Words are Medicine

About a year ago I heard a sermon about two brothers, Cosmas and Damian, both of whom were doctors.  Trained in Syria they practiced as physicians in the seaport Ægea, now Ayash, on the Gulf of Iskandrun in Cilica.

Through their work, they attained great status as healers. They were revered as the “anargyroi,” the Unmercenary physician,s because they decided to stop charging for their services and to offer the gift of healing purely out of their devotion to God.

They never starved or lacked for anything, although they were brutally tortured and beheaded in 287AD   during the persecution under Diocletian for not recanting their beliefs.

After I heard their story–despite their unfortunate ending–I made a decision about my practice as a holistic psychotherapist. From that point on, I would slide my fee scale and that if someone truly wanted help and I could honestly help them, I would. Period. No forms. No hidden agendas. God gave me the tools. I give them to you.

This is not easy in a world where standards of care are generated by committees composed of people from pharmaceutical conglomerates and insurance companies. Or where doctors get sued for malpractice when diabetics won't stop drinking alcohol. The tort laws in NM have scared most medical practitioners to Texas.

When I was being interviewed and had a site visit conducted by NM medicaid, in order to become a provider I had to post exit signs over what were clearly doors AND have a map of my house drawn according to scale and post it where patients could see it. It had to have a "YOU ARE HERE" mark and show them the way out.

Mind you, my private office is in my home and the office has a separate entrance. There's no mistaking it.

At one point in the interview, the insurance rep was so adamant about it I had to ask, "If there's a fire, do you think I'm going to run out and leave my patient here?" He, by the way, was sitting right next to the door!

He just shrugged, "Those are the rules."

I shrugged, too, and decided after two months that I wanted the exit signs off my walls and that I would not leave my patients to burn.

So, now to a more pointed story of modern medicine under the thumb of big business:

Someone I know who was injured on the job was sent by the Worker’s Compensation insurance underwriter to one of their approved rehabilitation physicians.

The patient was examined and at first it revealed nothing, so they said it was a muscle injury and pushed pain killers, particularly vicodin, which is a known hazard  (tendency for addiction, narcotic bowel syndrome, irritability and mood disturbance, motor function disturbance and so on and so forth). The patient  refused all of their suggestions but took a bottle of ibuprofen.

Finally, after much complaining and only after the 90 days for a lawsuit had passed, the insurance company begrudgingly ordered an MRI which found several bulging discs including an impinged S1. They also found moderate to severe neuropathy along one leg, hip and buttock.

Nothing worked to help except one thing: physical therapy. So what did the modern doctors do?

They discontinued treatment, declared the patient MMI (at “maximum medical improvement”) and told him he really should "reconsider the vicodin because it was never going to get better." He was told he was permanently disabled.

The patient couldn't believe what he'd heard. They were taking away the only treatment that had helped? “But that was the only thing that worked. How can you do this?”

“Yeah,” the doctor said, “but you had your 8 weeks.”

“But you’re a DOCTOR!” the patient leaned forward, raising his voice.

“I know. But that’s the system."

The patient was furious. He pointed his finger, “No. YOU’RE the system.”

The doctor went on to earn a lot of money and live very comfortably.  So far he has not been beheaded.

For the rest of this article on the choices involved in becoming a healer, on the amazing healers I have known, and what insurance companies have done to the practice of medicine, please take just a short click to: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Modern-Medicine-Healing-o-by-Judith-Acosta-100715-534.html. It's worth the trip. We have some serious thinking to do about medicine and what we expect from our physicians. And, practitioners: we have some serious, serious work ahead of us if we're going to get back to the real business of healing.

In one of my talks on Verbal First Aid™, I make a point of bringing up the stethoscope as one of the inventions that truly changed medicine and the art of healing. Because where once the physician had to lay his or her ear on the patient’s chest to hear the heart beating, now there was over a foot of distance between them. We need to rethink this.

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