Compassionate Healthcare - An NHS in need of healing

My friends and followers will notice that I have been quiet for an unacceptably long period of time. The truth is I have been hiding away to complete a book on depression - hopefully to be out later this year.

But I have to put my head above the parapet to comment on the dreadful events at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. Yes it's in the UK but my comments and thoughts apply equally to the American healthcare systems.
Following the Francis Report on the enquiry into this fiasco, our Prime Minister has called for more compassion in the health system. Whilst it has to be said many health care workers are doing an excellent job, it seems that some nurses and doctors have forgotten how to care for their patients.

It is often said that the physician used to be able to cure rarely but care always. Now it seems that the reverse is the case: he can cure very often but somehow it seems that there is often little room for the caring and the healing…

Michael Mayne, busy parish priest who subsequently became Dean of Westminster Abbey within the Anglican Communion, was well qualified to write about the patient’s perception of healthcare. In his book A Year Lost and Found he describes his experiences and struggle with a debilitating episode of ME, or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, the post-viral fatigue syndrome. Of all the various treatments and advice he received for a condition that is still very little understood, he significantly gives special credit to a certain Dr D, whose particular efficacy in helping him cope with his condition is attributed to his grasp of the inter-relatedness of body and spirit…Mayne wrote:

"he talked and he tested or massaged parts of my body. Sometimes he just talked. He had the great gift of encouragement. He understood that the question ‘How are you?’ is at root a metaphysical question, which is not sufficiently answered with clinical lists and data …but goes to the deepest part of ourselves as the complex and uniquely precious beings we are." 

Mayne tragically died from cancer in 2006, but not before heroically putting the finishing touches to his final book The Enduring Melody. This started as a meditation of his life, but when the cancer struck it became his daily meditations interwoven into an autobiography of his final year. The book is a brave and very thoughtful journal through those last ten months. It culminates in a reflective essay on illness and healing, and the need for a holistic approach.

‘To treat a disease,’ he said: “is to inhibit it and hopefully help the body to destroy it or control it: to treat a patient is to observe, foster, nurture and listen to a life...
In an ideal [health service] it would be good if every doctor and nurse in training would reflect on the mystery of the human being with both the learning of the scientist and the observation and sympathy of the novelist or the poet.” 


This is an adapted extract from my first book Healing This Wounded Earth, where in two prescient chapters I write how the health services lost sight of what I call Soul Medicine, in the rush for latest high tech cures, and how we need to return to this more compassionate health care - for the sake of ourselves and our world ; a world in desperate need of healing.