How does spirituality help cope with today’s stresses?
This week I have had another blog posted by The Independent. It is titled Facing Modern-Day Stress with Time-Tested Tools. It takes a look at the spiritual angle on dealing with today’s added stresses.
Here is an excerpt from the article.
Boxed in? – by Tony Lobl
“Some researchers into stress have been digging a little deeper into the surrounding question of whether there is actually an advantage to believing there is a divine ear listening at the other end of those prayers.
A University of Michigan study into “Gratitude Toward God, Stress, and Health in Late Life” found positive results for that gratitude, especially for older women who are more likely to feel grateful to God than older men. “The results revealed that the effects of stress (e.g. living in a deteriorated neighborhood) on health are reduced for older people who feel more grateful to God”.
Gratitude to God can also de-stress men, young people and those who live in pleasant suburbs…
The healing art of listening
A patient recently told researchers investigating the importance of “proactive care” that time spent with their nurse “was worth 100 prescriptions.”
Thinkstock/models for illustrative purposes only
This intriguing remark helped those behind the study conclude significant benefits can result from a more holistic approach to caring for those suffering from chronic and recurring depression.
The 3-year investigation, entitled ProCEED and jointly conducted by MIND and the Royal College of Nursing, found this method resulted in better mental health and a notable “improvement in social functioning” for people living with depression.
The results were conclusive enough that a new training pack for nurses has now been produced.
The research involved each patient having up to ten in-person appointments with a practice nurse over two years.
One of six key findings was that “attending all 10 sessions can lead to significant improvement in the severity of depression and a significant increase in social functioning.”
The researchers also reported that the new approach provided patients with vital aspects of care they felt were lacking in “many” GP consultations – more time, “excellent listening skills” and an “empathic, non-judgemental manner”.
Speaking of such benefits, nurse Kate O’Brien, who took part in the research, said: “If I am checking notes for any reason and the person is someone I have worked with on ProCEED it is such a positive feeling to see that they have not needed to restart their antidepressants or that they have only had a couple of GP consultations in the last year. It reinforces the impression of making a difference.”
Nurses from a total of 42 general practices were given the special training aimed at offering patients “proactive, enhanced levels of care”.
“The most important thing was listening, really listening to pick up what patients were trying to tell you,” O’Brien said.
In many healing disciplines, the art of listening to the patient and listening intuitively for inspiration is seen as an essential approach to helping those who are sick.
Doing so requires time, but it also needs a commitment of the heart to listen.
Here are three ways I have found to improve my own listening skills:
1. Get used to listening to others. Don’t wait until a need becomes acute before doing so. Make it an everyday practice with family, friends and strangers.
2. Make space at the start of each day for quiet time alone with your thoughts. If we daily find a comfort level in quietness that opens us up to deeper insights we will be better prepared to help others in their time of need.
3. If you can, focus your thoughts and take stock of your mental landscape to exclude negative traits like impatience, resentment and guilt. Nurture instead qualities such as gratitude, humility and kindness.
In such ways people from all walks of life can cultivate the ability and willingness to be more pro-active in caring for others, and will find the listener, too, benefits from doing so.
Author and management consultant Meg Wheatley puts it this way: “Listening moves us closer, it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy.”
In “Psychology Today” – Is There a Way to Ease Those Anxieties?
I have had a blog of mine published as a “guest posting” in Psychology Today as Is There a Way to Ease Those Anxieties?
Thanks to Madora Kibbe for generously sharing her (blogging) space!
Thinkstock/Hemera Technologies/AbleStock - Model for illustrative purposes only
Does acute or chronic anxiousness need to be an ongoing part of our life? Or is there a way to reduce our general anxiety level?
A paper published in the July edition of the Journal of Clinical Psychology has concluded that people who believe in a benevolent God tend to worry less and are more tolerant than those who believe in an indifferent or punishing God.
The findings were based on one study of Christians and Jews and another of Jews alone….
Intuition in the practice of medicine..and in the medicine of spiritual practice
In my most recent blog on the Huffington Post UK - called Medical Mistakes and the Intuition Factor - an amazingly courageous and forthright doctor spills the beans about errors in medical practice, but touches on a quality that might make a difference. Here is an excerpt from the article.
Thinkstock/Jupiter images/Goodshoot - model for illustrative purposes only
How then can the element of “human error” be kept to a minimum?
In recounting his story of Mrs Drucker, Dr Goldman touched on a quality which he clearly felt would have made all the difference that day: the humility to trust intuition.
He recalled that in sending her home prematurely he “disregarded a little voice, deep down inside, that was trying to tell me ‘Goldman, [that's] not a good idea, don’t do this’”.
A comment posted by another physician about her own Med School experience echoes this need to listen to that intuitive sense. “I was never warned against my inner voice during my training, just that intuition should be backed by study, sound medical evidence, and experience.”
The acknowledgment that an “inner voice” and knowledge are both viable components of health care is significant…
What next after the “end of modern medicine”?
This week I have had a blog posted by that great British newspaper The Independent. It titled the article Could the mind play a bigger role in healthcare? It is written in response to a rather stark announcement by the World Health Organisation Director about the state of things to come when antibiotics fail to deliver in the future.
Here is an excerpt from the article.
Thinkstock/John Foxx/Stockbyte - scientists say anti-biotics are losing the battle to super-resistant bugs because of over prescribing and usage in general goods.
“A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it,” she told the meeting.
Anyone reading these reports – and the WHO’s recently released book on the subject – could be forgiven for thinking we face a very uncertain future indeed.
But could it be a storm cloud with a silver lining? Might there be fresh approaches to health care waiting in the wings as the so-called “miracle medicine” of antibiotics apparently passes its use-by date?…
Is awakening from a dream the doctor’s prescribed cure?
Thinkstock/Comstock
“Have you noticed how everything seems a little impersonal nowadays? We have all become user names, reference numbers and IP addresses.”
Thus spake Starbucks in their latest ad, unveiled last Tuesday. But they have a remedy.
“From now on,” they promised, “We won’t refer to you as a latte, or a mocha, but as your folks intended: by your name!”
That’s progress in the coffee shop. Speaking as the Frappucino with an iPad in the Next store Starbucks in Kingston upon Thames, I appreciate this recognition of my individuality.
(Author’s note – no “product placement” fees have been received in the production of this blog….unfortunately!)
The ad says, “Hey, we realise this is only a little thing”. And that’s a point well taken.
But in other circumstances how we are identified as service users is far from trivial.
In hospital wards over many decades individuals have complained of being referred to by their disease rather than by their name.
I was at a talk a while back where a doctor confessed he didn’t realise how soul-destroying that would feel until he himself became “the cancer in bed 3″. Thankfully he survived and was determined to see things done differently.
London GP Dr Mabel Aghadiuno pinpoints this need to have a more holistic view of patients in her recent book ”soul matters”.
She writes: “Each individual is unique and holism underlines this uniqueness. Holism sees people as parts of a family, culture and community and regards people as entities with physical, psychological, sociocultural and spiritual aspects.”
Such a change in attitude on the part of medical practitioners is important to the patient because there is a lot more involved in identity than just a choice of labels.
Our identity is best defined by our qualities of character, especially the ones expressing those “spiritual aspects” which can strengthen our resolve when struggling with sickness.
Dr Aghaduino quotes a survey which explored this. It found one of the main reasons patients felt “spiritually distressed” in hospital was because of an anguished sense of “not being myself”.
Perhaps this “spiritual distress” is to some degree disquiet at being categorised by others according to our complaints.
But maybe it also indicates a deeper identity issue – namely, that we inherently feel disease is no legitimate part of us but feels like a bad dream from which we want to awaken.
This was an idea recently floated by a doctor when a friend’s husband visited him for an annual physical.
Her husband had been struck by polio as a 16 year-old and since then he’d had a difficult time walking. Now in his 80s, he could no longer walk at all. At the end of the check-up he told the doctor he was having a recurring dream of getting up in the middle of the night and freely walking into the bathroom and back to bed.
The doctor’s response was surprising.
“We don’t know which is real – your dream or this world. Either could be real. It may be that you really can walk and this is the dream.”
That sense of “is this is a dream or is it reality?” was what I used to think watching the classic TV seriesThe Prisoner.
In his struggle for freedom Patrick McGoohan’s lead character, “Number Six”, famously proclaimed: “I am not a number, I am a free man!”
In the struggle for health, we can assert, “I am not a disease, I am free” and test the doctor’s premise that maybe the incapacity is the dream.
If so, it doesn’t mean awakening will always come easy. Like “Number Six” trying to flee from The Village, it might be a long struggle to shake off an accepted, strictly physical sense of ourselves with which we have become all too familiar.
But striving to do so is worth it, not just to feel better but to have a clearer sense of what it means to be spiritual – to wake up and discover who we actually are.
This blog was first published on the Huffington Post UK as Questions of Identity in Sickness and in Health. If you like it, please share or “like” it from the HuffPost UK page to help it gain traction with the widest possible audience. Thanks!
Is Hope “the Most Potent Medicine of All?”
The “gods in white coats” era is over.
And many physicians would be the first to say “amen” to that.
As family practitioner Dr. Andrew D. Saal has put it: “We as doctors are essentially powerless over the unknown, just as we are powerless over everyday events. No gods walk in white coats. For physicians, the deepest unspeakable fear is inadequacy. Despite our best efforts, we may not be good enough”.
The way doctor-patient relationships have evolved was pinpointed recently in the House of Lords by Lord Walton, an experienced neurologist and physician.
The crossbench peer pointed out that all medical bodies, including the British Medical Association and General Medical Council, “now agree that the days of doctor’s orders are long past.”
He further explained: “The practice of medicine is a partnership in which it is up to the doctor to recommend to the patient what course of action is most appropriate in the patient’s best interests; what it is appropriate to do in order to reach a diagnosis; what tests are appropriate in order to achieve that diagnosis; and what course of treatment would then be necessary. However, it is up to the patient to decide whether or not to accept that advice and it is not possible for a doctor to carry out a test without the informed consent of the patient.”
Clearly it takes more than a mandate from on high to bring about such a course correction in medical care. A change of heart is required on the part of both patient and doctor.
Patients need to find the self-confidence to trust their own judgment without over-compensating and becoming overbearing.
And according to Boston-based surgeon and writer Dr Atul Gawande clinicians need to find more humility.
“It is not possible for an individual to know everything,” Dr Gawande pointed out at a recent TED talk, and so “each doctor is a specialist now, even primary physicians”. He said that has been a disaster because as medicine becomes too specialised mistakes multiply.
“We have amazing clinicians, and access to incredible technologies, but our experience is that it rarely comes together successfully”. To “admit humility” was a key factor in improving outcomes for the patients.
Specifically he gave the example of a need for surgeons to have the humility to use a “checklist” on each operation.
To road-test this approach Dr Gawande implemented a 19-point plan in eight hospitals from Western Africa to the West Coast of the United States.
The results? Post-surgical complications dropped by 30% and the death rate fell by 47%.
This illustrates something relevant in all walks of life – humility is needed as a helpful safeguard against making mistakes.
In times of need, though – especially when one’s health is on the line – the heart cries out for more than just a “less bad” prospect. It demands a real and reliable hope.
Where can one look for that?
In attending to the needs of a Navajo patient Dr Saal watched as his charge’s relatives added prayer and natural remedies to the Western medicine he was administering. As they waited together for progress, he noted: “…far beyond the realm of antibiotics and technology, both the family and the medical staff are trying to grasp the most potent medicine of all — hope. Because if disease may occur on the spiritual plane as well as the physical, then so must healing.”
In my own practice, centred on identifying that spiritual plane as the solid substance of the patient’s individuality – rather than a wispy echo of it – I, too, have found hope and humility to be powerful healing agents. Like ladders connecting consciousness to an unseen divine source they facilitate the inner appearing of insightful ideas which in turn facilitate outer recovery.
Those noble men and women “in white coats” can gratefully and gracefully relinquish the burden of bearing a deific label that can never be earned by even the best of human efforts.
And as the name returns to the exclusive domain of the One who wears it with eternal grace, hope will have a more potent object to gaze upon in the heart that yearns for healing.
This is my most recent blog on the Huffington Post UK - published as Is Hope “the Most Potent Medicine of All?” If you like it, please share or “like” it from the HuffPost UK page to help it gain traction with the widest possible audience. Thanks!
Images: Thinkstock/PhotoObjects.net/Hemera Technologies – model for illustrative purposes only.
¿La “medicalización de la normalidad” o la normalización de la Salud? Vamos a elegir con inteligencia
This is a Spanish translation by María Alexandra Higuera of my 12/02/12 Huffington Post UK blog The Medicalisation of Normality or the Normalisation of Health – Let’s Choose Wisely. Thanks Maria!
Thinkstock/IS Stock/Valueline - model for illustrative purposes only
Ayer eras tímido, afligido, apático, excéntrico.
Hoy en día tienes una enfermedad mental.
Pero no te preocupes. Nada ha cambiado excepto algunas nuevas etiquetas que aparecen en la próxima edición de un manual de trastornos mentales que será publicado por la American Psychiatric Association.
¿O deberíamos preocuparnos? El volumen en cuestión es internacionalmente “influyente” y muchos psicólogos y psiquiatras no están contentos con sus listados de nuevas propuestas de enfermedad mental. Algunos se reunieron en una conferencia aquí en Londres la semana pasada para decirlo.
Afirmaron que categorías recientemente identificadas en el manual de diagnóstico eran en el mejor de los casos “tontas” y en el peor “preocupantes y peligrosas”, según Reuters. “No es humano, no es científico, y no va a ayudar a decidir qué tipo de ayuda es la que una persona necesita”, dijo Peter Kinderman, quien dirige el Instituto de Psicología de la Universidad de Liverpool.
Como la red de diagnóstico está siendo lanzada cada vez más ampliamente, un estudio ha demostrado que el uso de “medicalese” para etiquetar un “trastorno poco medicalizado” conduce a un cambio en la percepción del público de esa condición.
Karin Humphreys, profesora asistente del Departamento de Psicología, Neurociencia y Comportamiento de McMaster –una de los autores del estudio– dijo: “un montón de condiciones se han convertido recientemente en medicalizables, algunas de ellas posiblemente por la influencia de las compañías farmacéuticas, que quieren hacerte pensar que tienes una enfermedad que tendrá que ser tratada con un medicamento”.
Ése no es siempre el más sabio curso de acción. Como un artículo del British Medical Journal pone: “un creciente escrutinio de lo aparentemente bien intencionada de la marcha de la medicalización sugiere que a veces podemos empujarnos a límites demasiado amplios, y al establecimiento de umbrales bajo tratamiento, que las personas con problemas leves o con riesgos moderados están expuestos a los daños y costos de tratamiento con poco o ningún beneficio”.
Un artículo de opinión de LA Times, por el profesor de medicina H. Gilbert Welch concuerda con esa visión, y añade: “Los umbrales bajo diagnóstico llevan a las personas que se sienten bien a ser etiquetadas como enfermas. No es de sorprender, que algunos subsecuentemente se sientan menos bien”.
Si simplemente ser etiquetados como “enfermos” a veces lo hace así, esto indica una influencia que nuestras mentes pueden tener sobre nuestros cuerpos. Y, de hecho, los investigadores están explorando cada vez más el impacto de la esperanza de los pacientes en los resultados de salud.
Pero si un cambio de mentalidad nos puede enfermar, ¿podría un cambio de pensamiento lograr el inverso, y prevenir la enfermedad?
¿Con cuánta frecuencia, por ejemplo, no nos encontramos pensando: “Voy a agarrar un resfriado”, basado en un conjunto de circunstancias que la opinión médica y nuestra experiencia nos han entrenado para asociar con ese resultado?
¿Qué pasaría si, en cambio, estaríamos tomando el pensamiento en el primer intento cuando intenta cruzar nuestro umbral mental y “acordar estar en desacuerdo” con él?
Esta frase concisa pero de gran alcance es un consejo sobre cómo hacer frente al acercarse a los síntomas de la enfermedad basados en un modelo espiritual de la salud como normal. Ellos son de la autora Mary Baker Eddy, construidos sobre las palabras pronunciadas por Jesús.
Poco después de la primera lectura de este enfoque sobre las necesidades espirituales de cuidado de sí mismo, traté de aplicarlo cuando síntomas familiares estaban agitando, con la promesa de pescar un resfriado en los próximos días.
Hice una pausa en lo que estaba haciendo, noté al miedo presentarse en mi pensamiento, y decidí que tenía el mismo derecho y la oportunidad, para excluir de la puerta del pensamiento a esa “profecía” de cosas por venir.
Eso fue todo lo que hice y el resfriado nunca se desarrolló. Esos primeros síntomas rápidamente se alejaron.
No siempre ha sido tan fácil. No siempre atrapaba al pensamiento acercándose o cerraba de golpe la puerta mental cuando yo realmente veía esto venir. Sin embargo, en estas dos décadas desde entonces, he experimentado resfriados con mucha menos frecuencia –agradecido por la libertad física y por lo que esto me ha sugerido: la salud es normal.
No es claramente incorrecto querer hacerse menos tímido, liberarse de la pena o quitarse impulsos de ser un telespectador pasivo. Y la acción apropiada es seguramente necesaria si tales condiciones se hacen agudas o crónicas.
Sin embargo, la “medicalización de la normalidad” –como un programa de la BBC lo describió– no es inevitable. La capacidad inherente y el derecho a reconocer la salud como una condición normal –nuestro status quo espiritual– tarde o temprano, pondrá en evidencia la tendencia opuesta a las condiciones, cada vez más a ser encontradas por un cambio de mentalidad que por prescripción de una serie de medicamentos.
Siga a Tony Lobl en Twitter: @ www.twitter.com/ tonylobl
International Women’s Day 2012 – Beauty Without Drugs
Every March 8 the world celebrates International Women’s Day. The 2012 theme is: “Connecting girls, inspiring futures”. One thing that can seem to disconnect any of us from recognising our full potential for a future of accomplishment is a heightened sense of needing to conform to physical stereotypes of what it means to be beautiful.
In my most recent blog on the Huffington Post UK - called Detox the Botox Mentality - I have shared one young woman’s story of finding a better way to think about, and act on, the desire to be beautiful. Here an excerpt from the article.
(Please “FB share”, “tweet”, “email” “G+″ it or “FB like” it from the HuffPost UK page…!)
Thinkstock/Stockbyte - model for illustration only
Your bags will be on carousel B – that’s ‘B’ for Botox”.
This quip from the Virgin Atlantic flight service manager got a laugh from the passengers as we touched down in the City of Angels, Los Angeles, where agelessness is often at a premium.
But to many of Hollywood’s finest – and to the rest of us – staving off evidences of mortality is no joke, as the statistics show.
Last year Botox alone pulled in $0.7 billion dollars in America for its cosmetic uses. (It made as much again for its use as a medicine.) Its popularity continues to grow even in hard times, according to the Financial Times.
Its Pharmaceuticals section reported: “Sales of Botox continue to be robust in the US despite a sluggish economy, as ageing US citizens increasingly turn to the wrinkle-erasing medicine to preserve their youthful appearances”.
That speaks to the pressure being so widely felt to cheat the mortal coil and turn back the clock on our years.
In the stratosphere of stardom there are, of course, other ways to claim a tiny slice of immortality – like getting a five-pointed terrazzo and brass star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Here is a favourite star of mine immortalised in the Hollywood Boulevard sidewalk.
The Duke once offered a thought that has resonated with me since I first read it. Asked to analyse his music he pointed out if you cut up a rose to learn how it works you no longer have the beautiful rose.
Could there be a “Botox mentality” that is the self-image equivalent of that?
A friend of mine encountered something of the kind when she interviewed to be a model. The agency director offered words which cut like a scalpel. She recalls: “My hair was the wrong color for my complexion, my nose was too big, my eyes were too small, my mouth was out of proportion, my neck was too long, and so on”.
She adds: “It was devastating! I didn’t cry then, but I sure did when I got out to my car. When I arrived home I went directly to a mirror to confirm all of her criticisms.”
Most of us don’t need a model agency’s opinion to encourage fears of physical inadequacy. That mirror is enough in itself.
But is injecting a toxin, or any chemical, the most appealing or effective way of getting together a more beautiful you? One of the quirky side effects attributed to Botox is it also causes wrinkles.
That friend found a different way to nurture a sense of being beautiful, one that wasn’t effort-free but was painless and pay-less. She changed how she evaluated her self-image. Instead of asking her body or that inner critic she asked some more searching questions.
Walking through an art museum, she asked herself why it was that what is considered desirable differs from culture to culture and in the eyes of various artistic beholders?
And as a Bible reader, she asked herself why physical descriptions of characters in the Scriptures are at best sparse, if there at all. She noted it is spiritual qualities – goodness, wisdom, etc – which are used to identify them.
My friend concluded that physical beauty is “a series of passing phases not the most important thing in life”, and started a daily discipline of praying to know how to grow more beautiful in character.
Becoming more joyful, vibrant, kind, humble and unselfish – instead of critical, ungrateful, unkind, lazy or apathetic – became the focus of her self-image “rather than the physical attributes”.
A few years later the same agency director saw my friend – now a broadcaster – without remembering their earlier encounter. This time her former tormentor was profuse with positive comments on her look and presence.
What had changed?
As my friend says of the encounter: “I was looking in the mirror of character and even she could see the effects. It never was about too big, too small, too long, too anything.”
No stranger to beauty herself, Sophia Loren – another star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame - echoes my friend’s findings: “Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.”
Before buying into the self-dissecting Botox mentality you might just want to pause and look into a different mirror. Take a spiritual measure of the unique qualities which make you invaluable to your Creator and to your family, friends and other neighbours.
You might just discover a truly beautiful you.
Feeding “the Hungry Heart” with Health and Happiness
Eight thousand Swiss people can’t be wrong.
Some might wish they had been, though, according to a study in a science journal.
Researchers in Switzerland found those who viewed their health negatively at the beginning of a 30-year surveillance period proved more likely to fall ill or die during that time span than those who felt the opposite.
Even when researchers took into account risk factors like smoking and medical history the correlation between expectancy and experience remained.
Scientific American reported that men of the same age group who had rated their health as “very poor” were more than three times as likely to die than those who originally rated their health as “excellent”. For women “the odds almost doubled”.
The Scientific American article concluded, “Maybe optimism also helps keep the doctor away.”
Maybe. But optimism versus pessimism isn’t an exact formula. Film director Woody Allen is living proof that not all the world’s health pessimists pass on at an earlier age. His health outlook is: “I’m not a hypochondriac, I’m an alarmist”. But to the relief of his fans he has lived to tell his tales for over three quarters of a century, right up to his Oscar-winning script for Midnight in Paris.
Nevertheless, noting the trend of those Swiss statistics prompts questions. On what basis did those who gave their health a positive rating do so? Why should it have made such a difference?
The research itself doesn’t spell that out. But some in the medical profession can offer a helpful perspective.
Best-selling author Bernie Siegel MD, speaking from years of experience as a physician “who has cared for and counselled innumerable people whose mortality has been threatened by illness”, says: “The simple truth is that happy people generally don’t get sick”.
Could that be so? Why should the happy get a bonus for being happy when the unhappy, if anything, need it more? That would seem so unfair.
Except that Dr. Siegel is not referring to the kind of circumstantial happiness dependent on a successful pursuit of pricey pills and possessions or privileged access to particular people and places. He is not even pointing to those more populist “reasons to be cheerful” which punk rocker Ian Dury so poetically articulated.
Dr. Siegel is referring to a happines accessible by anyone, even in trying times, through inner attitude rather than outer events.
And that can come as a relief, given the highs and lows we can sometimes experience when looking for love leads to rocky relationships.
My favourite definition of this more consistent kind of happiness is: “Conscious worth satisfies the hungry heart and nothing else can”. The author of those words, Mary Baker Eddy, also said of this spiritual basis for happiness: “It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it”.
I have come to see the type of conscious worth that encourages unselfishness as revealing more of what we all include – an inherent wholeness. This becomes more apparent as we moderate the sort of stimulation we sometimes tend to pursue, the kind that at best only intermittently delivers the happiness it promises.
That’s not to say there isn’t room for enjoying life. There’s nothing wrong with taking in a Woody Allen movie, being hit with Ian Dury’s “rhythm stick”, hanging out with friends and family and, of course, falling in love.
But by accepting that the healthiest happiness is what we bring to the table rather than what we hope to take from it we can begin feasting right away and continue as consistently as our resolve permits.
Doing so – I have frequently found – can open one’s own eyes to the good one’s heart is naturally yearning for.
Now that is fair.
This blog was first published on the Huffington Post UK.
And here is Ian Dury singing “Reasons to be Cheerful (Part 3)”.
