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.

The other day a patient told a story of how she got her first kitten. It wasn’t anything like what one might expect—found a litter in the alley behind the house, or a stray wound up on their porch. Her family doctor was over for dinner with his wife and he had found a kitten.

“Your doctor came over for dinner?” I asked.

“Yeah, he always did. He was like part of our family,” she sat back.

“He was your doctor and your parents’ doctor?” I asked stupidly.

“Yeah, why?”

The last time I heard about a doctor visiting a patient’s house to celebrate a socialoccasion was the last time I watched Little House on the Prairie.

When I went to graduate school and in every agency I’ve worked since, those boundary crossings were utterly verboten. I know of one social worker (who’s really an administrator, not a therapist) who won’t even acknowledge a patient in public unless the patient comes up to him first.

There are rules and regulations about these things now, privacy laws and confidentiality acts that can put a therapist or doctor in jail for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

So, the caution is understandable.
But it’s also lamentable.

Because this past week I left the cloister and went to see a client graduate.  She invited me to do so and there was no doubt it meant the world to her. In my mind and heart it was the healing and loving thing to do. I could have said no, that the regulations strictly interpreted limit our interaction to the office setting and that leaving those four walls could pollute the therapeutic relationship. But I didn't. I went. And we both wept.

To be fair, there are some good reasons for people being careful about leaving a traditional and "safe" setting. Many “healers” have taken terrible advantage of people by forcing unprofessional relationships on them with highly improper dynamics. And I don’t just mean sexual ones. I mean ones in which the therapist is the needy one. And people like that sincerely do need lines drawn around them that read: “so far and no farther.” But I suspect that we may have gone too far in our tentativeness and become fearful. In so doing we may be losing something truly precious—the healing relationship.

My father is a doctor. He no longer practices, but he is and always will be a doctor. When I was growing up it was not unexpected for the phone to ring and it would be his answering service.  I distinctly remember more than a couple of occasions when the call came in the wee hours of the morning and he picked up his leather medical bag (just like in the Jimmy Stewart movies) and left the house not to return until 4 or 5 in the morning.

In fact, one of our family’s closest friends—Aunt Irene and Uncle Harry, we called them—were his patients.  It was winter when I was an infant and Harry had contracted a bad flu which took a turn for the worse one night. They called in, my father went to their apartment on Decatur Avenue in the Bronx, where he sat with Harry as Irene paced until the fever broke. He sat there all night. Harry lived. Irene never stopped pacing, but she was eternally grateful and thought my father walked on water.

First they came to major family events—birthdays, funerals, the like. But then they started coming over just to come over. He still took care of them medically. And they lived into their 90’s, hale and happy.

It never occurred to anyone in my family–immediate or extended–that there was anything untoward or unethical about it. In fact, if that question had even been raised, they would have heard a resounding “Are you CRAZY?” from all of us.

I think the patient who got her first cat from her family internist would have said the same.

Doctors, therapists, priests, rabbis, pastors—healers and helpers of all sorts—used to be part of the community and a part of the lives of the people whom they served. Doctors didn’t have to find different churches to attend because one of the congregants came to see them for a yeast infection. It was confidential, the relationship was sacred, yes. But there was other life to live, too. And people did.

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.

In our zealousness and fear, we have substituted machines for people and strict rules for sensible relationships. We have literally taken the heart out of healing. I think that is something we cannot afford to do.

Psychology and fundamentalism at best have been polite opponents. In recent history, say the last 50 years, this opposition has become vigorous and often less than polite. Many churches, such as Calvary, completely eschew all mental health practitioners (whether social workers, psychiatrists or counselors) and staunchly maintain that all healing comes directly from God or prayer and that all you need in order to develop and maintain a robust mental health may be found in Scripture or a prayer session.

This rejection of psychotherapy may have been a reaction to the “I’m okay, you’re okay” generation of therapists who did very little for most people except to allay the anxieties of narcissists and sociopaths by telling them “if it feels good, it is good.”  In the eyes of both Orthodox Jews and Christians, the field of humanistic psychology took the whole program of self-improvement one giant step too far, putting man in the center of the universe, particularly his own.

Their objections were not wrong. And I say this as a holistic psychotherapist with almost 25 years of experience in the field.

I have seen far too many well-meaning therapists do little more for their patients than make them feel better about being sick. They are loath to challenge or confront negative behavior or unhealthy thinking because they fear being seen as judgmental. As a result of their tentative relationships with the truth, they fail in their relationships with their patients. They do not see what needs to be healed so the patient is left unhealed. This is truly a disservice to the patient because what it ultimately does is feed the pathology and starve the essence of the person.

I think all good and true healing flows from the same Source which means that there can be an alliance—and an important one—between the Biblical and Mental Health communities.

But only if we have an understanding of our terms and are actually seeking the same results.

(More on this topic to come.)

She was 15 and  had been sick for a year. Homeopathy had kept her miraculously vital and calm throughout that time even though she had been diagnosed with both bilateral cardiomyopathy and metastasized carcinoma. I knew it was coming. I thought I was prepared. In these last few weeks as I had to help lift her up to go outside so she could urinate, I tried to tell myself–as so many others were telling me–that when the time came I would be relieved. I would know it was the right time and it would be okay.

I know they meant well, truly. But I was not relieved. And it did not feel right. It was not okay.

When the doctors gave me the news more than a year ago, I made a committment to myself and to her that I would see her through it all. I would minister to her while she was here and when it was time for her to die, I would be fully present. It was the least I could do. She had been my truly faithful companion for more than 11 years since I'd rescued her. She was my first dog, my mentor, and my trusted  guardian. So when the time came I did what I promised I would do. I held her and I watched her die.

In the back of my mind I held out hope that the people who'd talked to me about the "naturalness" of death were right. I had prayed for comfort in the way they had promised. But I didn't feel it at all. I know that when I let go of her body, limp and without any of the fight she had in life, the Angie I loved and trusted and trained and struggled with for all those years was simply not there anymore.

As I held her and felt her chin go limp against my thigh, the strangest though popped into my mind: I'd heard people speak of dead weight before, but she seemed terribly light, nearly weightless to me as if the greatest part of her, her ballast, had departed with her last heartbeat. She–Angie–was not there anymore. Just a brief moment ago she had been there. But then she wasn't.  It was stunning. And I do not understand it. I find that no matter what I do or how I appeal to reason and the modern, scientific schema I cannot understand that disappearance. Where is she? Where did she go? She was just here. The first night I paced the house like a child as I whined a mantra, "I want my dog back."

It must sound awfully naive for a therapist and homeopath to be so surprised by death. I have seen death before, though luckily not very much. But I don't think the exposure has helped me understand or accept it much better any more than the platitudes about the cycle of life have helped to ease the pain.

When I was a very young psychotherapist, not two weeks out of graduate school, I worked at a hospital in New Rochelle on the med/surg unit. There were 30 some-odd beds and all of them were filled all the time with very sick people. I was only there for two months, but I watched several people get covered in sheets and rolled away by stretcher.  It was a hospital. I was saddened by it, but I expected it.

There was one woman who was different. She never had a visitor, not a family member or a friend. She was a quiet person with short, brown hair who always asked for books to read. Most people got in and out of the unit within a week or so. But she was in her room a long time, always propped up in bed, never in a chair or walking around. She was not assigned to my caseload, but I spent time with her anyway. She seemed so lonely. She didn't talk much when I visited because she found it difficult to breath, but she seemed to like it when I read to her or talked to her about the news, offering her some connection back to the world outside the window.

Once when I sat by her, she lifted her fingers straight up, though her arm remained flat on the bed. Because she was suffering with terminal lung cancer,  I thought she was restless or uncomfortable and offered to move her pillows or adjust her bedding. She shook her head until I realized she just wanted me to hold her hand.

It only took a few days from the time I first held her hand to the last time. Her spiral downward was quick, as if she could leave now that she had company. Or maybe she needed a witness. I don't know. I never really got to know her. But I came to care about her and never forgot her. I still think about the changes in her breathing as her time approached, how the muscles in her hand would occasionally contract as if to make sure I was still there, how thin she looked but how firmly her jaw was set as she finally let go.  I stayed with her till the end but I can't even remember her name. In my mind now, she was more than any name or any identity that could have ever been assigned to her.

Mostly what I remember now is what I didn't understand and what I still don't.

Peter Kreeft, one of the brightest and best when it comes to writing about the great mysteries, said, "We are shocked at the irreversibility of death although it is utterly familiar, utterly universal, utterly natural. We find the natural unnatural. Why? Let us be shocked at our shock…'This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations.'"

I AM shocked. I am stunned by its finality, its emptiness, its contrariness–not only to everything my senses can fathom but to what my heart holds truest, that He has "put eternity" in us and no matter how we try to rationalize, empiricize, or explain it away with, "well, that's the cycle of life," it never, ever feels right. And I, like Kreeft and many others, believe that it can't feel right because that is not what our souls–or our hearts–were created for. There is something in us, or to be more precise, we are made of something which is not temporal, which does not bow its head in acceptance to the last breath, which does not feel at home in the mortal, time-bound world and never will.

It is why, no matter how many times I hear from people "it's the way of nature", it will never feel natural to me. And if Kreeft is right, then that gives me the most hope of all.

"Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned."  (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Her daughter had been expelled from school and she was in danger of losing custody to her ex-husband. Her anxiety was bulging out from her sides. She was terrified.

Having both suffered from asthma (years ago) and worked with asthmatic patients for quite some time, it has been my clinical observation that it is a "poetic" pathology, often expressing a grief, a panic, or a worry that has not been expressed in other, more productive ways. Even in cases where there is a clear physical etiology (smoke inhalation, chemical burns, and the like), it may be ameliorated by understanding the way the human organism works and the power of both imagery and emotions.

The research has shown that Verbal First Aid. techniques are being used successfully with children who suffer from asthma.  In one pediatric study measuring the effects of guided imagery and hypnosis the results were dramatic: 80% of the children had improvement that was measurable, none of the children’s symptoms worsened, and, best of all, some patient’s symptoms resolved after one hypnosis session (Anbar, 2002). 

In an article entitled “Applying hypnosis in a preschool family asthma education program: uses of storytelling, imagery and relaxation,” author D.P. Kohen found that combining those modalities helped the children both physically (they needed fewer office visits) and emotionally (with greater self-confidence as marked by both the parents and the children).

Helping an asthma patient was the experience that changed one paramedic's way of thinking after I taught Verbal First Aid to his team in NY. He used the techniques of pacing and leading, utilizing both imagery and the rhythm of his own breath to calm the patient. "By the time she was at the hospital," he recalled later, "she was fine. It was amazing."