"If there is not something that can be visualized or quantified and something that can be fixed (like a broken bone or a heart attack), then you will probably find your interaction with the medical system feels rather frustrating and pointless."
This. This right here is something you learn at lightning speed when you have a chronic illness. The US medical system is so broken and I feel bad for the doctors and nurses trying to work within it. My primary doctor is amazing. He is passionate about healing people, but he is not given the ability to slow down and really help.
I appreciate your empathy. I am sure it is hard to find it through the frustration. It's true though, as a general rule new medical students are try-hards who care SO much. Then our training breaks us and the system breaks us and the things that need to happen to fix it feel so insurmountable that it feels like you need societal collapse to just start from scratch.
This reminds me of the poor medical care my wife received from a doctor. I looked him and and left a review on every page I could fine. Our doctors should be healers but they are often not. I wish they was some kind of metric scale for tenderness. Bed side manner is so key when working with people - especially when they, not just their bones, needed tending too.
It's really tragic how often I hear this and I'm sure the question of racism in medicine weighs heavy on your mind, particularly with a wife who is a black new mother. The system is so broken and it is breaking patients and it is breaking doctors.
My experience is that doctors go into medical school at least in part to prove their self-worth to someone else, then medical training is a lot of telling you you are not good enough and shame. When you finish training you are a pretty emotionally unhealthy person with very little insight into how wounded you are, which makes you very dangerous to other people, usually emotionally sometimes physically as well. Then there is the pressure to show no weakness, never ask for help, never make mistakes, just keep soldiering on. It's hard to imagine a system better designed to disconnect people from real healing if you tried.
That got bleak, sorry. Next week I'll be a little more solution focused.
Oh, it’s true. We all need tending and care, and so many of us are too overwhelmed to get it. I tried to give it and ask for it in small ways, hoping to grow this exchange of care.
What kinds of help do you give or ask for? I have been thinking about how we need to care for ourselves or ask for care from others to have that capacity to really tend to others. I haven't gotten too far in that process yet :)
You know, it’s vulnerable, but a lot of it is just simple touch. That’s why I can relate with your feeling, that after your accident, you wished for someone to rub oil into your sore muscles, and just be attentive to your difficulties with what you’re going through.
I’m not in a relationship now with sustained daily touch, and I’m realizing how important that is. Sitting on a couch with arms around each other, shoulder, massages and such. Long hugs, with men and women. It can be a little tricky, because I have issues around touch and so do many others, yet it’s so important and nourishing if done right.
I’m finding it’s nourishing to give touch as well, which is helpful as it opens that door.
I’m also starting a small business, helping people, tell stories, and it’s a heck of a lot of work to get going, with a whole bunch of tasks that I’m not familiar with. Yesterday a friend offered to help spruce up my website to give it the spirit of my work, and it feels so good excepting that help.
I’m thinking like so many things, where there are huge structural problems, that I find the only power I really have is to start small in my own life. May this micro influence the macro.
Oh, yes, lovely, like you said, so simple to ask for and something many people are longing for. I think manyof us are so disconnected from our bodies that we don't here those signals that we need touch or to move or what have you.
I took my daughters to "dance church" at the folk dance center in Minneapolis. It was a very cool event with all kinds of people, but I think themost striking thing for my daughters and myself was seeing people engage in really long hugs. It hadn't occurred to me whata foreign concept that is.
Regarding help with work, the culture of medicine encourages neverneeding help, but you have to have interdependence to have community and belonging. I am trying to unlearn that by viewing those offers of help as synchronicities that show I'm on the right path and I'd be shaking off the divine signal by refusing. I also think that refusal to accept help is part of why we're so isolated and burned out in medicine (stay tuned for more on that next week).
This is all so true with what women get for maternity care, too ❤️ It is stacked in a bad way that the more problems a woman has, the more “care” her insurance will pay for. For the most part, pregnancy and birth aren’t emergencies. Being “low-risk” or “unbroken” doesn’t lessen the need for care through these big life events.
Yes! 100% I realized after having my oldest daughter that as a physician I had a bias that looked like when someone is well enough to leave the hospital, that means they are fine. When I returned for my 6 week check, I was "fine" in that I was healing normally, but I was not back to normal and there should have been a lot more guidance on how to proceed from there, both physically, but also that there is no "normal" to return to, which I did not yet know at that time.
What makes postpartum so interesting is that it is such a spiritually potent time too, so this tending and witnessing (or lack thereof) shapes mothers for the rest of their lives. I wrote a bit about this a few weeks ago in The Universal Needs of Postpartum Mothers, but that was before I was really thinking deeply about these needs for tending and witnessing though they dovetail nicely.
Beautiful. I’ll go check that one out. I’m PP with my 4th right now ❤️ It’s truly amazing how the word universal fits the PP experience so well, even as each time is so unique.
We changed primary care docs recently. In our first visit with them we were shocked by how overwhelmed they were (several docs recently departed increasing their workload). They warned that they would be taking a sabbatical for about a year upcoming to come up for air and regain sanity. It seems modern healthcare is in crisis. Thanks for sharing your unfiltered perspective.
It is definitely in crisis. It was in crisis before COVID and I think many of us thought we can't help but deal with it after how everything went during COVID, but now we're not dealing with the crisis.
A few weeks ago I shared a story here about how a healing culture could evolve after a collapse. Unfortunately, it looks like that might be what has to happen to face this. I also think it is necessary to expand healing to include healers outside the halls of medicine. There are types of emotional and energy healing that we just can't do and we do a disservice to people by claiming we can.
Yes! And that transactional nature of healthcare hurts those of us working in healthcare as much as the patients, but it's the fish bowl we're swimming in, so it's difficult to imagine it another way.
"If there is not something that can be visualized or quantified and something that can be fixed (like a broken bone or a heart attack), then you will probably find your interaction with the medical system feels rather frustrating and pointless."
This. This right here is something you learn at lightning speed when you have a chronic illness. The US medical system is so broken and I feel bad for the doctors and nurses trying to work within it. My primary doctor is amazing. He is passionate about healing people, but he is not given the ability to slow down and really help.
I appreciate your empathy. I am sure it is hard to find it through the frustration. It's true though, as a general rule new medical students are try-hards who care SO much. Then our training breaks us and the system breaks us and the things that need to happen to fix it feel so insurmountable that it feels like you need societal collapse to just start from scratch.
It's heartbreaking to think about.
This reminds me of the poor medical care my wife received from a doctor. I looked him and and left a review on every page I could fine. Our doctors should be healers but they are often not. I wish they was some kind of metric scale for tenderness. Bed side manner is so key when working with people - especially when they, not just their bones, needed tending too.
It's really tragic how often I hear this and I'm sure the question of racism in medicine weighs heavy on your mind, particularly with a wife who is a black new mother. The system is so broken and it is breaking patients and it is breaking doctors.
My experience is that doctors go into medical school at least in part to prove their self-worth to someone else, then medical training is a lot of telling you you are not good enough and shame. When you finish training you are a pretty emotionally unhealthy person with very little insight into how wounded you are, which makes you very dangerous to other people, usually emotionally sometimes physically as well. Then there is the pressure to show no weakness, never ask for help, never make mistakes, just keep soldiering on. It's hard to imagine a system better designed to disconnect people from real healing if you tried.
That got bleak, sorry. Next week I'll be a little more solution focused.
Oh, it’s true. We all need tending and care, and so many of us are too overwhelmed to get it. I tried to give it and ask for it in small ways, hoping to grow this exchange of care.
What kinds of help do you give or ask for? I have been thinking about how we need to care for ourselves or ask for care from others to have that capacity to really tend to others. I haven't gotten too far in that process yet :)
You know, it’s vulnerable, but a lot of it is just simple touch. That’s why I can relate with your feeling, that after your accident, you wished for someone to rub oil into your sore muscles, and just be attentive to your difficulties with what you’re going through.
I’m not in a relationship now with sustained daily touch, and I’m realizing how important that is. Sitting on a couch with arms around each other, shoulder, massages and such. Long hugs, with men and women. It can be a little tricky, because I have issues around touch and so do many others, yet it’s so important and nourishing if done right.
I’m finding it’s nourishing to give touch as well, which is helpful as it opens that door.
I’m also starting a small business, helping people, tell stories, and it’s a heck of a lot of work to get going, with a whole bunch of tasks that I’m not familiar with. Yesterday a friend offered to help spruce up my website to give it the spirit of my work, and it feels so good excepting that help.
I’m thinking like so many things, where there are huge structural problems, that I find the only power I really have is to start small in my own life. May this micro influence the macro.
Oh, yes, lovely, like you said, so simple to ask for and something many people are longing for. I think manyof us are so disconnected from our bodies that we don't here those signals that we need touch or to move or what have you.
I took my daughters to "dance church" at the folk dance center in Minneapolis. It was a very cool event with all kinds of people, but I think themost striking thing for my daughters and myself was seeing people engage in really long hugs. It hadn't occurred to me whata foreign concept that is.
Regarding help with work, the culture of medicine encourages neverneeding help, but you have to have interdependence to have community and belonging. I am trying to unlearn that by viewing those offers of help as synchronicities that show I'm on the right path and I'd be shaking off the divine signal by refusing. I also think that refusal to accept help is part of why we're so isolated and burned out in medicine (stay tuned for more on that next week).
This is all so true with what women get for maternity care, too ❤️ It is stacked in a bad way that the more problems a woman has, the more “care” her insurance will pay for. For the most part, pregnancy and birth aren’t emergencies. Being “low-risk” or “unbroken” doesn’t lessen the need for care through these big life events.
Yes! 100% I realized after having my oldest daughter that as a physician I had a bias that looked like when someone is well enough to leave the hospital, that means they are fine. When I returned for my 6 week check, I was "fine" in that I was healing normally, but I was not back to normal and there should have been a lot more guidance on how to proceed from there, both physically, but also that there is no "normal" to return to, which I did not yet know at that time.
What makes postpartum so interesting is that it is such a spiritually potent time too, so this tending and witnessing (or lack thereof) shapes mothers for the rest of their lives. I wrote a bit about this a few weeks ago in The Universal Needs of Postpartum Mothers, but that was before I was really thinking deeply about these needs for tending and witnessing though they dovetail nicely.
Beautiful. I’ll go check that one out. I’m PP with my 4th right now ❤️ It’s truly amazing how the word universal fits the PP experience so well, even as each time is so unique.
We changed primary care docs recently. In our first visit with them we were shocked by how overwhelmed they were (several docs recently departed increasing their workload). They warned that they would be taking a sabbatical for about a year upcoming to come up for air and regain sanity. It seems modern healthcare is in crisis. Thanks for sharing your unfiltered perspective.
It is definitely in crisis. It was in crisis before COVID and I think many of us thought we can't help but deal with it after how everything went during COVID, but now we're not dealing with the crisis.
A few weeks ago I shared a story here about how a healing culture could evolve after a collapse. Unfortunately, it looks like that might be what has to happen to face this. I also think it is necessary to expand healing to include healers outside the halls of medicine. There are types of emotional and energy healing that we just can't do and we do a disservice to people by claiming we can.
Yes! And that transactional nature of healthcare hurts those of us working in healthcare as much as the patients, but it's the fish bowl we're swimming in, so it's difficult to imagine it another way.