All Medicine is Mindful Medicine
For the past few months I've been thinking a lot about why people seek out the medical treatments that they do. Today the average would-be patient has at least a dozen (if not hundreds) of potential avenues of medical care to address their ills--from the scientific medicine at hospitals, to specialty doctors, functional and integrative medical practitioners, urgent care, chiropractic, osteopathy, and seemingly endless iterations of alternative medical traditions.
All Medicine is Mindful Medicine
For the past few months I've been thinking a lot about why people seek out the medical treatments that they do. Today the average would-be patient has at least a dozen (if not hundreds) of potential avenues of medical care to address their ills--from the scientific medicine at hospitals, to specialty doctors, functional and integrative medical practitioners, urgent care, chiropractic, osteopathy, and seemingly endless iterations of alternative medical traditions.
While we can parse out the benefits and drawbacks of each approach, one fundamental similarity binds all medicine together: the patient feels some sort of symptom that they can't handle on their own, they seek out an expert who looks for signs of disease, and that person compares the signs and symptoms against other patient data to come up with a diagnosis. This is the basic approach to medicine that has existed since...well...at least as far back as the earliest medical texts and probably quite a bit before then, too.
If the first treatment doesn't work, then most patients won't just give up, but instead seek out other doctors or medical paradigms on their hunt for a cure.
In this week's podcast I examine how the very ordinary activity of searching out solutions to your symptoms is, in reality, a very deep mindful practice--that has curative potential all on its own. It doesn't matter if you stick only to doctors in lab coats or travel down to Peru on a spiritual journey--all medicine is at some level mindful medicine.
Check out Scott Carney Investigates anywhere you seek out find podcasts (Spotify) (iTunes) (YouTube).
What is the placebo effect, really?
One day Mr A walked into the emergency room where he just barely was able to tell the nurse on duty that he’d taken all of his pills before he collapsed at her feet. In his pocket was a jar of pills from a local clinical trial—but with no information about what exactly they were. The medical team eventually figured out that he was in the control group. He’d taken a whole jar of placebos. . .
The thing that most people fail to understand about medicine is that, for the most part, you take drugs and receive therapies from your doctors in order for your body to get to a place where it can manage to do the job on its own. We spend billions of dollars developing drugs that only work a tiny bit better than the healing power of the body. In this video I explain some of the underlying ways that the innate and adaptive immune system work as well as the curious way we talk about what it means to get better while under medical care.