Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Arrogance and ignorance

March 28, 2011 by bobleckridge

What is that makes arrogance and ignorance go so hand in hand?

Why do people claim to know for absolutely definite whether something is right or wrong, whether something works or doesn’t, but, in fact, don’t know anything about it at all?

I heard a few stories last week of patients’ exchanges with specialists. One man with cancer spoke to his oncologist about changing his diet and got the response “What do you want to do that for? There’s no evidence changing a diet affects your cancer”. The patient was surprised, having read a lot about the research related to cancer and diet so challenged the oncologist mentioning a research paper or two (you can imagine how that went down! So many doctors, sadly, don’t welcome such an adult/adult discussion!). At this the specialist said he admitted that diet might have an effect on whether or not you got cancer in the first place but he didn’t think it had any effect once you actually had the cancer. The patient persisted asking some more about what diet effects the specialist was aware of, at which he responded “I’m not an expert on diet. I’ll refer you to the dietician”.

Another exchange…..man with cancer who hears about “Iscador” treatment (the details aren’t important here) – the oncologist responds “Well you can go to Mexico if you like but you’ll be wasting your money!” Mexico? What on earth has Mexico got to do with “Iscador”? (Answers on a postcard please…..from Mexico preferably!) When asked what the connection was the “expert” confessed he knew nothing about “Iscador”.

I could go on……I heard at least FIVE separate stories like this last week. Situations where a patient is keen to find something that might help and is dismissed, apparently authoritatively, by an “expert”, who, it turns out, is pronouncing on something he knows nothing about.

This happens a lot, not just in Medicine. Look at the nuclear disaster post-quake and tsunami in Japan. Or the financial crash of 2008. Plenty of “experts” would swear such things were impossible…..until they happened.

We could do with a bit more humility, a bit more tolerance and open-mindedness, and a lot less claim for being in possession of the final, definitive truth……about anything.

I would also like to see an increase in the ability of doctors to engage in adult/adult discussion, and to let go off parent/child type consultations with adults.

 

Posted in from the consulting room, health | 1 Comment »

Morning sun

March 25, 2011 by bobleckridge

morning sun

So….as I walked along the road I saw this sight before me. I tell you……NEVER leave the house without a camera!

Posted in from the dark room, photography | 2 Comments »

The 1000th post!

March 24, 2011 by bobleckridge

4 years ago today, I wrote and published my very first post, having spent a few weeks before that researching various blogging platforms, learning how to use them, and creating a name and a design for mine.

I chose the name heroes not zombies because I believe we humans have a tendency to slip into autopilot and drift through life zombie fashion. I also think that society is ordered to make people that way. Commodification and command and control seem to be the order of the day. People are reduced to units.

I think we need to reclaim what it is to be human and we can do that through telling stories. We create a sense of self through the narratives we create around our experience, and we communicate our inner, subjective reality through telling others stories and through dialogue. We have the opportunity to become present and aware and in so doing to become the heroes of our own stories (hero, in the literary sense of the lead character).

But I had other motives for starting this blog too. I wanted to share my passion and my enthusiasm for life. This seems a good place to do that.

I also want to stimulate people to think differently about health and health care, so it pleases me greatly to see that the most visited post, by a long, long way, is the one about the Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp (click on “person sized medicine vs molecule sized medicine” in the top posts on the right). I really love that painting. I think it completely captures the shift in emphasis away from seeing illness as a contextually bound experiential phenomenon, to seeing it as a reified disease. What I mean is that through autopsies we began to see illness as a thing. As technology developed we delved deeper and deeper into the human body, examining smaller and smaller parts. That progress has enormously expanded our understanding of the body and of pathology. But too often, the downside is we forget that it’s human beings who experience illness and that disease is only a part of the problem.

I want to make the case for understanding and emphasising health and healing. Healing shouldn’t be just what you hope happens as a side effect of managing disease. It should be something we explicitly address, deepen our understanding of, and actively trying to deliver. After all, a healthy person is more likely to self-repair, self-regulate, and so, effectively deal with disease and pathology than an unhealthy one.

So, if this is your first time here, welcome, please take your time and browse around. I hope you find some things to stimulate you, to enlighten you, to delight you. And if you’re one of the folk who has been here with me back and forth over the last four years, thank you. It’s been great to make your acquaintance and I look forward to sharing much more with you in the years to come.

Here’s to great stories! Here’s to life! Here’s to wonder and awe at the amazing diversity and creativity of the everyday. Here’s to you!

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

Found beauty

March 23, 2011 by bobleckridge

lichen

lichen

lichen

….stumbled across these stones in the garden today – aren’t the lichen patterns lovely? Natural art.

Posted in from the dark room, photography | 1 Comment »

Female and male “voices” or tendencies

March 23, 2011 by bobleckridge

Female/Male, yin/yang, moon/sun, there are these two aspects, types or tendencies described in many cultures throughout history. It’s too simplistic to say men are one way and women are the other. However, it’s also too simplistic to say men and women are the same. This way of thinking can be helpful if we consider male or female qualities are tendencies, rather than fixed types, if we see their interaction as being present and dynamic in all human beings, and if we aspire to an integrated, mature state, where each of us access both ways of being.

One helpful discussion about this is in Carol Gilligan’s “Different Voices”, where she highlights masculine and feminine ways or types of being in terms of “voices”.

A man’s voice tends to be focused on autonomy, justice and rights, whereas a woman’s voice tends to be focused on relationships, care and responsibility. In other words, men tend towards agency, and women towards communion (see the qualities of holons).
Men follow rules, women follow connections. Men look, women touch. Men tend towards individualism, women to relationships.

Neither of these are better than the other. For example, if the masculine way goes too far, or goes wrong, we see

not just autonomy, but alienation, not just strength but domination, not just independence, but fear of commitment. And if the feminine way goes too far, instead of being in relationship, she becomes lost in relationship, instead of healthy communion, she becomes dominated by others, and instead of flow, panic, or meltdown.

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth | Leave a Comment »

An Integral framework of psychological development

March 23, 2011 by bobleckridge

In Ken Wilber’s integral map of development, he describes an evolution from egocentric, to ethnocentric, to worldcentric. By this he means an initial focus on “me”, to an identification with others like us (“we”), to an identification with all living things.

He demonstrates how this relates to stages of moral development, from preconventional, where a child is self-absorbed, to conventional, where they learn the rules and norms of culture, and identify with their tribe or group, then onto postconventional, where their sense of identity expands out to include all humanity.

Interestingly he suggests there may be another map which lays nicely onto these – body (a focus on my physical body), mind (expanding to shared relationships and values) and spirit (all sentient beings).

Or even, from a neurological basis, from the reptilian brain stem (centred on me), to the mammalian limbic system (centred on we – the seat of attachment), to the neocortex (able to perceive and identify with the world).

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, personal growth, psychology | Leave a Comment »

Non-pharmacological treatments for depression

March 22, 2011 by bobleckridge

I’m always interested to hear about non-pharmacological treatments for depression (especially as antidepressants are no more effective than placebo for all but the most severely depressed). Here’s a study on depression in the elderly. The researchers compared those who were prescribed antidepressants plus a Tai chi class, to those who received the drugs plus weekly health education classes.

Researchers at UCLA turned to a gentle, Westernized version of tai chi chih, a 2,000-year-old Chinese martial art. When they combined a weekly tai chi exercise class with a standard depression treatment for a group of depressed elderly adults, they found greater improvement in the level of depression — along with improved quality of life, better memory and cognition, and more overall energy — than among a different group in which the standard treatment was paired with a weekly health education class.

It would be interesting to compare the Tai chi class to the antidepressants……

Posted in from the consulting room, health | 5 Comments »

Investing in people

March 22, 2011 by bobleckridge

My place of work is “The Centre for Integrative Care. Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital”. It’s an NHS hospital with a small inpatient unit, a new day service, and a very busy outpatient department. Here’s an interesting fact about our budget – over 90% of our total costs are spent on salaries. That means less than 10% is spent on drugs, equipment, maintenance etc. Over 90% is spent on people. I think that’s amazing and something to be very proud of.

Health care is about people. It’s about people who are seeking help and those who are seeking to help. It’s about care, about compassion, relationships, communication and understanding.

Our particular approaches, our integrative approaches, prioritise the human aspect of health care. I’d be worried if the greatest part of the budget was spent on technology or drugs. (I understand that this is not the same in all departments – some acute medicine and surgery has to be very high tech, and that tech is very expensive – but even where non-people costs are great, I still think it’s important to prioritise the human beings – the patients and the carers)

Posted in from the consulting room, health | Leave a Comment »

Integrative Care

March 22, 2011 by bobleckridge

What is “integrative care”?

This is a term which is being used more widely in recent months and many times it seems to be used interchangeably with “integrated care” (or “integrated medicine”), so what is it? And are they both the same thing?

From what I can see different people use these phrases different ways, so let me just explain what it means where I work. I work in the “Centre for Integrative Care. Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital”. Those are the titles fixed to the front wall of our building, and they’ve been there since this hospital was built just over a decade ago.

What we mean by “integrative care” is an intention to support and develop greater integration in a patient. If we think of health as being a state of wellbeing and good function of the whole person, we can think of such a state having certain qualities. These include all the bits working well together! We call that “coherence”, but sometimes, I think the metaphor of “flow” is a better one – it’s where not only does everything flow well, but the person has an experience of “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi).

If we think of any organism as being a “complex adaptive system” then we can conceptualise an idea of health as a state of optimal self-organisation – that’s maximal integration.

So, “integrative care” is an intention. It doesn’t specify a treatment or procedure. The question is, does this consultation, or treatment, increase integration? Does it, in other words, promote healing? You’d be surprised how little health care is directly intended to promote healing (rather, most biomedical health care is focused on “disease management”)

“Integrated care” on the other hand, tends to refer to the bringing together of “orthodox” and “alternative” treatments. The “Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine” is an example of that type – they seek to blend “mainstream” and “complementary” medicine. Terms such as “alternative”, “complementary”, “mainstream” and “orthodox” however, are social constructs, determined by whoever happens to be in a place of authority in a society at a particular time. “Complementary” treatments may, or may not, promote greater integration.

 

Posted in from the consulting room, health | Leave a Comment »

Science and meaning

March 20, 2011 by bobleckridge

I find something very disturbing about the Brian Cox style of science programme. He usually presents something along the lines of the current “Wonders of the Universe” (his other recent outing being the astronomy week on BBC2 where his irritation factor was doubled by the contributions of his co-presenter Dara O Briain). The subject matter should be right up my street. I’ve had a lifelong passion for the wonders of Nature and the Universe. So, what’s the problem?

Two things – a certain contempt for human knowledge and wisdom prior to the present day which feeds an arrogant implication that everyone in the entire history of mankind was thick as two short planks until our current cohort of scientists who have finally found out the truth about everything. Secondly, an apparent view that only science can reveal truth. (Consider instead Ken Wilber’s Integral model which shows that science is a way of understanding surfaces, but that we need other ways to understand the depths)

Mark Vernon nails the issue perfectly.

At the start of the second programme, Cox is filmed on the banks of a holy river amidst Hindus attending to their dead. He notes that Hinduism, along with other religions, has a story to tell about people’s origins and the meaning of their lives. Only, that story is flawed. He has a deeper story to tell. ‘The path to enlightenment is not to understand our own lives and deaths,’ he intones, ‘but to understand the lives and deaths of the stars.’ He then proceeds to describe how the elements in our bodies are made from the explosive death of stars. Which is true. Only that’s not nearly enough to deliver on the enlightenment promise at the top. That would be like saying the meaning of Michelangelo’s David can be found in the quarry where the marble came from.

Nicely put, Mark! He concludes –

Science of itself does not do the meaning part. Only a human interpretation of the science can achieve that. But to do so, the interpretation must make raids on the language of values and metaphysics. It needs the beauty of colour and the harmonies of music – qualities which, of themselves, again are unknown to physics as physics.

I think it’s a shame to hear scientists trying to present science as a kind of “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” activity. Scientific enquiry and exploration is such a wonderful human enterprise, but it goes seriously off course when it turns into scientism.

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy, science | 1 Comment »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »