Healing People Not Patients

A bold account of the development of human consciousness and spirituality over the ages and an examination of the dynamic global transformation of attitudes about healing. For more than fifteen years, Caroline Myss has studied why some people heal, while others do not. In her previous book, Anatomy of the Spirit, Dr. Myss illuminated the hidden interactions of belief and body, soul and cell to show how, as she inimitably puts it, "your biography becomes your biology." In Why People Don't Heal and How They Can, she builds on her earlier teachings of the seven different energy centers of the body to provide a vital self-healing program for physical and spiritual disorders. With her characteristic no-nonsense style and high-voltage storytelling, she exposes and explodes the five myths about healing, explains the cultural and individual contexts in which people become physically and spiritually ill and invested in "woundology," and teaches new methods of working with the challenges that the seven energy centers embody. To help you get and stay on the path to wellness, Dr. Myss provides rituals and prayers for gaining a symbolic perspective on your life issues; for bolstering your personal power; and for connecting with a universal divine energy. Dr. Myss's breakthrough views on energy medicine and her active approach to healing life issues and physical illness will help you overcome the mental blocks that keep you from becoming well.

Medical practice and research are inconceivable today without electronic computing and communication tools. Digital machines do many tasks orders-of-magnitude better, faster and more accurately than humans. Still, there are functions critical to the healthcare endeavor that people do much better than machines, things like: understanding and using natural language; perceiving what is unexpressed; taking into account values, culture, ethics, and human relationships; touching and healing. For the foreseeable future, the "smartest" computers will be no match for human beings when it comes to performing these most anthropic functions. American healthcare is at a critical juncture. Providers and patients are increasingly frustrated by degradation of the human relationships that lie at the core of the medical practice. Technologies, such as the computerized medical record, get much of the blame for intrusion into the patient-provider relationship. However, it is not technology itself that is to blame. The fault lies with how systems are conceived, designed, and deployed. This book analyzes how to organize the work of healthcare in a way that uses machines to do what they do best, thereby freeing humans to do what we do best. Smart use of electronic technology is crucial to the success of any bid to fulfill the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s triple aim to make healthcare more effective, efficient, and humane.

Few experiences stir the emotions and throw a person into crisis as illness does. If affects not only the body but also the spirit and soul. Illness is about life and death, fear and hope, love and conflict, spirit and body. And yet, the healthcare system is not structured around these considerations—our doctors and other medical professionals are not trained to deal with the whole person. Care of the Soul In Medicine is Moore’s manifesto about the future of healthcare. In this new vision of care, Moore speaks to the importance of healing a person rather than simply treating a body. He gives advice to both healthcare providers and patients for maintaining dignity and humanity. He provides spiritual guidance for dealing with feelings of mortality and threat, encouraging patients to not only take an active part in healing but also to view illness as a positive passage to new awareness. While we don’t fully understand the extent to which healing depends on attitude; it has been shown that healing needs to focus on more than the body. The future of medicine is not only in new technical developments and research discoveries; it is also in appreciating the state of soul and spirit in illness.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Shift comes a frank look at navigating the world of healthcare as a cancer nurse becomes a patient and experiences the system from the other side.​ Despite her training and years of experience as an oncology and hospice nurse, Brown finds it difficult to navigate the medical maze from the other side of the bed. Why is she so often left in the dark about procedures and treatments? Why is she expected to research her own best treatment options? Why is there so much red tape? At times she’s mad at herself for not speaking up and asking for what she needs but knows that being a “difficult” patient could mean she gets worse care. Of the almost four million women in this country living with breast cancer, many have had, like Brown, a treatable form of the disease. Both unnerving and extremely relatable, her experience shows us how our for-profit health care industry “cures” us but at the same time leaves so many of us feeling alienated and uncared for. As she did so brilliantly in her New York Times bestseller, The Shift, Brown relays the unforgettable details of her daily life—the needles, the chemo drugs, the rubber gloves, the bureaucratic frustrations—but this time from her new perch as a patient, looking back at some of her own cases and considering what she didn’t know then about the warping effects of fear and the healing virtues of compassion. “People failed me when I was a patient and I failed patients when working as a nurse. I see that now,” she writes. Healing is must-read for all of us who have tried to find healing through our health-care system.

"Wonderful... Physicans would do well to learn this most important lesson about caring for patients." —The New York Times Book Review Over the years that Victoria Sweet has been a physician, “healthcare” has replaced medicine, “providers” look at their laptops more than at their patients, and costs keep soaring, all in the ruthless pursuit of efficiency. Yet the remedy that economists and policy makers continue to miss is also miraculously simple. Good medicine takes more than amazing technology; it takes time—time to respond to bodies as well as data, time to arrive at the right diagnosis and the right treatment. Sweet knows this because she has learned and lived it over the course of her remarkable career. Here she relates unforgettable stories of the teachers, doctors, nurses, and patients through whom she discovered the practice of Slow Medicine, in which she has been both pioneer and inspiration. Medicine, she helps us to see, is a craft and an art as well as a science. It is relational, personal, even spiritual. To do it well requires a hard-won wisdom that no algorithm can replace—that brings together “fast” and “slow” in a truly effective, efficient, sustainable, and humane way of healing.

This engaging and highly readable book, based on the author's professional experience in treating those who suffer from the devastating effects of emotional trauma, offers hope for those who suffer and those who care about them. Dr. McGraw describes how trauma affects the brain and, therefore, one's ability to carry out "good advice"; explains the subtle and largely hidden processes of attunement and attachment that take place between parents and children, examining their impact on all future relationships; tells what is needed for healing to occur; discusses the profound health benefits of spirituality and a relationship with God in assisting and accelerating the healing process; and suggests how members of the helping professions can begin to tap the deepest, most authentic parts of themselves to touch the hearts of those they seek to help.

Presents evidence from medical journals that beliefs, thoughts, and feelings can cure the body and shows readers how to apply this knowledge in their own lives. -- provided by publisher.