Healthcare and the incredible reinvention of medicine

In these musings of mine around the subject of healthcare we must not forget to give proper credit for the many wonderful advances that are being made in medical science; the technological achievements, the surgical and clinical skills, the development of ever more efficacious drugs and the efforts of the very many health care professionals working competently and tirelessly using best knowledge, experience and facilities for the benefit of the patient.

Lyme Regis February 2014

Perhaps more doctors than we realize do understand and practice the philosophy of holistic health care, with due regard to the full impact of body, mind and spirit in considering the ‘wellness’ of the person. Even so it is unlikely that this can often be realistically achieved within the normal time constraints of a busy practice. Nevertheless there is an opportunity here that should not be ignored; indeed we may not be able to ignore it for much longer, given the escalating costs of traditional healthcare.

Several years ago I picked up in our local library a very battered secondhand copy of Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine by Larry Dossey. I hadn't heard of Dossey at that time, and I was intrigued by the book’s title. Now I realize that Dossey has been in the vanguard of mind body healing for some time and is even sometimes credited with being the father of this genre of medicine with which so many are still uncomfortable. His influence was perhaps first felt in the 1990s with Healing Words. Upon reading further, I was immediately fascinated by Dossey’s division of the history of medicine, from when it first became scientific in the mid 1800s, into three Eras.

Studland Bay January 2014

The first 100 years or so from around the time of the American Civil War of Independence up until around 1950 he calls Era I, the rise of ‘mechanical medicine’, because, he says, ‘of its adherence to classical, mechanical physics.’ Era II from then until the first publication of his book in 1993 and still developing to this day he described as the age of mind/body medicine. During that period there was an increasing recognition that the state of a person’s mind, their thoughts and emotions can affect the physical body and cause what is usually described as psychosomatic illness. Such illnesses are often unfairly misrepresented, by being thought of as imaginary, or ‘all in the mind’, a misnomer that is unhelpful to the further study of this important phenomenon. Dossey now says that he prefers to look at this concept the other way around: that it is better to show how positive feelings keep us healthy, or whole.

Both Era I and Era II medicine remain, he says, ‘wholly devoted to the tenets of classical science as an explanation for all events, including the actions of the mind.’ Dossey also talks of an Era III, the era of non-local mind medicine. But that is for a later post…

If you are finding this series of blogs interesting, I have treated other vital aspects of our lives to a similar analysis - always urging spirit over matter - spirituality and healing over materialism and curing, bringing a more holistic lens to our economy, creativity, creation, pastoral issues, and so on… 
All in Healing This Wounded Earth: with Compassion, Spirit and the Power of Hope.

What readers are saying about Healing This Wounded Earth:
"Within a few pages ... I was making a mental list of all the friends and colleagues I wanted to give or lend this book to. I loved reading this book and am sure will turn to it again in the future."
From review by Dr Yvonneke Roe GP in London, in Network Review, Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network 

The social significance of healing

I have written rather a lot about healthcare lately, within the context of healing versus curing. Let’s assume that healthcare professionals recognize their fundamental role in the relief of suffering. However I believe there seems to be less understanding of the social significance of this true, holistic healing. Carl Jung and Scott Peck, Carl Rogers and Aldous Huxley, have all written in their times of the social impact of wounded behavior and the significance of individual healing within this context.
I think I have mentioned the work of psychiatric and mental health nurse Conti O’Hare before but make no apology for this. She has a vision for the importance of nursing in the healing of society in the twenty first century. Writing about the nursing profession in the USA she urges nurses to understand the wounded healer concept in their profession, stressing how important it is for them to heal themselves properly before they can generate true healing in their patients and in their profession. Conti-O’Hare reflects on the ills of the world, such as terrorism, addiction and violence on our streets, that she recognizes as symptomatic of our inner woundedness. Nurses, she says, have the potential not only to heal their own profession but to foster healing in the world. ‘We can only wonder,’ she says, ‘if people with serious emotional disorders will seek healing solutions or continue to inflict woundedness on others by their antisocial and unacceptable behavior…What a glorious expectation for nurses to be armed with the knowledge that they are wounded healers who have participated in transforming their own health and that of others.’
O’Hare has developed what she calls the Q.U.E.S.T. Model for Self-Transcendence to help nurses and other health professionals to heal themselves and their professions, as an aid for them to transform and transcend wounds to become true Wounded Healers. This transformation (from walking wounded to wounded healer), she believes, ‘will have a positive impact on the health care system, society and the nursing profession as a whole.’
While O’Hare merely hints in her book at the profound responsibilities of the nursing profession as Wounded Healers to the world, there are others who are more positive in their vision. J. J. Means, a pastoral counselor at the Des Moines Pastoral Counseling Center, Iowa USA, is more certain of his wider healing role in society. The medical and caring professions are in privileged and indeed socially responsible positions to reach those psychological and spiritual roots of social strategy, within the domain of the nation’s healthcare and soul care. And while the ills of the world at first sight may seem to be far removed from the day-to-day practice of medicine, in fact I agree strongly with these pioneers that here are issues that are inextricably linked. I think these professions have a profound responsibility to recognize their role as healers to the world. As is so often the case, North America seems to be taking the lead in this, for other countries no doubt to follow in due course.

References:
Conti-O’Hare, Marion, The Nurse as Wounded Healer: from Trauma to Transcendence, Sudbury, Massachusetts: Jones and Bartlett Publishers. London: Jones and Bartlett Publishers International, 2002, p. 141, 144.

Means, J. J. ‘Wounded Healer/Mighty Prophet,’ The Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling, Spring 2002, Vol. 56, No. 1.
Means, J. J., ‘Pastoral Counseling: An Alternative Path in Mental Health,’ The Journal of Pastoral Care Fall 1997 vol. 51 No. 3.

© Eleanor Stoneham 2011

Visions of empathy in healthcare

I found a really good article by Alex Massie on the Foreign Policy site 
Bitter Medicine - Britain's prime minister grabs the third rail of national politics: the National Health Service.

“However severely the prime minister has slashed other sectors of government spending and however inauspicious the country's latest growth figures -- GDP shrunk 0.5 percent in the final quarter of 2010 -- it's the NHS reforms that are seen as the most controversial. The government needs a plan for economic growth, but it also needs to show that, despite what the Labour Party argues, the NHS is "safe in Conservative hands," as Cameron puts it…Although the NHS will remain paid for by general taxation and free at the point of use, the aim is to build a more flexible service more responsive to patient needs that's less bureaucratic and better able to adapt to changing market demands. The downside might be that an already complex service will become still more complicated and susceptible.”

Massie recognises that all of this is being done to also save money in the long run. Because the original “totally free at point of service” National Health Service introduced in 1948 can no longer cope. Indeed the enormous costs of the latest technology, drugs and procedures could never have been foreseen all that time ago. There simply has to be rationing of procedures and medications. And that provokes widespread media attention when some are denied treatments available elsewhere in the country, or to other patients. In the eyes of many it is no longer “fair”.


But what strikes me most whenever there are debates about our ever burgeoning health care costs in the UK is that no one seems to ever consider in any detail the role that complementary and alternative medicines can play as part of a more holistic approach to healthcare. Ever more complex drug regimes and technological advances are alone unlikely to lower the costs of healthcare. It seems to me so often that many expensive invasive procedures and drug regimes could be averted if much earlier attention was paid to the health of mind and spirit, and the fitness of the body, through both physical and mental fitness regimes.

Because healing needs soul. And the healing power of the spirit and the soul is free and wholesome, with no unwanted side effects.

I have written elsewhere of the new era of spiritual awakening in medicine, of the dawn of a new understanding of consciousness. But this is only evident in a few pockets of holistic excellence. These are mostly in America, although some campaign tirelessly for the cause of the holistic practitioners in some parts of the UK. See SECTco for example, in Brighton.

It is surely because so many of us do not receive the healing for which we yearn on the visit to the physician that we join the ever increasing number of people who seek complementary and alternative therapies (CAMs) elsewhere, often without our physician’s knowledge and with varying degrees of success. It is no coincidence that the number of practitioners trained in such therapies has mushroomed. But these therapists need to be more widely recognized and paid for by the NHS.
This all raises a serious and fundamental question. Should healthcare be seen as a problem of cost, or an opportunity for growth? It should be neither! It should be a dynamic and readily affordable system that continually strives to integrate its conventional allopathic disciplines with the various and increasingly popular complementary and alternative medicines, including spiritual and religious healing methods. These should all work alongside one another in a spirit of full cooperation and mutual respect. This is truly integrated medicine at its very best.
(see for example Hufford, David J., ‘An analysis of the field of spirituality, religion and health.’)