Teaching humility in medical school…there is a mind-blowing and much needed idea. When you think about what it takes to get into medical school, you can see who ends up there. If you are the sensitive sort that acknowledges you have a lot of doubts/confusion about the world, you’re not going to medical school. In case you slip in, you’ll get hazed with 48 hour nonstop shifts (or something like this- I don’t know the details, even though I once thought id like to be a surgeon, I knew that I could never “hack it” in med school, pun intended). The experience of identifying oneself as a potential doctor, then training to be one necessitates certain survival mechanisms, it seems. Some of them are “be right, all the time (even if you’re not sure)” and “know more than your patient (even though you don’t live in their body).” I feel for doctors as a damaged group of people; I wish we had a different way of training healers. And yes, there are other great healers outside of the mainstream medical establishment - and we as consumers often can’t access them due to the cost of going “alternative.”
Western medicine is powerful in an emergency, but can become detached and inhumane. I am fortunate to live near a teaching hospital and my primary care physician is a DO - doctor of osteopathy and integrative medicine open to alternative treatments. I still find ways to afford my Chinese medicine doctor who is wiser about the "subtle aspects" of the balance of health and healing. It is a blow to my retirement budget, but "if you don't have your health, you have nothing."
My father was an anesthesiologist. Several years ago, I had a surgery which required a full anesthetic. We were speaking about my experience, and he flat out told me that no one understands “how” anesthesia really works, only that it does work and in a mostly predictable and controllable way. But the actual mechanisms that allow certain drugs to render you unconscious and incapable of feeling pain are not well understood.
Pretty mind blowing that such an important part of medicine is an unknown.
That any medical doctor could be so sure that they “know”, when so much is not known, is frustrating. It is entirely ok to admit to your patient that you don’t know something, or are unsure of something. I wish they would also teach humility in medical school.
"We don’t know what we’re denying, because we’re denying it."
Yes, it seems we're our own worst enemies and much of our lives are lived in various states of denial and fear. Denial is a survival mechanism useful in proper doses, but lethal when overdosed. Obviously, collectively we have become full fledged denial junkies and have normalized our affliction.
A few years back while studying for a masters degree in psychology, I stumbled upon the Terror Management Theory based on the philosophical works of Ernest Becker and his book The Denial of Death. Basically, it states that humans developed the capacity to foresee our death - "mortality salience." This knowledge would incapacitate us with ennui and despair if not suppressed and sublimated. We have done so by creating "symbolic" lives of rituals, words and symbols which attempt to "cheat" our mortality and give god-like powers to our mental creations. A writer knows his words will live beyond him. An artist's image will persist well beyond the life of its creator. https://psychcentral.com/health/terror-management-theory#terror-management-theory
We are terrified and addicted to our denial of our mortality and have sublimated this terror to our subconscious. The problem arises when we are overwhelmed and our terror defenses dissolve leaving us in start awareness of our fragility and mortality. To regain hope and to pull out of our despair spiral we must grieve the "death" of our illusion of immortality and accept our humanity again.
Denial is the first step in the grief cycle - denial, bargaining, anger, surrender, and acceptance. The first three steps are dangerous because of the underlying denial of personal responsibility and feeling of victimhood - "it's not my fault, I can fix this, I am a victim of others' wrong-doings..." It is easy to get stuck and looping in the denial, bargaining, and anger cycle to avoid accepting personal responsibility and to "own" the situation of the moment. This is a powerful "dark night of the soul" moment of consciousness expansion and personal growth. It is not a conscious process, but a deep restructuring at the subconscious level. The final step is an integration of the new subconscious wisdom with our conscious mind.
I fortunately do not have a chronic disease, but I am old and experiencing a deterioration of my health and body bringing my mortality into my daily consciousness despite my attempts to deny it. I was recently diagnosed with age related atria fibrillation, an irregularity in my heartbeat. I immediately went into denial and was angry at the doctors for even suggesting such a thing. After a series of tests and even a couple of electric shock treatments to "reset" my heart, I had to surrender to the reality that I am an aging mortal far beyond my "best used by" date. AFib probably won't kill me, but soon something surely will and I am consciously aware of this terrifying fact.
If we stop gaslighting and denying our mortality, we benefit by becoming more authentic and humane. Poet Mary Oliver says it well: "Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
"The Denial of Death" has been an important book for me as well. Although it was written long before the climate crisis became known, I've been wondering about its application to climate denial in the psychological sense. And thanks for quoting Mary Oliver. There's a longstanding Buddhist practice of reminding oneself of one's mortality every day -- something that now maybe for you is unnecessary... The point of course is not to fall into a pit of morbidity but face life fully and with more awareness of what really matters. And perhaps of what's really true, as you've described so eloquently here.
Thanks for your kind words and, yes, I do get a lot of daily reminders at my age of my mortality and frail humanity. But, that does not stop my busy mind of finding ways to deny reality and to generate all sorts of mental CGI (computer generated graphics). I guess it is is part of being human to want to deny our humanity.
I am reminded of a song ‘Old Folk Boogie’ by Little Feat:
Glad you are feeling better! When Covid began and people started telling me that they were afraid to get vaccinated, I also sympathized...a bit. Doctors have been wrong about so much during my lifetime: drugs like thalidomide (which caused catastrophic birth defects) and hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women (which caused cancer); the Dalcon shield IUD disaster; their insistence for decades that diet and lifestyle had nothing to do with heart disease; knocking women out during childbirth and ignoring the need for bonding between babies and mothers; discouraging breast feeding until the early 80s, and more. I grew up in a medical family, and I could see that doctors themselves were not healthy: my dad hardly slept, and both my parents smoked.
So when friends started expressing skepticism about the vaccine, I kind of understood, up to a point. But it's one thing to refuse a medical treatment that only affects you; it is another thing to refuse a vaccine when thousands of people were dying from an infectious disease epidemic! The thing that shocked me about vaccine refusal was that it showed a remarkable antisocial bent in so many people, as did refusing to wear a mask.
About physical health and world events: I think our minds, emotions, and bodies are more integrated than we realize. I don't have Lyme or long Covid, but the attacks on Israelis and the subsequent war, followed by the death of Navalny, plus some abuse at the hands of family members around Christmas exhausted me to the point that I started having small, and then bigger, "accidents," probably caused by stress. This has happened enough in the past that I recognize the syndrome now: if I'm emotionally upset, I start having accidents (unconsciously) in order to distract myself from the emotional pain. Fatigue is also a symptom of emotional distress for me.
Recently I found that yoga nidra helps a lot with the fatigue. I am also on a thirty day news fast that started a week ago. I feel better. I know that you can't really fast entirely from news because of your work, but maybe you can take breaks from it.
Another thing that helped me after the accidents was an app called Curable that helps you figure out the connections between your physical symptoms (especially pain) and your emotional situation. It is based on mindbody science, as pioneered by Dr John Sarno. Sarno mainly worked with patients who had back pain, but the connection between emotions and bodily symptoms is much broader than that. Sarno's big insight was that repressed rage was at the root of many health problems.
I also have chronic illness, and have been gaslighted by my doctors for years. I'm continually told that if I would just lose weight I would be cured. I feel for you.
Hello Jay! I am also fighting Lyme disease right now. I have been gaslighted as well. I have had Lyme for almost 5 years now. After 2 negative tests from my PCP and being told I was healthy, I was finally diagnosed with Lyme and Mold last June by my Functional Medicine nutritionist. There are alternatives out there. I started seeing a Naturopathic doctor who specializes in Lyme and due to health anxiety joined a healing, brain retraining program called Primal Trust. I truly appreciate your story as it is helpful to read about other’s experiences. Thank you so much for sharing. Take care, be well. Namaste.
Darn it, Jay, your opening sentences, and I thought you had found the cure for Lymes disease. My sister, Adele, is now confined to bed, in constant horrendous pain, after 30 years of living with Lymes. Her case is obviously more severe than yours; antibiotics don't do a thing for her. She's tried so many "cures" (including spending a month in Germany having her body overheated for long periods) and nothing has worked.
I am glad for you to be free of this monster, Lymes. You are one of the few lucky ones.
Same with Morgellon’s disease. If I hadn’t had it myself, I would have been skeptical too. But alas, it does exist and I struggled for a year and ended up treating it like Lyme disease, with 90 days of antibiotics and more. Slowly, I came back to myself. No more sores, excruciating fatigue, and brain fog that left me wondering if I would ever string together a coherent paragraph again.
Teaching humility in medical school…there is a mind-blowing and much needed idea. When you think about what it takes to get into medical school, you can see who ends up there. If you are the sensitive sort that acknowledges you have a lot of doubts/confusion about the world, you’re not going to medical school. In case you slip in, you’ll get hazed with 48 hour nonstop shifts (or something like this- I don’t know the details, even though I once thought id like to be a surgeon, I knew that I could never “hack it” in med school, pun intended). The experience of identifying oneself as a potential doctor, then training to be one necessitates certain survival mechanisms, it seems. Some of them are “be right, all the time (even if you’re not sure)” and “know more than your patient (even though you don’t live in their body).” I feel for doctors as a damaged group of people; I wish we had a different way of training healers. And yes, there are other great healers outside of the mainstream medical establishment - and we as consumers often can’t access them due to the cost of going “alternative.”
Western medicine is powerful in an emergency, but can become detached and inhumane. I am fortunate to live near a teaching hospital and my primary care physician is a DO - doctor of osteopathy and integrative medicine open to alternative treatments. I still find ways to afford my Chinese medicine doctor who is wiser about the "subtle aspects" of the balance of health and healing. It is a blow to my retirement budget, but "if you don't have your health, you have nothing."
I feel this so much. Thank you for sharing. I hope you continue to feel good!
My father was an anesthesiologist. Several years ago, I had a surgery which required a full anesthetic. We were speaking about my experience, and he flat out told me that no one understands “how” anesthesia really works, only that it does work and in a mostly predictable and controllable way. But the actual mechanisms that allow certain drugs to render you unconscious and incapable of feeling pain are not well understood.
Pretty mind blowing that such an important part of medicine is an unknown.
That any medical doctor could be so sure that they “know”, when so much is not known, is frustrating. It is entirely ok to admit to your patient that you don’t know something, or are unsure of something. I wish they would also teach humility in medical school.
This isn't your main point, but my mind is now blown that no one really understands how anesthesia actually works?!
"We don’t know what we’re denying, because we’re denying it."
Yes, it seems we're our own worst enemies and much of our lives are lived in various states of denial and fear. Denial is a survival mechanism useful in proper doses, but lethal when overdosed. Obviously, collectively we have become full fledged denial junkies and have normalized our affliction.
A few years back while studying for a masters degree in psychology, I stumbled upon the Terror Management Theory based on the philosophical works of Ernest Becker and his book The Denial of Death. Basically, it states that humans developed the capacity to foresee our death - "mortality salience." This knowledge would incapacitate us with ennui and despair if not suppressed and sublimated. We have done so by creating "symbolic" lives of rituals, words and symbols which attempt to "cheat" our mortality and give god-like powers to our mental creations. A writer knows his words will live beyond him. An artist's image will persist well beyond the life of its creator. https://psychcentral.com/health/terror-management-theory#terror-management-theory
We are terrified and addicted to our denial of our mortality and have sublimated this terror to our subconscious. The problem arises when we are overwhelmed and our terror defenses dissolve leaving us in start awareness of our fragility and mortality. To regain hope and to pull out of our despair spiral we must grieve the "death" of our illusion of immortality and accept our humanity again.
Denial is the first step in the grief cycle - denial, bargaining, anger, surrender, and acceptance. The first three steps are dangerous because of the underlying denial of personal responsibility and feeling of victimhood - "it's not my fault, I can fix this, I am a victim of others' wrong-doings..." It is easy to get stuck and looping in the denial, bargaining, and anger cycle to avoid accepting personal responsibility and to "own" the situation of the moment. This is a powerful "dark night of the soul" moment of consciousness expansion and personal growth. It is not a conscious process, but a deep restructuring at the subconscious level. The final step is an integration of the new subconscious wisdom with our conscious mind.
I fortunately do not have a chronic disease, but I am old and experiencing a deterioration of my health and body bringing my mortality into my daily consciousness despite my attempts to deny it. I was recently diagnosed with age related atria fibrillation, an irregularity in my heartbeat. I immediately went into denial and was angry at the doctors for even suggesting such a thing. After a series of tests and even a couple of electric shock treatments to "reset" my heart, I had to surrender to the reality that I am an aging mortal far beyond my "best used by" date. AFib probably won't kill me, but soon something surely will and I am consciously aware of this terrifying fact.
If we stop gaslighting and denying our mortality, we benefit by becoming more authentic and humane. Poet Mary Oliver says it well: "Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
"The Denial of Death" has been an important book for me as well. Although it was written long before the climate crisis became known, I've been wondering about its application to climate denial in the psychological sense. And thanks for quoting Mary Oliver. There's a longstanding Buddhist practice of reminding oneself of one's mortality every day -- something that now maybe for you is unnecessary... The point of course is not to fall into a pit of morbidity but face life fully and with more awareness of what really matters. And perhaps of what's really true, as you've described so eloquently here.
Thanks for your kind words and, yes, I do get a lot of daily reminders at my age of my mortality and frail humanity. But, that does not stop my busy mind of finding ways to deny reality and to generate all sorts of mental CGI (computer generated graphics). I guess it is is part of being human to want to deny our humanity.
I am reminded of a song ‘Old Folk Boogie’ by Little Feat:
“You know you’re over the hill
When your mind makes a promise
That your body can’t fulfill…”
In case you never heard Laurie Anderson’s song about Walter Benjamin’s Angel
https://youtu.be/RGL2Ne0V9mI?si=1dCYnq_AaSsWVhKb
I'm a huge Laurie Anderson fan and yet hadn't heard this until now - thanks!
Glad you are feeling better! When Covid began and people started telling me that they were afraid to get vaccinated, I also sympathized...a bit. Doctors have been wrong about so much during my lifetime: drugs like thalidomide (which caused catastrophic birth defects) and hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women (which caused cancer); the Dalcon shield IUD disaster; their insistence for decades that diet and lifestyle had nothing to do with heart disease; knocking women out during childbirth and ignoring the need for bonding between babies and mothers; discouraging breast feeding until the early 80s, and more. I grew up in a medical family, and I could see that doctors themselves were not healthy: my dad hardly slept, and both my parents smoked.
So when friends started expressing skepticism about the vaccine, I kind of understood, up to a point. But it's one thing to refuse a medical treatment that only affects you; it is another thing to refuse a vaccine when thousands of people were dying from an infectious disease epidemic! The thing that shocked me about vaccine refusal was that it showed a remarkable antisocial bent in so many people, as did refusing to wear a mask.
About physical health and world events: I think our minds, emotions, and bodies are more integrated than we realize. I don't have Lyme or long Covid, but the attacks on Israelis and the subsequent war, followed by the death of Navalny, plus some abuse at the hands of family members around Christmas exhausted me to the point that I started having small, and then bigger, "accidents," probably caused by stress. This has happened enough in the past that I recognize the syndrome now: if I'm emotionally upset, I start having accidents (unconsciously) in order to distract myself from the emotional pain. Fatigue is also a symptom of emotional distress for me.
Recently I found that yoga nidra helps a lot with the fatigue. I am also on a thirty day news fast that started a week ago. I feel better. I know that you can't really fast entirely from news because of your work, but maybe you can take breaks from it.
Another thing that helped me after the accidents was an app called Curable that helps you figure out the connections between your physical symptoms (especially pain) and your emotional situation. It is based on mindbody science, as pioneered by Dr John Sarno. Sarno mainly worked with patients who had back pain, but the connection between emotions and bodily symptoms is much broader than that. Sarno's big insight was that repressed rage was at the root of many health problems.
I also have chronic illness, and have been gaslighted by my doctors for years. I'm continually told that if I would just lose weight I would be cured. I feel for you.
Hello Jay! I am also fighting Lyme disease right now. I have been gaslighted as well. I have had Lyme for almost 5 years now. After 2 negative tests from my PCP and being told I was healthy, I was finally diagnosed with Lyme and Mold last June by my Functional Medicine nutritionist. There are alternatives out there. I started seeing a Naturopathic doctor who specializes in Lyme and due to health anxiety joined a healing, brain retraining program called Primal Trust. I truly appreciate your story as it is helpful to read about other’s experiences. Thank you so much for sharing. Take care, be well. Namaste.
Thank you for sharing your story, Marcy! I was hopeful that my post would elicit comments like this. I'm rooting for you.
Darn it, Jay, your opening sentences, and I thought you had found the cure for Lymes disease. My sister, Adele, is now confined to bed, in constant horrendous pain, after 30 years of living with Lymes. Her case is obviously more severe than yours; antibiotics don't do a thing for her. She's tried so many "cures" (including spending a month in Germany having her body overheated for long periods) and nothing has worked.
I am glad for you to be free of this monster, Lymes. You are one of the few lucky ones.
Same with Morgellon’s disease. If I hadn’t had it myself, I would have been skeptical too. But alas, it does exist and I struggled for a year and ended up treating it like Lyme disease, with 90 days of antibiotics and more. Slowly, I came back to myself. No more sores, excruciating fatigue, and brain fog that left me wondering if I would ever string together a coherent paragraph again.