”The earliest of civilizations, from many Native American cultures to that of the ancient Greeks, recognized an inextricable interrelationship between poetry and healing; surely, the best poems we have today demand that we listen, and not just with our ears, but with our whole hearts. …"
[T]he healing potential of poetry is related via [Raphael Campo's] personal experience in reading poetry with patients. He will relate several vignettes that exemplify how poetry can help to restore the role of the clinician to that of healer. He will show how engaging our creative faculties can help us ultimately to practice medicine not only more humanely, but more joyfully as well.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(From: "The Poetry of Healing" -Rafael Campo, M.D.)
I don’t know about you, but when I walk into the doctor’s office with a herniated disk I’m really looking forward to hearing him/her recite a couple of strophes to get me back on my feet again. Who needs an MRI or morphine?..... I think I prefer to get my doses of poetry at a poetry reading and not in ICU. Doc, let the proffessionals handle this would you!
Sunday, May 15, 2005
The Poetry of Healing:
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5 comments:
Oh Nick: this is so funny. But I think you might miss the point. We all want doctors who are technically excellent; but we also want doctors who have a human dimension to their person.
True healing is really more than just an MRI and the right dose of morphine; it's depends upon a doctor who connects with you as a human being.
Having been a patient myself, recently, I know of (or at least have a perspective on) what I speak.
all the best to you . . .
Peter
Peter,
Nice of you to drop by. Don't mind me, I'm just clowning around. It's what passes for humor in these parts. Although the wife and kids have become quite impervious to it all.
Nick
P.S.: (Remember I'm Canadian...Eh!) :-)
I apologize for the flip response. However, in all seriousness, I do agree with a holistic approach to medicine and treating the "patient" and not just the illness. My tongue in cheek response to the "The Poetry of Healing" blurb was really more of a side-effect and in essence a knee jerk reaction to the state of health care here in Canada. Once it was touted as the best health care system in the world. I believe that even the Clinton administration studied our system and advocated adopting some of its characteristics. However, when the government funds started to dwindle in the nineties the doctors and health care professionals started an exodus (mainly to the south). This became a sizeable component of the so-called "brain drain". Today many provinces have a two-tiered system. On one level you have public health-care and on the other private clinics and even hospitals are starting to pop up in the larger more affluent cities. They are now talking about levying a yearly health care tax which will go to partly fund an ailing system. I don't think that that will bring the physicians back. Perhaps it's just too little too late.
Nick
Nick:
We could learn so much from the Canadian system (IMHO). And I have on occasion contemplated moving to Canada!
Health care is just so complicated, sometimes. But if we all just took better care of ourselves (eating right, exercising, etc) we wouldn't need to depend upon it so much.
Still: I LOVE being a primary care doc: it is just so fun.
Peter,
You sound like a very devoted physician and I'm sure that your patients are very lucky to have you as their primary care physician. The Canadian paradigm functioned very well for a number of decades and Canadians from all walks of life were receiving quality care. I wish that I could say that that were true in the present. But I have, myself in 2001, spent days on a gurney in the corridors of an emergency unit before I was assigned a room waiting for a gallstone operation. The waiting for non-elective surgery has become intolerable for some. This, I'm afraid has become common place.
Still, it is a better system than most others so I should not be too critical. I guess it's difficult to settle for hamburger steak when one has tasted fillet mignon. Thanks for coming back to this.
Nick
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