Is Time The Missing Component In Health Care?

Slow Medicine. I like the sound of that.

Dr. Victoria Sweet recently wrote a memoir, God's Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, And A Pilgrimage To The Heart Of Medicine, about her experience working in San Francisco's own Laguna Honda Hospital. Laguna Honda is possibly one of the country's last almshouses which provides long-term care for the sick and poor. What she took away from her experience is the positive effect of spending time with her patients. In the modern hospital doctors can spend less than ten minutes with a patient, concentrating only on acute care which can lead to a cycle of patients going in and out of the emergency room. At Laguna Honda one patient she discussed stayed for two years.

I love this piece from the interview where Dr. Sweet talks about a nurse that she admired, Nurse Hildegard...

"Hildegard thought of the body as more of a plant than a machine and the doctor as more of a gardener than a mechanic. What's the difference? Well, someone has to fix a broken machine, but a plant can heal itself. So Hildegard had this idea that just as a plant has its own greening power to grow, so did human beings. We had a natural healing power."

This is the same feeling we have in TCM about healing and our body's innate ability to care for itself. Sometimes it just needs a little nudge in the right direction (a little TLC and plant food) to return to a healthy state.

You can read the transcript or listen to the full interview on NPR here: http://www.npr.org/2012/10/11/162715368/is-time-the-missing-component-in-health-care 

(sorry for the bad punctuation, this was a quickie post =) )