What is whole person healthcare?

• This article introduces the concept
• What’s in the name? How Whole Person Healthcare differs from other approaches
• Developing a unitary whole person approach
• The role of the ‘healer’
• The healing power of authority
• How this began with symbolic illnesses
• Imagination and its companions
• Healthcare and medical ‘guidelines’ from a whole person perspective
• Symbolic diseases and “Mindbody” co-emergence: A challenge for psychoneuroimmunology – Download article
• Medicine and story: A novel clinical panorama arising from a unitary mind/body approach to physical illness – Download article
• Naming what we do – Download article

Skills:

Illness Explorer self-help pathway

• How to recommend Illness Explorer to your patients

The art of listening: discovering the ‘story’ behind the illness

A listening skills mini-course in 14 parts.

1. A person speaks as a whole
2. Gaining permission
3. The Smorgasbord Question
4. Don’t jump to conclusions!
5. The emergence of meaning
6. The role of imagination
7. Self-disclosure and sharing experience
8. Personal discipline, and who is there for whom?
9. Making connections, seeing patterns
10. Co-constructing the story
11. The power of summary
12. Educating about illness and story connections
13. Timing and waiting
14. Being there for the other

Training opportunities

Training clinicians in whole-person centered healthcare – Download article

Frequently Asked Questions

• Tell me the basics of opening up story aspects in a medical setting
• I finally got the story—but what do I do now?
• ‘How focused should I be on the ‘real’ meaning of illness?’
• What illnesses and diseases? COMING SOON!
• Does this apply to cancer or life-threatening diseases? COMING SOON!

The Science

• See list of published books and articles
• Person-centred healthcare versus Patient-centred healthcare
• will be enlarged over time