The Nature of Healing: The Modern Practice of Medicine - Tapa dura

It will make you think and reflect (IAHPC News)

...Eric Cassell has been one of medicine's foremost thinkers about suffering. The Nature of Healing is full of insightfully presented and sometimes moving case histories that help Cassell make a case that practitioners need to hear patients' stories so they can understand them enough to help them move toward healing. (Christian Century)

Cassell is a great listener and a natural storyteller. I hope that he will write a third volume in which he develops those stories more fully. (John D. Lantos, The Hastings Center)

The Nature of Healing: The Modern Practice of Medicine offers effective and strategic ways to practice patient-centered medicine. [It] offers readers specific ways to reconsider the negative effects of reductionism in medicine, which can manifest as a distancing between clinician and patient as a patient disconnects from the world in descent into illness. (Adrianne Vincent, Journal of Palliative Medicine)

Currently and for centuries past, sickness has been understood to be primarily the physical result of bodily disease. Yet this definition of illness is out-of-date and untrue to life at a time when chronic illness and the problems of disability and aging are increasingly common. When persons are sick, it pervades their whole being. The Nature of Healing is based on a different definition of sickness, one that recognizes persons as sick when they cannot achieve their goals and purposes because of impairments of function, ranging from the molecular to the spiritual, which they believe to fall under the scope of medicine. Such impairments may result from disease, but certainly not all.

As the sick person has increasingly become the focus of medicine, there have been repeated but mostly failed attempts to achieve both technological and humanistic goals in caring for patients. This approach is flawed because there is only one ultimate goal ― the well-being of the patient. Whether it involves the personal action of the clinician or the use of technology, everything done toward the goal of well-being is part of the healing enterprise. In this book, Eric Cassell explores what sickness is, what persons are, and how to understand function and its impairments. He explains healing skills and actions, as well as the nature of healing for sick and suffering patients. This book concludes with a discussion of the moral basis of the relationship between patient and healer, as well as the goals of healing.