Dear Friends and colleagues As I begin 2023, I am thinking of all the like-minded colleagues around the world, known to me or not, who are on a journey of exploration, discovering what it means in practice to be a ‘whole person-centred’ clinician. There is a recurring question in this: ‘Why is it so difficult […]
What really counts is the heart of a story. We forge our own stories into ‘wholes’ by choosing particular and special details, linking them together in the ‘present moment.’
I discovered him by internet search–someone purporting to customise chairs for people with back problems. This sounded promising. I had fractured a vertebra six months previously, and sitting, chairs and pain had become wrestling partners. So I called him up the next day during normal office hours. He clearly wasn’t ready for customers; his name […]
I figured my stories could interest him. Many years ago my family and I were lunching with Bob, a surgical colleague, and his family. The occasion was winding down, and he and I had subsided into a corner to share work perspectives. Both of us had unusual work histories. He was an altruistic and principled […]
How is it possible to be whole person-oriented and still feel that our work is manageable? Surely, we can’t be all things to all people? Biomedical diagnoses and treatments of the ‘mechanical’ (sic) body are largely grounded in recognizing typical clinical patterns, objectively measured and verifiable physical changes using reliable testing methods, and statistical evidence […]
How did the whole person approach develop? All histories go endlessly backwards (and forwards). But a major marker of change occurred in 1988 when, after several years away from my internal medicine (clinical immunology) practice, I re-ignited it and amalgamated it with my newly developed psychotherapy training. In short, I put together a highly conventional […]
Modern healthcare (sometimes we call it biomedicine) is a massive and dominant enterprise in which the clinical gaze (1) is largely directed at the physico-material aspect of sick persons. In contrast, ‘whole person’ or person-centred approaches hold that people are complex multidimensional beings, in which physical, subjective, soul-ish, spiritual, creative, relational, genetic, family, cultural, and […]
What is a ‘story’? I was asked this question recently by someone who had been associated with whole person healthcare for a long time. ‘Story’ seems such a simple concept. Humans are storied beings. But suddenly it got complicated. There was too much at stake. As in a game of ‘snakes and ladders’, we had […]
Generally speaking, clinicians do not listen to exactly what a patient says. When a patient speaks she is speaking from herself as a whole. When we listen very carefully to exactly what she says we have, potentially, a doorway into the whole. For instance, I asked a woman, a 43 year old office manager, ‘when […]