MEDICINE DOES NOT HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS

The power of modern drugs can be awe-inspiring, but social interaction and other activities are undervalued forms of healing. Here are a doctor’s thoughts on this, from 10 years ago, but the message is still worth reflecting on today.

As a medical student I marvelled at the magic little pills could do. I watched fatal malarial fevers dissipate and resolve, I saw suppurating, oozing wounds smooth over and heal, cancers regress and disappear under the wondrous effects of little coloured capsules and tablets. The power of modern western medicine can be awe-inspiring.

But the more experienced I became, the more I began to realise that for all its wonders there are many things modern medicine cannot come close to healing or even understanding. We may have pills to unclot blood and clear clogged arteries but we have nothing for a broken heart or lonely soul. Our biomedical model of illness and disease can do much but it lacks a lot.

We fail to realise and acknowledge the complex context of the person that has the illness. As Hippocrates said: ‘It is more important to understand what sort of person has a disease, than what sort of disease a person has.’ There is no pill which will have everything we need to make us healthy and there never will be.

Medicine is an act of love and brotherhood. True healing comes from people, not machines or chemicals or protocols or pathways but from us all to each other. It comes from art and companionship and love and trust.

Several years ago, I was struck by the story of a group of elderly Bangladeshi widows. These women who had relied entirely on their husbands and were completely isolated by deep cultural and language barriers. They almost all suffered with poorly controlled diabetes and were regular attendees of the local AE and GP surgery.

The surgery started a gardening group for these women and as they got out and exercised and laughed and gardened together, they developed a network of support. Their diabetic control improved and they became significantly less frequent visitors to AE and the GP.

Looking back at the history of western medicine and how it has evolved over the millennia, doctors have done some wonderful and some awful things in their attempts to help and relieve sickness. They have often held misguided views for too long and failed to accept new ideas or listen to patient experiences with an open mind. In short for all its greatness the consistent failing of modern medicine has been its arrogance. Our model of the body explains a lot but it does not explain everything.

– by Laura Marshall-Andrews in The Guardian (19 June 2014), edited extracts