History of Western Medicine contd: Soul Medicine

There have been glimmers of hope in the development of what I like to call “soul medicine” but sometimes they seem to be lost from view.
In its 1990 definition of palliative care, the World Health Organization said that the
‘control of … psychological, social and spiritual problems is paramount’ in the total care package of those with incurable disease.
At the same time, Michael Kearney, clearly not sharing the optimism of Dossey or the W.H.O., was predicting that the holistic focus in palliative care (let alone in the wider medical field) was in danger of being lost under the weight of the biomedical model of medicine (1) and the narrow mindedness of those who paid attention only to physical symptoms, whom he called ‘symptomologists’. His concerns were justified. Only a few years later in a paper in Progress in Palliative Care a leader in the field, Sam Ahmedzai, wrote in his editorial: The view now, within palliative medicine, is that it is okay to be symptomologists, and proud of it …Ultimately, suffering from losses, lack of love, existential doubts as well as from poverty and cruelty are not medical issues, and the response to them is not necessarily the responsibility of any healthcare discipline (2).

Surely those who have argued for the exclusion of psychological concerns from the field of medicine, let alone spiritual elements, must be mistaken? 

Many have campaigned over the years for a greater understanding of suffering and holistic healing in a medical context. This first assumed some recognition in the UK within the field of cancer and other terminal illness care, where an understanding was developed within the hospice movement, founded in 1967 on the ideas of Dame Cicely Saunders. The spiritual theme of medical care is also picked up by Michael Lerner who has a special interest in mind/body health in the care of cancer patients. In his book, Choices in Healing, (3) he explores the very diverse range of mainstream and complementary treatments available to the cancer patient. These include for example the practice of Yoga and the power of prayer, in addition to shamanism, all clearly understanding the importance of the inner life of the mind and spirit to the overall well being of a patient in the context of a terminal illness. Some of this is inevitably out of date in a fast changing world but Lerner’s book is still available as a valuable overview of the wealth of ideas and treatments available. The book is well illustrated from literary sources that delightfully complement the consideration of the technical aspects of treatments.

Michael Kearney, palliative care consultant and former medical director of palliative care at Our Lady's Hospice in Dublin, Ireland, has also long campaigned for medical practitioners to pay more attention to the interactions of body, mind and spirit in healthcare (4). He writes of the ‘deep’ as well as the ‘surface’ elements of suffering, and the patient’s “soul pain” that must be acknowledged in addition to the physical pain. He suggested that the principles of Asklepian healing should be taught alongside the traditional and well-established Hippocratic style training almost universally taught in medical schools today, so that they can again work together as happened in Hippocrates’ day.
Healing, he says, needs to be given the environment in which the natural human psyche can be given the space to take over and do its own healing work. 

The overriding problem in healthcare today seems to be that too often our doctors are ‘Techno-doctors’ (5) and ‘Super Specialists’ in a system that reduces patients to paper statistics and doctors to slaves of machinery, forgetting the importance of the personal, the subjective and the social aspects of care. ‘By their very nature doctors deal with bits and pieces – microbes, hormone deficiencies or tumors – while patients experience illness as the disorders, disruption and possible disintegration of their ordinary lives…Every healing art sees illness in its own terms. Patients need to remember that the illness is theirs and theirs alone.’(6) And perhaps some physicians need to remember this also?

Apart from the palliative care available for patients at the end of life, it still seems that the different forms of spiritual and religious healthcare (S/RH), complementary and alternative medicine (CAMs) and conventional allopathic clinical practice are not working together as well as they could and should. Many of the CAMs are gaining credibility within mainstream traditional healthcare but the influence of S/RH lags woefully behind.

To be contd...

References:

(1) in Foreword by Balfour Mount p viii to Kearney, Michael, A Place of Healing: Working with Suffering in Living and Dying, Oxford University Press, USA (November 30, 2000), p. 31. Now see Place of Healing: Working With Nature And Soul At The End (Spring Journal paperback, August 27, 2009)

(2) Sam H.Ahmedzai (1997) ‘Five years: five threads’ (editorial, Progress in Palliative Care, 5(6), 235-7

(3) Lerner, Michael, Choices in Healing; Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press paperback edition 1998, p.123.

(4) This is explored in much more detail in Michael Kearney, A Place of Healing, 2000, foreword by Balfour Mount p. iv. Now see Place of Healing: Working With Nature And Soul At The End (Spring Journal paperback, August 27, 2009)

(5) Helman, Cecil, Suburban Shaman: Tales from Medicine’s Frontline, London: Hammersmith Press, 2006, pp. 5.

(6) Ted Kaptchuk and Michael Croucher, 1986, pp. 26, 37, cited in Mayne, Michael, A Year Lost and Found, London: Darton Longman and Todd, 1987, p. 38.

Chiron the Wounded Healer

Pain and loneliness are forms of energy that can be transformed if we turn them outward, using them to recognize and redeem someone else’s pain or loneliness.
This is quoted from Jonathan Sacks book: To Heal a Fractured World- the Ethics of Responsibility.

Many people outside the healing professions of pastoral care and medicine have not heard of the expression The Wounded Healer. So here is a brief story from Greek mythology, where there was a Centaur called Chiron. Centaurs are normally portrayed as clumsy and brutal beasts. Chiron was different. He was kind, gentle and well educated and tutored many of the Greek gods. Famous pupils included Jason, the leader of the fifty Argonauts, who sailed aboard the Argo to bring back the golden fleece to Pelias. Another was Achilles of the vulnerable heel legend, killed by an arrow from Apollo’s bow.

Much of Greek mythology is highly intricate and complex and the myth of Chiron varies in precise details depending on its source. The story goes that he was the love child of an affair between the Greek God Cronus and the Earth Nymph Philyra. Before making love to Philyra, Cronus changed her into a horse to allay the suspicions of his wife Rhea. And so the centaur Chiron was conceived. Abandoned by his parents at birth, Chiron was adopted and brought up by Apollo, The Divine Physician, who trained him to be a great and wise teacher, physician and healer.

Centaurs were known for their over indulgences and Chiron was probably no exception. One day there was a bloody fight between Centaurs over a carafe of wine and Chiron was accidentally shot in his knee by a stray poisoned arrow from the bow of Heracles (or Hercules). The wound would not heal and it gave him much pain. Centaurs also had the gift of immortality. Such was Chiron’s suffering, from both the mental wounds of his abandonment at birth and from this painful physical wounding, that he prayed to the gods to let him surrender his own immortality and die. He then spent the rest of his life trying to find a cure for his physical wound and became an expert in the healing power of plants, particularly the herbal remedies he developed for war wounds. But the healing abilities for which he was renowned came especially from the empathy he developed for the suffering of others, acquired from his struggle to overcome his own physical and mental wounds. Chiron allowed his own wounds to be a source of healing for others. He became a Wounded Healer.

What became of Chiron? His prayer was eventually answered and after his death he was placed in the sky by the king of the Greek gods, Zeus (the Roman Jupiter and the only surviving son of Cronus and Rhea), where he can be seen in the night sky as the constellation Sagittarius (the archer), otherwise known as Centaur (the man/horse).
Greek mythology is of course a collection of fables, of the Greek gods, goddesses and heroes. But many of them encompass a deeper wisdom about human behavior even if few have any basis in fact.

One of the legacies left by the analytical psychologist Carl Jung was the idea that in our psyche we all share deep inherited and unconscious ideas and images together known as our “collective unconscious.” This collective unconscious, Jung said, is made up of different recognizable human models or archetypes. He saw in the Greek myth of Chiron a reflection of the archetypal Wounded Healer of the indigenous medicine man or shaman, first recorded in the earliest known hunting and fishing communities of Siberia and Sub Arctic North America. In fact it was probably from the language of a small group of hunters and reindeer herders from the Arctic Tungus that the name shaman comes, meaning “he who knows.”

The true shaman was both priest and healer and prophet. The essential prerequisite of the shaman was that he would have suffered a serious mental or physical illness or both, which would often be long and drawn out. As healing progressed, the shaman acquired the capacities for inspiration and healing and with recovery he came to understand the spirits and how to master them. He would also train and initiate assistants into the role of healer. Shamans can therefore be seen as people who have come through their own serious illness as a result of which they are stronger in themselves and more able to safeguard the souls of others, either into the next world or to heal them in this world. Michael Lerner has aptly called them “spiritual midwives.”

This then is the concept of the Wounded Healer. The idea is well researched, documented and understood within the traditional fields of medical and pastoral care. But I believe that the Wounded Healer holds a much wider significance for us all within the healing needs of the whole world.

So why the spring flowers photo? Simply to give some cheer on this gloomy foggy frosty winter morning, when the last remnant of our unseasonably early snow is still lying around on the grass and the roads. Oh for spring!




Copyright Eleanor Stoneham 2010