Heroes Not Zombies

This is a photo I shared with many patients and students over the course of my career. I saw this rock, a long, long time ago, just down from a waterfall in woods in the Scottish Highlands.

How did this rock come to have such a shape? It’s as if it had been struck by a Viking axe! What’s even more interesting is that it will never “heal”. That cleft, that wedge in the body of the rock, will never disappear.

It’s pretty common to think of healing as the complete resolution of something. We think of a cut, or a broken bone, and imagine that once it has healed, the skin or bone will return to how it had been before, forgetting somehow that all injuries leave scars. We think of infections as “self-limiting” – that is, once they have gone, they are gone. The body returns to some prior condition. We talk of “defeating disease” and use a lot of war imagery to suggest we can remove it (whatever “it” is) from our bodies, “defeat it”, and then it will be gone…for good. Job done.

But Life isn’t like that.

And neither is healing.

We don’t go backwards. Injuries, infections, traumas and diseases of all kinds change us. Even when we make a “complete recovery”, our lives have now changed. Something is altered….in the body and in the psyche. Whatever we encounter, whatever we have to “deal with”, becomes part of our story. Every event, every experience, changes our lives forever.

So, what are we to do with these wounds?

It would be nice if we could just ignore them. And in many situations they are minor enough for that to be a reasonable strategy. But the bigger impacts can’t be ignored, they can only be denied. That’s never a great strategy.

Maybe we could fill in the gap. Fill that wedge with prozac-a-filla or something like that. Would that work? Unfortunately, suppressing, and hiding the wounds tends not to work for very long. All those “anti-” medicines that we use – antibiotics, antihypertensives, antacids, anti-inflammatories, antidepressants etc combined with opiates and other sense-numbing drugs, don’t actually directly promote healing at all. They just “take the edge off” things….for a bit. You think antibiotics cure infections? I’m afraid not. They can do a very important job. They might even save your life. But what they do is kill bugs. The inflamed, swollen, and damaged tissues in your body need to heal. The antibiotics don’t do that. It’s your ability to self-repair that does. And antibiotics don’t stimulate the self-repairing functions of the body.

So what do we have to do?

Take a look at the photo again. See the river rushing by the rock? I think of the life force when I see that. The wound has become part of our internal landscape now. The illness, the experience of it, the memory of it, the impact it had on our psyches and our lives, is part of who we are now. It’s an integral part of our story. But life continues. We adapt. We find new ways to live and to thrive with this changed landscape. We evolve our inner environment.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t use our modern medicines. They can reduce our suffering and even, sometimes, save our lives. But they don’t directly help us to heal. We still need to recover, repair and adapt. How much of “Medicine” or our “Health Service” is directed towards that life-long, important issue of healing?

I hope that, whatever the answer to that question, the answer will be “a lot more in the future”.

Our lives are not going to be the same once this coronavirus pandemic is over. How are we going to heal? How are we going to adapt? How are we going to live differently?