Again, I’ll start with medical school. I realize my writing often starts there but it really was the beginning of a shift for me. As soon as you express interest in medicine, people will start asking what kind of a doctor you want to be. I usually didn’t have an answer.
There are several types of medical students. During training, you rotate through different specialties so that you can decide what suits you best. Some students know what they want from the beginning and stay the course. There are the students who say, “Gosh I can’t decide, I love everything!” And then, some are like me. I just kept crossing things off my list. All the surgical specialties were first to go.
As my training continued and even more so as I had my children, I started to feel a growing disquiet. I was drawn to other medical systems, past and current, where the person providing care is considered a healer. They worked to help someone find balance, instead of label and treating symptoms. And not only did I feel like what I was being taught was not really making anyone feel better, but I took issue (and still do) with the title ‘doctor’ and all its many implications. To demand respect based on a title given to me by others in my field and based on my performance on tests and my ability to regurgitate content at the whim of my professors. Bedside manner is encouraged, and sensitivity is discussed, but neither is required for graduation.
So, I set off on a new journey to become more like a healer. I was a doctor, but I wanted to learn all sorts of things to get to the root cause and find balance and treat from the inside out. That felt good and right… mostly.
While contemplating leaving the busy university based primary care office where I was working, I had a few lunches with private practice integrative medicine doctors with whom I considered sharing space. During one of these lunches with a doctor much more experienced than myself, he said something that suddenly crystalized my vague feelings on my time spent with patients. When discussing the variety of ways of making a diagnosis or planning treatment, he said,
“I’ve found that if you listen to someone long enough, they’ll tell you what’s wrong with them. And if you listen even longer than that, they’ll tell you what they need to feel better.”
Yes.
Yes. That is what I felt. I am not the healer. We are all our own healers. The power to heal comes from deep within each one of us. Exhale.
So, maybe I’ll be a facilitator. One of many among the various types of healing practitioners. Maybe that’s why so many people find themselves unexpectedly crying during our talks. Maybe so much starts with just a little time and space, a healing space. But, I am not the healer.