Consciousness and Healing
I am just finishing reading Consciousness and Healing. It is encouraging to know that some 67 doctors feel strongly enough about an integral approach to medicine to put such a book together. It doesn’t quite make we want to break my decade long moratorium on paid medical assistance, but I feel good knowing that should the need arise, they will be there.
What I do feel was lacking from this book was any sense of patient responsibility. The bald headed one would probably point out that it is a very democratic approach, in that Democrats always expect the society(LR) to support the individual, while Republicans tend to expect the individual to be a bit more self reliant.
The best approach, of course, is both.
It is an unfortunate result of following a grossly objective (
Translation: Medicine has been so focused on science that it has forgotten that people are complex physical, emotional, thinking, spiritual creatures capable of looking inside of themselves, taking stock, and sharing their insights with a doctor.
This often times means that, never mind diagnosing or healing, people are barely even expected to investigate or be able to relate much of anything about their current condition to the ‘experts’. We are all to blame for the lack of trust that we have infused subjective experience with, but we are not all held responsible for this. The doctors of the world are forced to shoulder an unfair burden. Most physicians have long ago lost any expectations that the patient will have any valuable insights into their own situation. I, for one, can not entirely blame them.
So what I am saying here is that I am committed to being an informed patient…whenever this may be.
Why is it that physicians should be held solely responsible for the diagnoses and subsequent treatment of disease? We know that ‘nonadherence’ to the prescribed course of action is one problem that must be addressed, but how about the patient’s responsibility to ‘know thyself’?
The two(out of 67) chapters that I felt really address true patient responsibility are on The White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy recommendations and the following chapter on 'Sociopolitical Challenges of Integral Medicine. These are a beacon, but I want more.
At what point did it become the medical communities responsibility to probe everything from the depths of ones phyche to the contents of their bowels? Most people have no idea what they put into their bodies or the effects that it is having on them at any given moment. We ignore the food, air, information, hormones and meaning that circulate in and constitute our bodies and then demand that someone we have just met, comprehensively understand and manipulate this system into some sort of relevant harmony.......or face career threatening legal action.
Yes doctors should spend more time with us, and ask us more questions, and have a more comprehensive worldview, but why not fucking demand it? Better yet, inspire it. Why not get started without them?