The Promise


Medicine Ways, the television series, explores the extraordinary possibilities of complementary healing and the considerable challenges of changing the current paradigm of modern health care. It seeks a vision beyond present and past and looks to the future -- where neither the past nor the present struggle for dominance, but instead strive for balance and integration.

Medicine Ways poses the questions: “What would healing look like if doctors and healers worked together? What if they used their skills, abilities and knowledge in complementary rather than in competitive ways?” The series examines the possibility of a new health care paradigm; weaving together elements, traditions and protocols from the ancient past with the cutting-edge present. Each episode concerns itself with what works in an elegant and effective way to heal ailing bodies and imbalanced souls.

Medicine Ways looks beyond modern medicine’s view of the body as a collection of parts and symptoms of disease; beyond the past’s more limited technological means; into the future of quantum physics and the energetic web that ties us all together. Medicine Ways follows Marina Bridgeas’ exploration of healing the whole -- body, mind, emotion and spirit -- not only in the patients who come through the doors of the hospital, but in their families and the hospital’s staff as well.

The healing stories within Medicine Ways are based on actual events and occurrences. The characters’ skills and abilities are founded on those of real healers and mediums. The research and studies portrayed reflect current and ongoing research. Marina Bridgeas, her family, friends, adversaries and clients are fictitious -- they have been created as a medium for this message. It is my hope that they will live in your hearts and minds, as they do in mine.


The Premise


Medicine Ways’ primary focus is Marina Bridgeas. She is not a doctor, a lawyer, an administrator, a nurse, or even a patient. She is the hospital chaplain. Marina comes from a matrilineal line of healers and psychics -- that have been placed under a “geas".* She was raised ignorant of both her gifts and the geas under which her family lies. This results in the loss of her husband and son, which causes her untrained gifts to overwhelm her sanity.

She struggles back and comes to terms with her psychic/mediumistic gifts with the aid of her Granny Brigit and the Spiritualist Church in which Marina is ordained as a minister. She then trains her healing talents with a Native American medicine elder, Grandmother Weaver.

Marina is called to bridge the worlds of the psychic, the healer, and the spiritual with the world of Modern Medicine -- a world that does not believe in her gifts, her skills or her vision. Medicine Ways follows Marina’s journey into the labyrinth of the medical system and her struggle to balance and to heal it through the birth of a Complementary Alternative Medical (CAM) Unit.



*Dineen's Irish Dictionary explains the word "geis" /alt spelling: “geas”/ (pronounced "gaysh”) as meaning "a bond, a spell, a prohibition, a taboo, a magical injunction, the violation of which led to misfortune and death."