Hi Jude,

I read your wonderful, thoughtful article with mixed emotion. First, when I grow up, I want to write as well as you! Second, I am seriously saddened by the creeping loss of both trusting medical relationsh

I grasped his hand and then called for the nurse. I sat there as nurses, therapists­, and aids showed up. A young and older doctor arrived together; both respected practition­ers, but the difference became evident after all attempts to improve the patient’s condition failed. The young doctor indicated there was little to be done and said to the older one, “Well, we’ve done about all there is … I haven’t eaten so I’m grabbing a bite. How about you?” The older doctor shook his head; the younger one left. The older doctor moved to take my place; quietly told me thanks, then sat down. Everyone else, including me, left.

It seems he stayed until the patiend passed, becuase the next day when I asked about the patient, I was told he died in the early morning, and when I looked at the chart I saw that doctor’s signature on the final entry. I told my wife, if I went into that hospital, I sure hope he is my doctor, because he truly cared. His heart was definitely into healing.

I fear the current system is vulnerable to change, neither from the inside nor the outside, and the healing hands type of practition­er will return only after we, as a culture, understand the ultimate benefits possible, and the current system, with its limitation­s, for what it is.

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Hi Jude,

Your point about children tending to "interpret things literally, think magically, and respond viscerally" to heal right away, I observed when my daughter, known then as the "Little Princess", crawled atop a chair and "unintentionally" dove into the edge of a coffee table. Contact point: right eyebrow, which accommodated her explosion of kinetic energy with a half inch gash.

I am an easy-going parent, but watching your kid simulate bungee-jumping sans bungee, even for two feet, heightens your terror alert meter… For those who don't know, small head wounds produce volumes of blood. I remained calm and said, "Wow, I've done that, boom, you hit your head!" then I told her bleeding was a good thing, cleaning the wound and all, and that it would stop soon because of the magic ice. There was more, but the really interesting part occurred at the hospital, she chatted with the nurses and doctors about her situation, never cried (even while they stitched the wound), and the amount of blood was comparatively small. It was a non-event to her.

Did I contribute to her self-healing attitude and actions? Looking back and comparing elements of what I did to your Verbal First Aid… I believe I may have, and if it worked on the "Little Princess" it will work on other kids too.

The best part is that you are modeling beneficial behavior for your kids – how to react to your grandchildren.

Good thoughts!
Lawson M.

That's precisely how it's supposed to work. Words lead to thoughts lead to images lead to chemistry which in turn leads to images and reinforces thoughts about ourselves–how we handle stress, healing etc…

Thanks, Lawson.

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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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Music is a mysterious mathematical process whose elements are part of Infinity. … There is nothing more musical than a sunset.

Debussy, as quoted in The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music (1996)

by Don Michael Randel

In the movie, The Weeping Camel, a pregnant camel lived in a remote Tibetan Village. After a protracted labor, she gave birth to a stillborn. The camel, pained beyond anyone’s expectation, lay down and would not get up. She keened and moaned in grief.

Her owners tried everything they could to prod her back up. They enticed her with foods. They coaxed her with caresses. They pushed her, pulled her, and pleaded with her.

No response except more keening. She barely seemed to sense that anyone was around her. She had become encased in her own loss.

One day, someone in the village thought to call in a local musician. When he arrived at the camel’s pen, he sat and listened. Then he picked up his instrument and imitated her keening. He “sang” with her that way for a while when, slowly, she started to pay attention. He kept playing. In time, she started to eat. And then she stood. Her grief was resolved.

When I heard about this story, I decided to include it in a workshop I was giving on classical homeopathy as a perfect example of vibrational similarity (or the principle of like cures like). I told my husband about it since he’s a musician and engineer and I thought he’d not only understand but be delighted by this mystery of resonance and musical healing.

“So, what do you think?” I asked.

“So she had to have someone to grieve with?” he said.

“Precisely,” I answered.

Then he added, “Well, there’s the blues for ya.”

Musicians and lovers of music have known this since the first instrument struck the first golden note, since the first bird sang the first song, since the first words were written to sing along.

Mystics and prophets have known it, using music to celebrate and call forth the Divine. There’s an old saying: “The scientists climbed the mountain and found the mystics waiting.” I imagine there will be some musicians there as well.

The Science-Music Mountain

The evidence is mounting: Sound of all kind not only reaches us in the obvious emotional sense, but more profoundly at the preconscious, genetic level. Words and music are transformative and can alter cellular function.

One study provided us with our first clear evidence that music affects us at an exceedingly deep level—even before we’re born.

The study was conducted at the University of Leicester’s School of Psychology in England in which babies were exposed (in utero) to music for up to three months before they were born and then not again until they were at least a year old. In it, Dr. Alexandra Lamont found evidence that babies remember and recognize music they hear in the womb. She was further surprised to discover that not only did they recognize it, but they retained the memory of that music for at least a year. Keep in mind this impact was felt in a fetus prior to six months of gestation, at a time, supposedly, that we are not "feeling" anything or "thinking" anything at all. Not only was it felt, it was stored and recalled.

But it’s not only the very young. This resonant relationship with music continues as we age. Research led by Dr. Frederick Tims of Michigan State University (November 1999, Alternative Therapies) showed that patients with Alzheimer's Disease who underwent four weeks of structured music therapy showed significant increases in their level of melatonin, a chemical linked with sleep regulation and immune response.

Yet another study at the Maryland School of Medicine (M. Miller, M.D., 2008) demonstrated that “joyful” music (defined by every individual) improved vascular health, causing the inner lining of blood vessels to dilate and increase blood flow. This same response occurred in the researchers’ prior study on the effects of laughter (2005).

In one of the latest, more pointed studies, several researchers studied the effects of music on hypertension. (Arq Bras Cardiol. 2009 Nov;93(5):534-40. Music therapy effects on the quality of life and the blood pressure of hypertensive patients. Zanini CR, et al.)

They concluded:

“Music therapy has contributed to an improvement on the quality of life and blood pressure control of patients, suggesting that this activity may represent a therapeutic approach to help strengthen the programs of multidisciplinary care of hypertensive patients.”

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(This article is dedicated to R.M. who inspired it. Thank you for reminding me of what we are supposed to be doing.)

For some reason lately I have been seeing quite a number of brand new social workers for supervision, some of whom are still in graduate school. It has been a poignant and privileged rite of passage for me after all these years to be passing on what I’ve learned.

One in particular touched me. She worked some time ago in a hospital emergency department in another state. As you might imagine, she bore witness to countless tragedies and sorrows, the worst of which was one little girl who had been beaten so severely by her mother’s boyfriend that they didn’t know if she would make it.

When she originally came on the ward she had been warned by the other professionals on staff to “watch her boundaries.” That’s a trigger point for social workers who, as a group, have been known to go the extra mile for patients and clients. This has become an “issue” for the profession as it has grown over the years and tried to maintain its status along with psychologists and physicians. What the well-meaning advisers meant was that she would be facing horror and that she needed to “detach” and “not bring it all home with her.” The real meaning: don’t get involved.

Those were their words. People warned me the same way when I started out.

I have been a psychotherapist and crisis counselor for nearly 30 years. I have worked with rape victims, survivors of war, children who had been abducted by drug lords, parents who were abused by their own offspring, addicts who had been lost and left to die on the street, and a full retinue of the mildly neurotic. I have stared into the abyss with friends and colleagues at Ground Zero and had to breathe the acrid smell of death.

But what I have learned is that there are boundaries and there are boundaries. Some should be zealously guarded and some not so much. And whenever I have made a real difference I have absolutely become involved though not in the way you may imagine or some may fear.

I will explain through her story.

As the baby was being treated, she called the proper authorities, as was legally required. She watched as the mother and boyfriend were carted away. And she stood nearby as the baby, broken and battered, moaning in pain, was gently set to rest in a small bed in PICU.

She was told to go home, that she’d had a hard day, and to have a glass of wine. There was nothing more to do.

But something inside her rebelled at that: there’s nothing more you can do.

And, against all the advice of authority, against all the warnings, she went into the PICU and sat with that little girl, breathing gently with her, resting her own fingers carefully in the child's small hands, smoothing the downy hair on the little girl's head, the one place that had gratefully been spared from the brute’s rant. She sat with her for hours until the little one was able to rest. She talked to her. She sang to her. She hoped for her. And then she reluctantly went home.

The case moved on from there and she doesn’t know what happened to her or the family. But there she was in my office, years later, wondering if she’d done something horrible by not letting go, by not listening to the advice of the nurses and administrators who told her to detach, to not take it home. “Did I make a terrible mistake?” she wanted to know.

Through tears as I listened to her and through tears as I write this, I said “No. You did everything right.”

She didn’t understand how she could be right and feel pain that way and disobey the warnings she’d been given. But I did. And I have found that when you do the right thing, there is often no way to sidestep the pain and sorrow that is common to us all. Nor should there be.

Suffering and Professional Boundaries

Social workers’ boundaries are important, but not in the way we might think.

I think there are actually two separate questions in this larger issue and it is a far more complicated topic than people might imagine.

Boundary Question One: How do we face suffering and not get lost in it? How do we help people in pain without absorbing it? How do we have empathy and compassion without becoming the patient? What do we do with suffering if we can't fix it?

Boundary Question Two: How do we treat people in a clinical setting and keep our focus on them rather than using the session or relationship as a way of working out our own lingering issues? How do we stay clear-sighted about the pathology and vigorous in our pursuit of  health and the well-being of our patients?

These are two separate issues and I believe that we often confuse them in clinical practice.

I hope I can answer them both briefly and simultaneously by drawing on my experience and explaining what I think is necessary in any healing relationship.

Over the years, despite accruing more and more “tools” for my clinical tool bag, despite learning more and more techniques and styles, I have actually simplified. One of my mentors in graduate school told me, “Learn them all well so you don't have to use any of them.” I didn’t know what she meant then, but I do now. She also told me, “Don’t for a second think it’s you doing the healing. It’s the love.”

So, the distillation is this:

• Presence and Pacing

• Compassion and empathy

• Seeing someone fully without bias and without projection

• Spiritual context

Presence and Pacing

Presence is paramount. It is foundational. The ability to be fully present in the moment with whomever is there, with whatever situation confronts you, is to be adaptable, available, and genuinely healing. It addresses both Question One and Question Two in that being in the moment (as opposed to the past or the future) allows you to feel fully, be ready to do what is needed, and then move on to the next moment. When you are in the moment truly, you will be more adept clinically. You will know the situation at hand is not about you and that it will not last. You can fully feel and know that when you go home you will be fully present to the joy and life that is there.

This is not easy and it has taken me many years to learn. Being present has a caveat. It means we are there for all of it—the pain, the glory, the defeat, the sorrow, the loss, and the redemption. All of it.

Pacing is a term coined by Milton Erickson, M.D., the greatest hypnotherapist in American history. It  is also a technique I focus on quite a bit when I teach Verbal First Aid to first responders, medical personnel and clinical professionals. It means to "move with" or "walk along." It can include mirroring (to some extent) but I use it mostly to stress the act of being with another person. When a person is in pain and we are hoping to move them to a state of greater comfort, we do what is called pacing and leading. We pace their pain (I can see your wound and your discomfort…) and then lead them, sometimes one tiny step at a time, to healing (…so as I hold your arm and apply this bandage, you can rest more comfortably and stop the bleeding). Without the pacing, there can be no proper leading.

Pacing requires presence. Presence implies pacing. It is an emotional and spiritual partnership that may last anywhere from a few seconds at an accident scene or at an ER or go on for years in a psychotherapy setting.

Compassion & Empathy

This is not the same thing as taking on another’s pain. It is a communion, an experience of commonality, not a sympathy or an absorption. It is also NOT a projection of our own feelings onto them and this is where our skill must be honed and refined over and over again. Sometimes it means feeling what someone else is feeling, but that doesn’t mean it’s ours. It is a subtle difference, but an important one.

Many of the patients that come to social workers have been hurt terribly. We may in fact be the first person in their lives to genuinely feel them. (S.W. Recall: Winnicott’s “The Good Enough Mother.”) This can be in and of itself enormously healing.

What I have come to both believe is that feeling is not the problem. Over-interpreting and/or ignoring feelings is the problem. And that’s where we—as healers—can get into serious logjams.

In fact, it is the social worker’s ability to feel fully (and know what to do with those feelings) that is the hub of all clinical work. If we can’t do it, how do we expect our patients to do it?

Seeing Fully

When I was in school for classical homeopathy, my teacher used to warn us, “If you can’t see your patient, you can’t heal him.” He spent five years talking to us about the power to see.

I think this is true in any clinical setting. We open the door, a patient comes in and sits down. What do we see? What do we want to know? Can we see the hurt? What’s broken or bruised? What still works? How does it still manage to work?  These are the questions we want to ask and have answered.

Seeing someone truly may also entail some detachment, but not in the way it is used colloquially, which is to “not feel” what our patients are feeling. To see the truth means not get beguiled by façade. Most patients will come to us with a well-practiced façade in place, a mask they use to get through their lives—to hide pain, to forestall an accounting, to deceive and manipulate for one thing or another. We have to see past those deceptions, both conscious and unconscious. We have to see past the acquired skills and into the recesses of a person’s heart. We have to observe carefully. They may say they feel fine, but they can’t stop biting their nails. They protest over much about how calm they are, but their feet don’t stop tapping, they sigh repeatedly, or their eyes twitch.

As healers we are observers. Both of ourselves and our patients.

Spiritual Context

I cannot imagine doing this work at this point without two backups: One is the homeopathic philosophy and Materia Medica of Samuel Hahnemann and the second, most important one, is God. Suffering is intolerable (our own or anyone else’s) without some context within which we can hold it. Suffering or pain without meaning in a purposeless, random world is utterly intolerable. When there is meaning and purpose, even the worst pain becomes manageable.

Over the years, my work has become more about serving God (this is not about proselytizing by any means) than adhering to an agency code or a diagnostic manual, more about being present and truly healing than politically correct for the moment, more about truth and love than techniques.

I explained it to that young social worker that while others may not have understood what she did for that baby, God did. And the baby did. I am as sure of that as I am of the nose on my face. That baby heard her soothing voice, felt her calming breath and heartbeat, rested in her loving hands. Is there a better “technique” than that? I don’t think so. Those few hours she spent with that child may have changed the trajectory of her entire healing process.

I no longer aim for detachment, though I respect it. I no longer aim to fix every broken thing that is presented to me, though I very much want to alleviate suffering and disease. I no longer aim solely for technical skill, though I love learning.

What I am for is this: I aim to be present. I aim to see the truth. I aim to serve. Doing this work for so many years has required that I become more like a tube than a vessel. I do not “hold” other people’s pain, but I allow it flow through me and then up to God, Who can do with it what must be done, whatever that is so that peace and health and love are restored.

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http://www.jems.com/news_and_articles/columns/Acosta/

the_science_of_self_healing.

html;jsessionid=B4F84463578C979DD36CA9AD74B1A045

Post-script:  There's a great study that was done in 2005 at the University of Michigan on the placebo effect (Journal of Neuroscience, August 23, 2005  http://www.med.umich.edu/opm/newspage/2005/placebo.htm)  and pain. We've always known that placebos worked…which is why they're always ruled out in double-blind studies. What we didn't know is how…what architecture responds and is responsible for the pain relief. Their study pointed to the specific brain sites that were activated by imagery alone and simultaneously relieved pain.  

This is one more pearl of evidence for Verbal First Aid.

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Traditional or fundamental Christians have had issues with hypnosis before. Verbal First Aid is a form of hypnotic communication. Can they be true to their faith and use Verbal First Aid?

I believe Christians can use Verbal First Aid to benefit their own health and the health of their loved ones and stay faithful to scripture and spirit.

One of Christianity’s great fears about hypnosis as they've understood it through television and mass media is that it is used by malevolent people to induce a moral laxity and make the prohibited permissible.

The truth, however, is that clinical hypnosis cannot make anyone do anything that would undermine their moral or ethical resolve.

There's a simple and true story to demonstrate this:

One day Dr. Erickson, the greatest psychiatrist and hypnotherapist of the last century,  went to his secretary and told her he was tired and wanted to rest. If anyone called, he told her, she was to say that he was out of the office. She agreed to do this for him. A few days later he put her in a hypnotic trance and then asked her the same thing: to tell people he was out of the office when he was in fact taking a break. While still in a formally induced trance, she refused outright. “Why?” he wanted to know.

"Because,” she said, “it would be a lie.”

Ironically, in hypnosis she had a stronger moral resolve than in her normal waking state.

Hypnosis is not “brainwashing" even though it's been portrayed that way. Verbal First Aid–as a form of hypnotic communication in acute situations–is similarly not a form of "mind control."

Here is the critical difference between the way Christians have been taught to see hypnotherapy and its clinical reality in the hands of ethical practitioners:
Hypnosis only utilizes a state of consciousness that is already natural and normal. Trance is not something that is artificially induced in a person. It is simply a state of awareness in which we are more focused on an internal process (breathing, thoughts) and most importantly it is something all of us move in and out of all day.

This normal shift of awareness is even more common when we are frightened, hurt, or ill, which is why Verbal First Aid works so well to help stop bleeding, reduce an inflammatory response, and lower blood pressure. We can see it even more dramatically when it is used with children who enter fairly easily and frequently into “trance."

How Verbal First Aid Works in Alliance with Faith and the Faithful

If the definitions of trance as clinicians use it are accurate (and I believe they are) and the dangers are real as Christians see them (and I believe they certainly can be), how can the healing use of imagery work together with the faithful so that as Jesus said in John 10:10, “I am come that they may have life and have it more abundantly.”

In the beginning was the word.

That words are powerful is a familiar concept to those who read the Bible.

Words have a prominent position in the Bible from the third sentence: And GOD SAID LET THERE BE LIGHT. He did not create with His “hands”. He spoke—“By the word of the Lord were the heavens made (Ps. 33).” To speak is to WILL into existence. What we say and how we say it is a co-creative act. What we say hangs somewhere between heaven and earth.

Words matter. The mystics have always known this. Only now is science catching up.

Why? Because they create images in the mind of the person to whom we are speaking. Those images and the thoughts that flow with them generate cascades of chemistry that dictate not only how we feel emotionally, but how fast or slow our hearts beat, how high our blood pressure goes, how profoundly we feel the pain of an injury, even the way our livers function.

We all use words all the time. And they have the power to help or to harm. Isn’t it our obligation to make what we say as healing as possible?

The therapeutic use of words (psychotherapy/hypnosis) is no different than a good conversation, a sermon, a lecture, a television show or a good book. It is the use of words to move us to see things in a different way, to uplift and help us. When used in the right way with a proper intention, those words can help us heal.

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The Art of Healing

Healing, then, is more than a technique. It is an art that utilizes every resource a person brings to bear—will, patience, strength, attitude as well as imagination.

Imagining Healing

In World War II, when medics and nurses on the battlefield were left without morphine or other painkillers, they often resorted to a more subtle form of pain relief for soldiers who were suffering: suggestion. They gave them saline injections but told them with great authority that what they were receiving was the most potent form of morphine.

What happened was what they prayed for: relief. There were no drugs administered and no “medical” reasons for the change in the soldiers’ perceptions. None, that is, but the suggestion that was given to them.

Placebo effects are so potent that they are regularly included and ruled out in pharmaceutical trials. According to John Cloud (“How a Sugar Pill Can Heal (or Hurt) You,” Time, November 2, 2009), “Scientists are coming to understand the placebo response as a cascade of neural reactions that not only provide psychological relief but also play a physiological role in block stress hormones that damage the body.”

Imagining relief can be as helpful as its drug-store counterpart—without all the “side-effects.”

This ability to receive healing suggestion and translate it into a healing response at the most basic physiological level is innate to all human beings. Naturally, in some it is greater than others.

But in children, it is the greatest of all.

Children’s Magical Lives

Children are born open. To them everything is new and everything truly is possible until either experience or tutelage makes them see otherwise. Children imagine monsters, wide-eyed fairies, flying pigs and sled-pulling, night-riding reindeer; they see connections and meaning where well-conditioned and socialized adults only see concrete effects and numbers.

This is especially true of pre-school children and it is called “magical thinking” by psychologists. In a very young child’s view, rain falls from the sky because the sky is sad. To that small child, it is entirely plausible. It is just as plausible that the sky is crying because of something he said or did. While it is considered a phase of development out of which they are expected to grow, it points to a very important truth: children are not little adults. They have a way of viewing the world that is quite different than our linear, logical, and limited way.

For this reason, Verbal First Aid and therapeutic suggestion are particularly effective with children. Logic and expectation are not yet the barriers they become for adults and it is easier to reach them with healing suggestion when they need it most.

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My father and I are very different sorts of healers. He is an old-school internist, graduate of New York University Medical School, a devoted scholar and follower of the allopathic method. I am a product of a very different school. Instead of going for my M.D. as he so dearly wished, I became a psychotherapist with a specialization in trauma treatment, anxiety disorders, NLP, and hypnosis. “Why don’t you do some real medicine for a change? If you’re going to listen to people all day long, why not become a psychiatrist?”

At the time it seemed clear to me that he not only couldn’t but wouldn’t even try to fathom my vision of the human being as a spiritual and emotional entity, which naturally fueled my rebellion. So I took it further. Up to that point our work had overlapped—we at least both understood drug therapies and could talk about the new SSRI’s. We went to pharmaceutical conferences together. We could have dinner and tell the tale of the latest injustice in the growing takeover of medicine by the insurance companies. But when I veered off to study classical homeopathy, our professional paths diverged. At least for a while.

I questioned (and often argued passionately against) his methods, but that is not to say that I ever questioned his dedication to the purpose or art of medicine. Some of my oldest memories of him are when he had to leave on a house-call in the middle of the night. The phone would ring and I would hear my mother’s muffled voice say, “It’s your service.” Next would be the opening and closing of closet doors, the sound of his leather bag clicking shut and finally his car starting—a sound as lonesome in a new suburban neighborhood as the howl of a lone coyote in the desert.

I knew he loved the science of medicine, too. But where he talked about the systemic action of a drug, I now talked about the energetic action of a remedy. He bemoaned the loss of my intellect to the field of “real medicine” and I grieved his rigidity even in the face of some astonishing clinical evidence.

So, for a long time—nearly twenty years—we had to agree to disagree. I would occasionally bring a case to him, half to seek camaraderie and half to prove to him that Samuel Hahnemann’s method worked, but we would wind up in the same old Ferris wheel with one of us strapped in waiting at the top and the other strapped in on the bottom until the wheel moved again.

Recently, we had a conversation that threw new light onto this philosophical and personal dichotomy. My eldest dog, Angie, is dying—slowly. She has bilateral cardiomyopathy and metastasized carcinoma, not to mention spinal arthritis and dysplasia. She has incredibly good days for a dog with such a morbid diagnosis, which made the decision we felt was inevitable unbearably painful. There wasn’t a night my husband and I didn’t agonize about it.

I called him and asked him outright (something I hadn’t done since I was quite little) what to do. “She has trouble breathing. There are tumors in her lungs. Her heart is so big it’s pressing up against her trachea and she has trouble walking. The other day she fell into her own feces.”

“That’s the way it goes with mets.”

His observation was terse but not without compassion. I knew he’d seen it more times than he cared to recall. His own father had died of stomach cancer, his sister of ovarian cancer, his aunt of lung cancer.

“I don’t know what to do, because some days she trots like a happy puppy and she wants belly rubs and she eats like there’s no tomorrow.”

“She still wants to eat?”

“Yeah.”

”She still wants to walk? Even if she falls?”

“Yeah. It’s just so sad when she can’t.”

“She’s still breathing even if it’s a little labored. It’s not like she’s in anything near arrest, is she?”

“No. She’s able to sleep calmly. I gave her Arsenicum 10M and she seems to be rallying, she’s not breathing so hard anymore and she’s not pacing all over the place.”

“You gave her arsenic???” He seemed shocked and worried.

“The Arsenicum? No, dad, don’t worry. It’s not molecular arsenic. It’s a remedy. It’s a high potency and they say if you give it and they’re close to death it facilitates the transition. If they’re not close to death and the vital force is strong enough, they rally and can be comforted. It seems to be helping.”

For the first time he didn’t argue or raise any philosophical gavels. “That’s good. Then, it’s not your hands anymore.”

I asked him what he meant because all I wanted to know was whether we should help her die or not. I moaned about the “signs” and which would tell me it was time. He told me it’s not up to the physician to help anyone die, that it wasn’t our job. Our job was to minister to the sick. Period. He had included me in “our” job. It was the first time he had done that or acknowledged my work as healing.

And in a voice that made me wonder who I’d been talking to for the 50 years prior to that moment, he said: “Leave the big things to God. We don’t help where we’re not needed and we don’t mess with the Mysteries. We receive life, care for it and we release it when it’s called back.”

It dawned on me after 30 years of arguments, debates, and disagreements that perhaps we agreed on the most important things after all.

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