After better than a quarter of a century of having an addiction to “doing something that matters”, and focusing primarily on patients with severe and chronic illness within the Medical Industrial Complex, about a year ago I was given the opportunity to switch gears. The new venture was in Integrative Medicine, which has been practiced in Europe and Asia for years. For all of you who are familiar with “holistic” care, natural health care, alternative health care and so forth, you get the idea. For those of you who go to your health professional, wait forty-five minutes, enjoy a ten minute appointment consisting of a prescription for antibiotics and a good-natured, “Get some rest!” and are perfectly happy with this, let me explain.
Many people have had rather troubling reactions to prescription medications, and prefer plant-based preparations, with the assumption that there will be fewer side effects. This may or may not be true, of course, but common sense does suggest that most of the herbal compounds currently available on the market may, in general, be safer. For example, digitalis is derived from foxglove, which grows as a volunteer in shady spots where I live. While foxglove is a beautiful wildflower that is commonly seen and can certainly kill you, it is not found on the shelves of your friendly health food store. The toxic herbals aren’t. But even with just the benign ones for sale, there are oodles of herbal remedies out now, so many that it’s baffling to most people exactly what to buy. It’s important, though, to know that none of them are as blatantly poisonous as some prescription compounds. Lay people sense this. And it’s my job to know appropriate use. So one of the things we do in Integrative Medicine is to make it our business to know how herbals and pharmaceuticals interact, and when to use either.
Another thing we emphasize in Integrative Medicine is prevention. We’re very interested in preventing illness and disease, instead of waiting for them to happen. I’ve found that many of our patients are not really sick in the classic sense, but they don’t feel their best either, so they come in for an evaluation. This is good. This is preventative. And I’ve been seeing something interesting here. It has been during these evaluations, these getting-to know-you sessions, that I’ve been seeing something lately in my patients. People want to escape.
Now this may seem obvious to you, but it thoroughly surprises me. It’s another example of the Law of Constant Amazement. People want to be somewhere else. They want to leave their minds, change their jobs, get a new car, change their relationship, get on an airplane and go to another place, live someone else’s life. There is even a car called the Escape.
Maybe it’s a Baby Boomer thing. Maybe it’s Iraq and the Middle East, and W and gas prices. Maybe it’s menopause or andropause or both, but I’ve never experienced so much “there is better than here” before. My patients are truly suffering, even if they’re not suffering from diabetes or cancer or heart disease. Many of them are well-fed, well-educated, white people who are experiencing a dis-ease of the soul.
I’ve got to tell you that there is nothing in the medical literature that supports that a common symptom of Boomeritis (icon Ken Wilbur’s term) is longing. Yet it seems so common, and it doesn’t seem to matter exactly what specifically is going on in people’s lives. Even the “happy” people are suffering from it. I have a suspicion about the cause of it, though, because I’m a Boomer like most of my patients.
You get to a certain age where, unless you’re really asleep, you know that you don’t have that much time left. You look at your parents, if they’re still alive, and you get that they can no longer parent you, because they are struggling with just being here. And you know that they are you in twenty years, if you’re lucky. And you think to yourself: I’ve got to live before I die. I’ve got a few years left before I’m old, sick, or demented, and I must make the most of it. How can I do that?
So you plan your trip to India, leave your husband (only later do you find that THAT didn’t make your life better), move to Maui (that REALLY doesn’t make your life better), take bioidentical hormones, change jobs, etc. Because if you don’t, you’ll get depressed just realizing that you’re really not utilizing your precious time.
So, even the worried well teach me, and remind me. Sometimes, I go home at night, have a glass of wine and prepare a delicious meal, and languidly reflect on it all. Suffering is ubiquitous. Change is constant. Live well, be happy, and appreciate living in this crazy consumer society where we have casinos, the Sleep Number Bed, and spare change. We’re at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy, and we either wake up and love the altitude, or dizzily lose footing, fall off, and try to clamor up again.
The thing I really like about my new practice is that our patients actually ponder issues, and rarely want drugs to help them get through the angst. They need time to talk about it, and sometimes they might benefit from an herb or supplement, or a referral for yoga, acupuncture, hypnotherapy, or similar treatment. They understand that life is a mystery that cannot be easily solved. So they deal with it the best they can, and sometimes that involves a little fantasizing about change. And sometimes, they just need to know that someone seems to care.
It bothers me to think that if some of these patients had gone to a traditional health practice, none of this would have entered the clinical picture. It would have just been symptoms. Symptoms and drugs to cure the symptoms. Not the whole person being looked at, and evaluated. And, incidentally, not the whole person seeing me as another whole person. This is important, too.
Often, it is the patient who comforts me. Like the lady I saw the other day who told me how delighted she was that her life had turned out to be nothing that she had imagined, but how looking back, she wouldn’t change a thing. Since then, when I want to escape, I think of her. She reminds me to stay put just to see how it turns out. It is what is unexpected and surprising that creates the healing.
My patients need to tell their story. After they tell it, they need space to allow their personal keys to healing to arise. The key may be when the bacterial count in their body is diminished through antibiotics. It may be when an ingested plant binds cholesterol in their gut. Or it may be during a massage, after a walk in nature, or when they go back and read what they journalled when they were writing down their yearning.
It may be that all of that is the same — and it is — for me. I’m not the super Doctor giving prescriptions from somewhere up on high. I’m down in the trenches with everyone else, and you know what? I like the view from here.