Last night Aunt B. had a post which rang a few bells with me. She was discussing the misbegotten adventures of a woman in a store looking for advice on herbs from the clerk. Of course this is ridiculous. Store clerks are not qualified to diagnose and treat illness.
But I think it says something about how much our society secretly yearns for the lost art of the Wise Woman. I think that a part of every ailing person longs for the comfort of a mother, and modern medical care completely denies that. The purely clinical nature of 21st century treatment offers some level of physical healing but lacks the succor found in the craft of the Wise Woman. Medicine has pulled away from a healing art and morphed into a kind of dry, white, sterile science. In turn, the arts of herbal healing and insightful analysis are now annexed under the labels of Occult and Witchcraft. I believe that witchcraft exists, but I don’t believe that all Wise Women throughout history were witches. In fact, the history of medicine refers back to many texts about herbs and herbal lore.
I am a Christian and a woman. When I watch the Da Vinci Code fever sweep the world, when I hear about women asking other women for medical advice, whenever people talk reverently about Mary of Magdala it makes me realise again just how much we crave the sacred feminine. I believe, because the Bible said so, that we are made in God’s image. Male AND Female. Which means that I believe that God has as much an essence of femininity as masculinity. I believe, as David said, that the Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof. Which leads me to believe that the healing arts of the Wise Woman are as much God-directed as any medical care in a hospital.
There is always talk about how to “reshape” Christianity to refocus on the feminine aspects of God, as we continue to anthropomorphise God to meet our purposes. For me I’m content to let God be God and worship as such. But I would really like to see modern medicine reshaped. As clinical treatment strays further and further from the realm of the healing arts traditionally practiced by Wise Women it becomes less and less effective on a whole-person level. Two soon-to-be-released books–Better and How Doctors Think will once again talk about the flaws in modern medicine.
Flaws I believe could be healed by looking in the direction of holistic medicine. As with faith, I believe things are best when you consider the balance between the feminine and the masculine. Surely it could help medicine, too.
The (male) professionalization of healing certainly threw the baby out with the bathwater. Our physical health has unquestionably improved over the past few centuries, but the idea of curing the whole person has been lost. Unfortunately, all too many of the protests against the process are equally off-target. People want to throw out the baby of good medicine together with the bathwater of impersonal treatment. And then there’s laetrile.
I know that’s not the kind of thing you’re talking about. But I think that in fact the practice of medicine has become so depersonalized in the past couple of decades (largely because of the need to fit the interactions into units that can be charged to insurance companies) that people are more vulnerable than they used to be to any charlatan who comes along with a good bedside manner.
Should I be upset that the implication here is “male = cold and clinical”? Do I need to remind you that when it comes to abortion, many men are the overly emotional ones, and many women are the clinical ones?
Back on topic – my wife absolutely loves her job because she truly gives care. Hands on, Florence Nightingale care. It’s too bad that we wait until things are hopeless before we let this happen.
Slarti–
My husband said the same thing, and that’s where I need to emphasise that what I’m talking about is not that cold, clinical care is MALE, but is (as nm points out) absent things that were stereotypically female.
I’ve done years of study in the history of medicine and the various cultural practices and definitions of healing. Summing up all those books in a few paragraphs is hard, but the thumbnail version is that medical doctors used to be perceived as a high-risk endeavour. People would rather trust the familiar Wise woman (female) or barber-surgeon (generally male) than to put their health in the hands of a clinician.
Medical doctors were often considered those not smart or gifted enough to make it in the philosophical disciplines–maligned in the past the same way many malign chiropractors today.
In an effort to make a Doctor the go-to guy for health care, medical physicians progressively (to borrow from nm’s comment) threw out the baby with the bathwater. They wanted their profession associated with progressive science and in order to do so dissociated themselves from “granny’s herbal tea” and, by extension, the arts of the Wise Woman.
In fact, the very term “wise woman” is not always accurate, because at different periods in the history of medicine, male physicians harvested and compounded herbs as much as the Wise Women did.
It makes me so sad to think that the only times modern medicine offer whole-person care are at the moments of birth and death. Midwives, doulas and hospice nurses are the islands in the stream.
Coincidentally or not, they are generally women.
I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one on television, but I’ve worked and spoken with enough of them over the years that I’ve become familiar with some of their hot-button issues. This is one of them.
At the risk of speaking in broad generalizations, many healing-oriented individuals begin their pursuit of the medicinal arts with every intention of providing the very types of holistic, person-centered treatment that we all seem to agree is lacking in the mainstream healthcare system these days. Somewhere between day one of the under-grad pre med program and hanging up their shingle, a lot of those best intentions get weeded out. In many ways, solving the problem will be a question of correctly identifying and responding to these causative factors.
I’m sure that you’re onto something with your idea of there being a conscious effort to re-conceptualize the role of physician to raise it above the idea of folk healer. But I think that this accounts for only a portion of the transformation at best. More immediately, I’d wager that the forces are much more pragmatic and, to a large extent, beyond the direct control of the physician. I’d love to hear a physician chime in on this, but my second-hand perception is that there are two interrelated driving forces behind this dynamic.
First, are business necessities, plain and simple. Whether medicine is practiced in the context of a hospital, private practice or any permutation thereof, maintaining a viable operation is largely a numbers game. Every physician is well aware of – and driven by – the knowledge of how many patients per hour they have to see in order to break even. While we’re all aware of the common perception that doctors are rolling in the money, many practices have extremely narrow margins and are forced to function as high volume operations just to stay in the black. As much as many doctors would love to be free to spend an extra five or ten minutes with each patient to discuss the intricate ins and outs of their medical history or a particular complaint, doing so would directly and severely impact their bottom line. Thus, spending more time with each patient translates to seeing fewer patients, which results in having to charge more from the patients that they do see. How many of us are up for paying more for a visit to the doctor or waiting longer to get in to see one? Sure, it’s great when you’re in the exam room and have the doc’s undivided attention, but for the rest of the time…
I think that the more significant motivator is actually fear. Not to mount up on an already heavily ridden horse, but the fear of legal liability has thrown a huge wet blanket over the practice of medicine. Back in the “good old days” when someone suffering from a headache would visit the local Wise Woman for an herbal remedy, said practitioner had relatively little to worry about if the patient subsequently died of a massive brain aneurysm. She did her best; it wasn’t enough; nothing more could have been done; so sad… But physicians today work within a much narrower margin of error and many live in constant fear of reprisal should they step ever so slightly out of the bounds of strict standards of practice. When working with the constant threat of malpractice suits, it’s not surprising that many physicians get into the mindset of providing the safest, most minimal course of treatment and getting the patient out the door. The less they do and the less creative they get, the less likely they are to be sued for doing something wrong.
OBGYNs are the perfect example. What better opportunity to get involved with someone on a personal level and to demonstrate the compassion and humanity of the medical arts? But it’s getting to the point where these docs are leaving the business in droves because of astronomical malpractice insurance costs and legislative environments in some states where they may as well just paint targets on their backs. Does that make these doctors cold, uncaring clinicians? No – it makes them pragmatic. And as long as we have systems in which pragmatism outweighs nurturing and compassion by such a wide margin, we’re going to continue to see the death of the idealism that most healers-to-be have when they begin their training.
Hey, I have an idea! Let’s turn the delivery and regulation of healthcare over to the federal government. I’m sure that will completely take care of the problem and instantaneously turn every doctor back into Marcus Welby. Lollipops for everybody!!!
Well, you should if that’s what I had said, or meant to imply. Part of the “professionalization” of medicine was a deliberate strategy of masculinizing it, to the extent that women were forbidden to study or practice medicine. This strategy excluded not only women, but also the styles of interaction — the emotional connections — that were primarily associated with women in the culture of the time. Male, as I used it, isn’t “what men do (or did)” or “how men act(ed)” but “self-consciously not (and maybe even anti-)female and feminine.” If you keep in mind that in European tradition the men most associated with healing had been priests (celibate! and therefore not manly! as well as concerned with the soul in addition to the body) my point will be clearer.
Nevertheless, I apologize for choosing my words poorly and inadvertently making you think that I think of men as cold and unconcerned with the whole person.
At least we’ve got half the rites of passage back.
And let’s not damn all physicians, while we’re at it. I’ve had my share of clock-watchers, but there have also been a couple of doctors who, because they were concerned with my overall well-being and took the time to explain how they could and could not help and how that was going to play out in my life overall, were of tremendous help in dealing with specific illnesses.
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