Post by Admin on Apr 15, 2024 11:35:58 GMT
A monk showed me that spirituality needs more space in medicine
psyche.co/ideas/a-monk-showed-me-that-spirituality-needs-more-space-in-medicine
As a doctor, I’ve seen how brain diseases can become entwined with spiritual pain. Who is responsible for addressing it?
‘I was always interested in the life of hermits,’ my patient told me. ‘As a teenager, I was a very spiritual person. I’d go to mass every day, but the life of hermits seemed closer to…’ He paused, seeming to crank up the idea from a wishing-well by the subtlest of head tremors. The bucket came up dry. ‘It’s so hard to explain.’
‘Just try your best, Brother John,’ I said. ‘I don’t really know what I’m asking, but I know the answer’s there.’
I had found myself on unfamiliar ground: doctors are poorly instructed in medicine’s spiritual dimensions. We pronounce patients dead but are little involved in the worries of their afterlives. Yet a person’s spirituality can be injured, as their body can. Sometimes, a person’s only support system is their religion. Other times, it’s how they reconcile their illness. If doctors cannot tap into that support and perspective, we do our patients a disservice.
As a neurologist, I’ve had a number of patients who faced moral anguish when their mental faculties began to fail. Would getting lost during their prayers mean they were straying from grace? But sometimes the biggest source of pain might not come to a doctor’s attention because patients don’t feel comfortable talking to a man in a labcoat about how the divine illuminates their life. Doctors can be most effective, and their recommendations better adhered to, when their rhetoric embraces and aligns with the values of the patient. For many patients, those values are virtues of their faith.
To know something about that faith, and how the patient uses it to make meaning of suffering and successes, is a valence of healing we should exercise, not exorcise, through clinical practice. My experiences with patients like the one I’ll call Brother John have helped me understand that.
‘Monastic life’s simple,’ he told me. ‘It constitutes a prayer – always being in a state of prayer to the Lord, always thinking of the Lord, always making your every action an act of getting nearer the Lord. That’s why I joined [the monastery]. There was a lot of manual labour, chopping and stacking wood, praying all the while. Then all at once, somehow, I’d come to this state like a euphoria. It doesn’t last, so you have to keep at it to get back there again. It doesn’t seem possible for a human to stay in this spot, though the saints must have. Anyway, after three or four years, a call came to help a parish, and I answered it. I stayed there in the world for maybe 18 years.’
‘Did moving away from the monastery take you away from the… the uh…’ I faltered. ‘Getting into the zone?’
‘Not a zone. More a kind of ecstasy.’
I felt like I had made the transcendent feel like a field goal. ‘Sorry, the ecstasy … did leaving the monastery take it away?’
‘No, Parkinson’s did.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I started to stumble. I’d be bumping into people I was walking with. I just thought it was clumsiness. When I couldn’t access that ecstatic moment anymore, even though I was praying like always, with my intentions in the right place, I knew something was really wrong. The tremor came, and I went to the neurologist – Parkinson’s disease. They even DaTscanned me to be sure.’
‘Have you felt that ecstasy since?’
‘Never again.’
psyche.co/ideas/a-monk-showed-me-that-spirituality-needs-more-space-in-medicine
As a doctor, I’ve seen how brain diseases can become entwined with spiritual pain. Who is responsible for addressing it?
‘I was always interested in the life of hermits,’ my patient told me. ‘As a teenager, I was a very spiritual person. I’d go to mass every day, but the life of hermits seemed closer to…’ He paused, seeming to crank up the idea from a wishing-well by the subtlest of head tremors. The bucket came up dry. ‘It’s so hard to explain.’
‘Just try your best, Brother John,’ I said. ‘I don’t really know what I’m asking, but I know the answer’s there.’
I had found myself on unfamiliar ground: doctors are poorly instructed in medicine’s spiritual dimensions. We pronounce patients dead but are little involved in the worries of their afterlives. Yet a person’s spirituality can be injured, as their body can. Sometimes, a person’s only support system is their religion. Other times, it’s how they reconcile their illness. If doctors cannot tap into that support and perspective, we do our patients a disservice.
As a neurologist, I’ve had a number of patients who faced moral anguish when their mental faculties began to fail. Would getting lost during their prayers mean they were straying from grace? But sometimes the biggest source of pain might not come to a doctor’s attention because patients don’t feel comfortable talking to a man in a labcoat about how the divine illuminates their life. Doctors can be most effective, and their recommendations better adhered to, when their rhetoric embraces and aligns with the values of the patient. For many patients, those values are virtues of their faith.
To know something about that faith, and how the patient uses it to make meaning of suffering and successes, is a valence of healing we should exercise, not exorcise, through clinical practice. My experiences with patients like the one I’ll call Brother John have helped me understand that.
‘Monastic life’s simple,’ he told me. ‘It constitutes a prayer – always being in a state of prayer to the Lord, always thinking of the Lord, always making your every action an act of getting nearer the Lord. That’s why I joined [the monastery]. There was a lot of manual labour, chopping and stacking wood, praying all the while. Then all at once, somehow, I’d come to this state like a euphoria. It doesn’t last, so you have to keep at it to get back there again. It doesn’t seem possible for a human to stay in this spot, though the saints must have. Anyway, after three or four years, a call came to help a parish, and I answered it. I stayed there in the world for maybe 18 years.’
‘Did moving away from the monastery take you away from the… the uh…’ I faltered. ‘Getting into the zone?’
‘Not a zone. More a kind of ecstasy.’
I felt like I had made the transcendent feel like a field goal. ‘Sorry, the ecstasy … did leaving the monastery take it away?’
‘No, Parkinson’s did.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I started to stumble. I’d be bumping into people I was walking with. I just thought it was clumsiness. When I couldn’t access that ecstatic moment anymore, even though I was praying like always, with my intentions in the right place, I knew something was really wrong. The tremor came, and I went to the neurologist – Parkinson’s disease. They even DaTscanned me to be sure.’
‘Have you felt that ecstasy since?’
‘Never again.’