Making the right health care choices

The recent news that drug and medical device and supply manufacturers may soon be required to disclose all payments they make to doctors and teaching hospitals (news article 1 and news article 2) got me thinking about how much the practice of medicine has changed in my lifetime.

When I was a kid, doctors came to your house and their word was the final authority. Second opinions were rarely sought, medical malpractice suits were the exception. When I was two years old  a doctor suggested my mother take me to a New York City teaching hospital for experimental surgery to fix a vision problem. Without giving it another thought, she followed instructions. And when the operation left me blind in one eye, she never considered suing anyone. Years later the condition kept me out of Vietnam; I mostly saw what happened as a mixed blessing.

But as time went by, attitudes toward doctors were radically shifting. House calls were out, specialization was in, and people were waking up to the idea that the burden of making the right call about your healthcare was the patient’s business. Get a second opinion. Get a third and a fourth. Do research, get the facts, come to the doctor’s office prepared. If the Obama administration’s proposed regulations go through, people will have yet another thing they can check before choosing a treatment or care-giver; could a doctor’s proposed treatment plan be complicated by a conflict of interest.

I’m not interested in bashing the medical profession. It is full of decent and more than decent human beings who genuinely want to help. It is also a very complicated practice. Harvard med school students are told that half of what they will learn is wrong and the teachers can’t tell them which half. Drug and device manufacturers market helpful products, but they are also driven by bottom-line economics; like any business, decisions are made that place the company’s welfare above altruism. Then there is just plain old human error. We all know this, and much as we might long nostalgically for the days of the wise and selfless general practitioner, we know the world we live in rolls very differently.

Which is why, almost twenty years ago, when I saw my wife healed overnight of a chronic condition that her doctors told her there was no cure for, I sat up and took interest. Although I was skeptical of spiritual healing for “real physical problems,” I couldn’t deny what had happened right under my nose. Through an epiphany about the power of divine Love, my wife’s painful, inhibiting condition disappeared and never returned. Seeing her laughing over the change on that remarkable morning, aglow with good health after weeks of being bedridden, made me willing to take a longer look at how an idea could change a physical condition that had been unsuccessfully treated for years with drugs and surgery.

What I began to see was that in a very positive way, we have more say in our health than I had previously thought. We talk a lot about taking responsibility for our own health; we constantly hear about new ways to eat the right foods, get better exercise etc. Why not take that responsibility to a deeper level. Making the right choice is so much more than weeding out conflicted prognoses and searching for the most recently discovered solution. Medical opinion changes on a regular basis; that’s the nature of scientific practice. With new discoveries, old paradigms get thrown out. What we need, I think, is a more solid relationship with those health-giving factors that never change.

What my wife’s healing and my own subsequent experiences with spiritual healing have shown me is that your own thought and belief is really the predominant factor in how we are doing. Whether it is being proactive about staying well, or dealing with an acute condition, what you believe has real power, what you think comprises the real substance of your being plays a bigger role than any other variable. Once I began to see that there is a consistent, spiritual basis in life, preceding and able to transform what we think of as matter and the body, I began paying much more attention to how I was responding to everything around me.

Studies show that laughter, generosity, kindness, happiness are positive forces in human life and health. The spiritual wisdom through the ages about loving your neighbor, following The Golden Rule, turning the other cheek, letting go of anger, fear, and sorrow all turn out to be provably good prescriptions. According to MRI research, such changes in our way of thinking can relieve pain, calm us, strengthen our immune systems, and even change our DNA.

Science and religion, though seeming to be antithetical and mutually exclusive of each other, are actually moving toward common ground.  True, to stand on that ground we’re going to have to step away from cherished dogmas, both medical and theological. But, given my own experiences, I’m happy to give up old, superstitious forms of religion and medicine and be a stranger in the strange new land of scientifically demonstrable spiritual good.