Welcome to Spirit of Medicine’s blog. I am really excited about doing this. The aim is to inform and educate and to form working partnerships, to help with better outcomes for all our patients, especially dealing with those difficult problems for which there have been no satisfactory solutions or outcomes up until now. I welcome comments, feedback, any dialogue which will help shine a light into these areas.
It has always intrigued me that what we see as doctors is often the surface presenting issue. We are very rarely given what was driving it. Finding ways to get to core issues has been a passion and driving force for over 25 years. I really started to get insights when I took part in a 2 year Balint program, looking at “difficult patients”. After around 6 months, it was obvious that we weren’t bringing difficult patients, we were all bringing cases that highlighted difficulties we had ourselves. In other words, if I had an issue (don’t we all!), and someone presented with the same issue, then they pressed my “hot button”, and I was no longer objective and in the best place to deal with whatever was presenting.
So began my journey into self-development, and looking for clinical tools that could help elicit what was really going on, and be effective in dealing with it. This in essence, is for me, the Spirit of Medicine – to not only help with the presenting (usually physical) issue, but to find and eliminate what was causing it, so promoting total good health.
What I propose to write on, and share thoughts on, are the many and varied ways in which people with health problems present, how to elicit any underlying meaning, and how to go about accompanying them on their journey until a return to health is achieved – at least that’s the goal. Sometimes it isn’t the outcome that counts, but the journey. Medicine can often look at a “negative outcome” as a “failure”. I would like to explore this notion at another time – is this in fact the case?
I have used as a by-line – “when all else fails”. In other words, when traditional methods fail, where do we go from there?
