Good Health Medicine

The most powerful image that comes to mind of Patch Adams is when he is in Afghanistan, dressed in yellow with red spots, a duck hat and a seriously injured boy in his arms.

The amputated boy is blind in one eye and laughs his head off while warm tears roll down Patch’s face.

The scene of the film depicts Patch’s deep nature: compassion, the interruption of “dysfunctional prescriptions”, the regaining of vital energy. A Medicine for Health and not for ILLNESS.

Many of us think that there should be hospitals and clinics orientated towards VITAL ENERGY instead of Illness, but they are only words because we each have a concept of the word “health” which is distorted and invalidated by the concept of “illness”.

We think that illness is a “demon” that needs to exorcised and that a “wizard” needs to give us a “magic potion” which will exorcise the demon and make him go away. We are very disappointed when our Curing Wizard does not give us the magic potion and we decide to go to another one, and even another one, until we are given the right potion.

To change approach to the illness and look at it with a “healthy” point of view, we need to change paradigm, the basis to concepts such as “illness”, “disadvantage”, “symptom”, “diagnosis”, “therapy”, “medicine”, “cure”, “recovery”: until we agree on a DEFINITE definition of these terms, the approach to illness with always be a “military” type approach (with “soldier” type medicines to fight the illness/demon).

Furthermore, the hospitals themselves (like in the scene of the film) are filled with colors, sounds, smells and tastes that are completely associated to pain and sickness. They are, in fact, Cathedrals of Pain in which the patients of the various wards exchange incredible stories, shown each other wounds, stitches and suchlike, and compare (often without listening to the other person) experiences in hospital.

So what does Patch Adams do for the first time in the Western world since the birth of medicine? He creates attention to the PERSON who is suffering and not on the illness, on the SOLUTION and not on the PROBLEM.

In his way of thinking, the patients have a NAME (which is repeated as often as possible!) and not a bed number or illness (“the tumor of bed 16”); they have DREAMS, EMOTIONS, and – above all – the RESOURCES TO GET BETTER.

To make this giant step, we must first avoid popping down self-prescribed pills (“last year I took this and it made me feel a lot better”) to “exorcise” the “illness” demon that keeps us in bed and gives us runny noses. The time has come for us to listen to our own bodies, our own Interior Voices, our own dreams.

It would be difficult to see a happy and satisfied person in the corridor of a hospital and therefore instead of strengthening hospitals, it would be better to strengthen the dreams of the people in them and help them to fulfill them.

Furthermore, having basics of Traditional Chinese Medicine, I believe that the most functional approach is not “fighting the illness”, but “enlarging health”, being as the body of a sick person is mostly healthy and functional and your body KNOWS how to get back in balance.

Naturally, this is without counting our daily healthy routines which do more good to our well-being than any medicine.

Therefore, in order for US to be the change that we want to see in the world, we must acquire a new Model of Health, based on healthy diets and exercise, humor, passion and respect for yourselves and for the messages given by our bodies.

Furthermore, when we go to visit someone in hospital, we must go with a smile, give them a pat on the back and transmit vitality: we must tell the patients the positive stories we know (like: “my cousin has had the same operation and now he is in perfect shape!”), we must give them hope and support, remind them that there is a world outside full of infinite possibilities waiting for their recovery and return.

Not only physical.

Max Damioli