A person can recover from a stroke by being able to walk or talk again even though the brain cells are still damaged and can never be normal again. Neither permanent pathology, treatment, or adaptation invalidate a recovery if people have met their functional goals. Treatment professionals are therapists who act as coaches helping to design a rehabilitation plan in which they support the patients' efforts to achieve a series of functional goals. Their relationship often focuses around motivating and focusing the patients, own efforts to help themselves. Within rehabilitation, there is more of a concordance between the professional and the patient, than within the medical model, because both are clearly focused on treating the person and not the illness.
Patients can experience active recovery regardless of the state of their illness.
Spiritual healing is a more complex and diverse field. In fact, treating an illness medically first is often equated with betraying spiritual faith and therefore antagonistic to God and spiritual healing. In mental health we tend to overtly exclude spiritual aspects of life and treatment although they may be very important to our clients. These moments, whether conceptualized spiritually or not, clearly impart a state of acceptance and love, prior to relieving the illness. Psychosocial rehabilitation is a growing movement in community mental health today.