with its potential to possibly create a balance in this situation.

Time Heals All Wounds

What is happening in the social sphere? We’re all familiar with the phrase, “Time heals all wounds.” This emphasizes the importance of the etheric body as a time body crucial for the healing of wounds. Just as we are living through an acceleration in the development of medications via new technologies, we are also living through an acceleration in the therapeutic encounters with patients. The average duration of an initial consultation with a general practitioner in Germany is eight to twelve minutes! In 2018, a study in the US investigated how time spent by health professionals (e.g., nurses or physical therapists) with their patients during home visits following hospital discharge affects the rate of readmissions. For 60,000 documented home visits, it was shown that for every extra minute spent with chronically ill patients, the risk of readmission to the hospital fell by 8 to 13 percent.⁷ Due to digitalization, all healthcare professionals are constantly confronted with a binary logic that has little or nothing to do with the true nature and needs of the patient. In the future, this will be perfected to such an extent that, before consulting the patient, the physician will be confronted with an “electronic double” (see above) created from all the various research findings, which will influence their thinking accordingly.

Encounter in the Etheric

In his book Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again,⁸ US cardiologist Eric Topol expresses the hope that in the future, AI could free up more time for therapeutic encounters by taking up the tasks of documentation. Whether and how this will be possible remains to be seen. However, much more interesting is his observation that the fixation on the “digital image” of the patient and the lack of time without the possibility of a comprehensive sensory perception of the patient in the context of a detailed anamnesis and bodily examination lead to a “disembodiment” of the encounter between doctor and patient. The alienation from the body that we have described in relation to new medications can now also be found at the level of the social encounter. The great secret of healing is that genuine empathy, which awakens trust and the will to recover in the patient, is only possible when the healer, themselves, is connected to their own body in a healthy way during their meeting with the patient. There is an impressive description by Rudolf Steiner in Manifestations of Karma⁹ that describes the interactions between the etheric bodies of therapist and patient as an “interchange of tensions” akin to the polarity of positive and negative electricity.

Rudolf Steiner saw all of these developments with great clarity. In the so-called “Young Doctors’ Course” of January 1924,¹⁰ he gave a meditation about the relationship between body and soul and advised young medical students to take this meditation so seriously that it would have a “body-forming” effect. The training path of the anthroposophical physician is essentially geared toward developing their own bodily sheath in such a way that it can become a useful instrument in the therapeutic process—the exact opposite of disembodiment.

Development Path through Warmth

The bridge between spirit, soul, and body is formed by warmth, which encompasses all dimensions. Rudolf Steiner said to young medical students:

But you must find the bridge to experience this warmth-organization in such a way that you find your way from the experience of the differentiations of warmth within the individual organs to a moral warmth. You will have to come to experience what is called a “warm heart” in such a way that you will feel this warmth in your physical being. You must find the way from the scientific-physiological to the spiritual-moral and from the spiritual-moral to the physiological-anatomical.¹¹

The physician’s own body, with its individual imbalances, is further developed and prepared through an inner path of training; an individually attained morality is incorporated into the body through warmth. The so-called “Warmth Meditation” that Rudolf Steiner gave to young physicians serves to permeate one’s own etheric body with the profound question, “How do I find the good?”¹² In this sense, all anthroposophic medicine is a medicine of warmth. This creates the basis for the conscious inclusion of the patient’s individual destiny in the therapeutic process. Gerhard Kienle, who was enormously far-sighted in these matters, expressed this as follows:

A Christian doctor cannot be content with healing, even from a spiritual viewpoint, but must ask themself in concrete terms how they must act therapeutically so that, on the one hand, the human being can fully unfold in the body . . . and on the other hand, so that the illness can bear fruit for the eternal essence of the human being, so that the process of resurrection is initiated in every illness.¹³

This question of healing in the sense of karma will become increasingly urgent for us in the future. It will have to be wrestled out of internal and external circumstances.

New Forms of Community Building

Technical developments are closely linked to specialization in all medical professions. Today, doctors are no longer simply “cardiologists” but are either “electrophysiological cardiologists” specializing in cardiac arrhythmias or specialists in cardiac catheterization. There is a clear danger of losing sight of the person as a whole. But Rudolf Steiner was a realist on this issue:

Now, I don’t want to say that doctors shouldn’t specialize, because the techniques that emerge over time certainly bring about these specializations to a certain extent. But when specialization occurs, the cooperation and socialization of the specializing doctors should become greater and greater.¹⁴

In other words, if specialization is to have a beneficial effect, it must raise community building to a new, higher level.

Gerhard Kienle, who made great personal sacrifices to establish the first large anthroposophic hospital in Germany, the Herdecke Community Hospital [Gemeinschaftskrankenhaus Herdecke], wrote to a fellow doctor who wanted to leave:

It is probably possible to help the anthroposophical impulse in the medical field take a step toward realization by establishing a clinic, because the establishment of a clinic can provide the opportunity to build a collegium as a spiritually effective, committed community. . . . I myself am of the opinion that the medical movement will not be able to sustain itself without such a step. A hospital where people in all conceivable crisis situations are treated and accompanied thus becomes a Mystery site where, through the force of such a community formed out of moral ideals, destiny can be transformed.¹⁵

Another initiative that we have been cultivating in the Medical Section for two years now is the annual Summer School at Emerson College, which is dedicated to questions of spiritual identity in specific medical professions as well as to the resulting formation of spiritual communities: What spiritual identity does each of our medical professions have in an esoteric sense? What is the specific spiritual orientation of nurses, art therapists, and doctors? What are the spiritual sources from which we draw? Working together on these questions creates a deep sense of community and strengthens our enthusiasm for our daily work with our patients.

Community building has a direct effect on the etheric body and creates healing forces. In view of the isolation and loneliness that prevail in our social contexts, it can be enormously beneficial to offer group programs with educational and therapeutic elements for patients with certain chronic illnesses. It is important that these courses don’t lack commitment, but rather that a constant group follows a path together, for example, over ten to twelve weeks. The therapeutic aspect is, in a sense, enhanced by the invigorating effect of the community, which reduces fears and increases self-efficacy. It is not uncommon for friendships to develop that shape people’s destinies.

The Source of Life

The path of warmth developed by anthroposophic medicine and the spiritual communities that arise from it can lead us so far into supranature that a powerful, forward-looking balance to the downward spiral of modern medicine will emerge. The etheric was the theme of our conference, and so I ask: Where are the sources of life? They lie in what inspires moral ideals. Let us be imbued with moral ideals and carry them out into the world as healing, creative impulses. That is the source.¹⁶

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This article is based on the lecture of the same name given at the annual conference of the Medical Section in September 2025.

Translation Joshua Kelberman¹⁷
Images From “The Art of Healing,” see the Medical Section at the Goetheanum playlists, in particular “Die Kunst des Heilens / The Art of Healing,” 7 episodes, YouTube (Feb. 12, 2021).

1. Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman, Extending Practical Medicine: Fundamental Principles Based on the Science of the Spirit, CW 27 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1997).
2. Rudolf Steiner, Leitsätze—Leading Thoughts. Zweisprachige Ausgabe—Bilingual Edition, CW 26 (Arlesheim: Verlag des Ita Wegman Institut, 2024).
3. Rudolf Steiner, Fachwissenschaften und Anthroposophie [Specialized sciences and anthroposophy], GA 73a (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 2005), lecture in Stuttgart, June 17, 1920, p. 439:

   Thus, one can say: Since modern humanity has succeeded in extracting technology from out of the whole field of nature, since we have had to learn in recent times to live in the realm of technology in such a way that our human consciousness stands in a completely different relationship to technology than to that which is produced in nature, we say to ourselves: Now, for the first time, we are standing before a world that is, in a sense, transparent to the soul. The world of nature research is, in a certain way, opaque to the soul; one cannot see to the bottom of it. The world of technology is like a transparent crystal—understood from the perspective of the soul, of course. Thereby, humanity has truly ascended to a new level of spiritual development with modern technology. Thereby, something different has entered the history of human development.

4. See footnote 2.
5. See footnote 1, ch. 9.
6. Rudolf Steiner, Death as Metamorphosis of Life: Including “What Does the Angel Do in Our Astral Body?” & “How Do I Find Christ?”, CW 182 (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2008), lecture in Zurich, Oct. 9, 1918.
7. Elena Andreyeva, Guy David, and Hummy Song, “The Effects of Home Health Visit Length on Hospital Readmission,” NBER Working Paper 24566 (2018).
8. Eric Topol, Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again (New York: Basic Books, 2019).
9. Rudolf Steiner, Manifestations of Karma, CW 120 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1996), lecture in Hanover, May 27, 1910.
10. Rudolf Steiner, Understanding Healing: Meditative Reflections on Deepening Medicine through Spiritual Science, CW 316 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2013), lecture in Dornach, Jan. 9, 1924.
11. Selg, Peter, Helene von Grunelius und Rudolf Steiners Kurse für junge Mediziner [Helene von Grunelius and Rudolf Steiner’s courses for young physicians] (Dornach: Natura Verlag im Verlag am Goetheanum, 2003). See also: footnote 10, lecture Jan. 2, 1924.
12. See footnote 10, pp. 202–203.
13. Kienle, Gerhard, Die Würde des Menschen und die Humanisierung der Medizin. Aufsätze und Vorträge, herausgegeben von Peter Selg [Human dignity and the humanization of medicine. Essays and lectures, edited by Peter Selg],(Verlag des Ita Wegman Instituts, 2009).
14. Rudolf Steiner, Introducing Anthroposophical Medicine, CW 312 (Hudson, NY: SteinerBooks, 2010), lecture in Dornach, Apr. 7, 1920
15. Selg, Peter, Gerhard Kienle—Leben und Werk Band 1: Eine Biographie [Gerhard Kienle—Life and work Vol. 1: A biography] (Dornach: Verlag am Goetheanum, 2003).
16. Cf. Rudolf Steiner, Universal Spirituality and Human Physicality. Bridging the Divide: The Search for the New Isis and the Divine Sophia, CW 202 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2014), lectures in Dornach, Bern, & Basel, Nov. 26—Dec. 26, 1920.
17. All footnotes added by the translator.