Heroes Not Zombies

I’m listening to the audio version of Thomas Moore’s “Care of the Soul in Medicine”, and I can’t remember the last book I encountered with which I so comprehensively agree.

I’ve not used the word “soul” much in life, and the triad of “body, mind and spirit” or “body, mind and energy” have seemed more useful to me, but the way Thomas Moore describes soul, the more I’m beginning to wonder why I didn’t clock this at an earlier age. Here’s what he says about soul –

It is impossible to define precisely what the soul is. Definition is an intellectual enterprise anyway: the soul prefers to imagine. We know intuitively that soul has to do with genuineness and depth, as when we say certain music has soul or a remarkable person is soulful. When you look closely at the image of soulfulness, you see that it is tied to life in all its particulars—good food, satisfying conversation, genuine friends, and experiences that stay in the memory and touch the heart. Soul is revealed in attachment, love, and community, as well as in retreat on behalf of inner communing and intimacy.

Well, I understand that. Completely. And I agree with both the broad thrust, and the detailed statements within his book. Medicine is care of the soul, and without that, it degenerates into something both disturbing and unsatisfying. Why did we start to remove the subjects who experience health care, and replace them with the objects to be worked on? Why have we developed an obsession with what can be measured at the cost of losing the stories, no the souls, of those who are sick?

Thomas Moore quotes Albert Schweitzer a couple of times and I decided to read a little of his writings too.

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering the attitudes of their minds.”

Wow! That’s my job every day. That’s exactly what my colleagues at the Centre for Integrative Care, Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital, come to work to do every day – to help people to alter the attitudes of their minds, and so alter their lives.

“Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate. ”

And there’s something we can’t be reminded of too often. I’m struck by the lack of kindness, the complete absence of empathy and compassion, in the communications of the critics of my discipline. I’ve often wondered what their vision is for health care….more people taking more drugs? It’s all too easy to react to their hostility with indignation and in so doing to lose touch with the only thing which can make it evaporate – kindness.

Let me be more kind. Let me aspire to be more kind every day.

I am proud of my colleagues. In little ways, small gestures of kindness towards their patients, a few words of greeting in the corridor to welcome them in, the passion with which they speak about their work, and their determination to do their absolute best every time, they affirm for me what doctors should be like.

I guess I’m lucky. I get to connect to people at a soul level every day.