Believing
There was a time I considered alternatives to the sort of medicine I’d chosen to practice, the “mainstream” sort. Back then I had many friends who were into “alternative health”—crystals, meditation, auras, herbalism, visualization, living a good spiritual life. A popular millennial belief was that Jesus could heal you, or conversely that you got sick because you were spiritually impure. Your disease happened because of the dis-ease in your spirit.
One of my least favorite notions also was prevalent: “Illness is a gift.” Having gotten some bad ties and sweaters at Christmas, I know not all gifts are things we wish to keep.
Is belief illumination or hallucination? Are we empowered or imprisoned by the unprovables that capture our fancy? Is religion a pillar of strength or “the opiate of the masses,” as Karl Marx put it? I agree with him and more—I think religion is all of the above, both positive and negative.
Bill Moyer’s powerful four-part series “On Our Own Terms (2000) looked at how we die and the choices we make. I hope it’s still available on Youtube, and I recommend it to anyone facing end-of-life issues. In one segment, a family member was asked what was most important in dealing with his father’s illness. The answer could be displayed on every MRI scanner, cancer center and grant committee room in the country: “We have to keep hoping.”
I agree, but there are many other things to hope for than an unattainable “cure,” which is the only kind of success we recognize in our technological society. Rather, we need to hope we will be cared for with compassion and respect. We need to believe that we will be remembered with tenderness. The belief I know to be true is that, if we must suffer, let it be for some good purpose, and lead us to a death with a minimum of pain and indignity.
In the book The Anatomy of Hope (2005), Jerome Groopman differentiates between true hope and optimism:
Hope does not arise from being told to “think positively,” or from hearing an overly rosy forecast. Hope, unlike optimism, is rooted in unalloyed reality. . . Hope is the elevating feeling we experience when we see in the mind’s eye a path to a better future. Hope acknowledges the significant obstacles and deep pitfalls along that path. True hope has no room for delusion.
One of my career’s greatest pseudo-successes was a lovely elder and Senior Women Dancer for her tribe in the far away Dakotas. Her diabetes had led to dialysis, vascular stenoses, and amputation of two toes, which left her foot looking like a gull’s wing. Saving her leg would depend on precise wound care and staying off the foot 24 hours a day.
As summer came on, she pleaded for permission to go to the Dakotas for the Sun Dance. Her sons would do the traditional self-piercings in the chest and hang from a pole for hours or days. She said it was very beautiful. Not my idea of a jolly vacation, but there it was.
We struck this deal: I’d arrange dialysis there, but only on the condition that she’d stay off her foot entirely. She gave me her absolute promise, “Honest Injun,” she joked.
Two weeks later, she returned energized, hungry as a wolf and with her foot completely healed! She assured me she’d been a perfect patient.
As I was walking away, congratulating myself on my skills at manipulation, I overheard her crowing to the patient in the next chair. “Oh, it was wonderful. My sons did the piercing rituals for 36 hours! I met with the Shaman, and he and I danced for most of two days and a night. He drew the evil out of my foot down into the earth, and it’s not hurt 1 minute since then.”
When I got over my sibling rivalry with the guy in the Dakotas, I realized that I had become an additional insult she needn’t have had to face. My failure to honor what was most central to my patient’s values was an insult on top of all her body was suffering.
Ah, but she was quite forgiving—after surviving Indian schools, forced conversions, relocations, diabetes and a lifetime devoted to at least three competing religions, she seemed amused by what I didn’t realize: to her I was just another of the many sillinesses life hands out along the way.
We hope for a cure. We dream of power, and control, and peace. To this day it hurts my ego if, when someone gets better, it’s chalked up to Jesus, the patient’s having “always been a fighter,” or dancing with a shaman during a sacred ritual. But if they get worse, everybody figures I must have screwed up. Oh, well.
Perhaps life offers alternatives that may prove as valuable or more so than a terribly costly cure. How about wonder? And joy? And lightness? Does it matter whether God or betadine, T-lymphocytes or a nurse’s compassion beat the infection? Maybe we medicos come into this crazy business just to stand in the presence of healing energy, whatever its source. It has an orange-teal glow, you know, and shimmers with warmth like a living metal. It’s delivered to you in the tone of a gentle voice, the moistness of a loving eye, the reassuring roughness of a weathered hand.
I was speaking at a conference where a prior presenter went over the results of the Human Genome Project. It turns out, he said, that only 6% of our DNA is functional. The rest is junk. This was 30 years ago, and it turns out he was completely wrong. Recent research points toward active (but previously unknown) roles for this “genetic junk.”
The next speaker touted the scientific evidence for Alternative Medicine. One of the complaints technologic medical practitioners like me make against alternative therapies is that they’ve not been demonstrated to be efficacious by controlled clinical studies. What percentage of traditional, technological therapies have been so proven, he asked? Six percent.
Thank heavens that so much we don’t understand and can’t control still, to our eternal embarrassment, works.
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