Who Are You and Why Have You Come?

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Is that a line from a movie?  No, it’s assignment #4 for Blogging 101, “Identify Your Audience: Publish a post you’d like your ideal audience member to read, and include a new-to-you element in it.”  Okay, here goes!

Welcome back, how was your week?  What phenomenal doctor-patient encounters did you experience, witness, or hear about since we last met?  What made them so?  Or maybe they were less than stellar…  I wouldn’t be surprised, unfortunately.  What made them so, and what can be done to make them better?

If you think the physician-patient relationship plays an essential role in our healthcare system and patients’ overall wellness, please read on.  If you think this relationship also plays a central role in physician wellness, welcome!  So do I.  Maybe you are a physician.  Most likely you have been a patient, or a patient’s family member, somewhere along the way.  I know you could be both.  It doesn’t matter, if you think the physician-patient relationship is important, and you want to help make it better for yourself and others, then I’m writing to you!

For a moment, think of our healthcare system as a vast, dense forest on a dark, moonless night.  It’s early fall in the Rockies, crisp and chilly tonight.  You are either the physician or the patient, and you are here alone, tasked with finding your counterpart, somewhere else in the forest.  Maybe you’ve never been here before, and you’re scared.  You’ve only heard about it, or walked through in virtual simulations.  Maybe you’ve hiked here many times already, and feel quite confident–cocky, even.  But every encounter in this forest is unique.  Insurance plans, drug formularies, government regulations, and technology can alter the topography like lightning strikes and wildfires–and almost as quickly.

The objective is to find your way to each other, and then journey together to the place in the forest where at least the patient can camp in health.  If you really work well together, then the doctor will also find solace in that spot.  What would that look like?  What will you need?

You’ll need to identify dangers in the forest–most of which you cannot control.  They will affect you both in different ways, and it will help if you know the potential consequences ahead of time, for yourself as well as the other.  You’ll need to learn each other’s strengths, vulnerabilities, tendencies, and talents.  You’ll need to know your own needs and limits, and those of your partner.  And wouldn’t it be great if you had a map and a plan?

I have just described the ideal physician-patient relationship.  How can we do all of this?  With tools, I say!  We would never enter a forest to camp at night without the appropriate gear.  So why do we so often enter the physician-patient relationship in this way?  Until very recently, physicians received almost no formal training on effective communication and interpersonal skills.  I think we were expected either to be thusly gifted by virtue of being smart enough to get into medical school, or to ‘pick it up’ along the way.  I also think patients’ expectations today vary so widely based on personal experience and circumstances, that sometimes it’s a miracle that we understand each other at all.

The tools I explore in this blog–mindfulness, compassion, empathy, reflective listening, patience, self-awareness, stress-management, collaboration, and others—are intended for patient and physician campers alike, but only the ones truly interested in achieving the objective above—finding one another, walking together, and finding the best place for both parties to set up camp and stay a while.

I seek fellow campers! Tell me your stories! Show me the tools that work for you! What have you learned? What advice have you for our frightened novices or frustrated (disillusioned, burned out, cynical) elders? Let us find one another, clear our own authentic spaces in the dark forest, and build our campsites intentionally, deliberately, with respect for one another and the forest ecosystem. Once we have our eco-friendly doctor-patient camps firmly established, maybe we can start to clean up the litter and pollution in the forest, too—but that might be another blog…

Who Am I and Why Am I Here?

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I’m a student again!  Blogging 101 is the first class I have taken in maybe decades.  This is my first assignment–Introduce Yourself to the World.

I’m a writer! Since I can remember, I’ve written. I learned about mail in second grade and cheerily wrote letters to our student teacher, Miss Bruce, all summer. I think postage was about $0.05 back then. I passed notes to friends in middle school. I looked forward to writing essays in high school, and always felt a rush as I typed them late at night. I submitted a paper on the contribution of Chinese workers to the Transcontinental Railroad to The Concord Review after graduation—ya gotta love writing to spend summer vacation doing that! Intermediate Composition, which I took in my junior year at Northwestern, taught by Charles Yarnoff, was a turning point for me. I learned that quarter the true great potential of words, and that I could wield them. That was 21 years ago, and this past winter, when I received the brochure for a writing conference for healthcare professionals at Harvard, my soul leapt for joy and I knew I stood at the threshold of something big. Thursday morning, before for the conference started, I had no intention of blogging. By Saturday afternoon I was scrambling to secure a domain name from my phone on the cab ride to the airport. It is time.

I’m a physician, wife, mom, daughter of immigrants, almost native Coloradoan, and lover of nature and Brad Paisley! Turns out, as I reflect, I’m also a connector. Growing up I merged Chinese and American culture into my own expression of self, which has served me well. At work I became interested in integrative medicine, and today I stand confidently with one foot each in the conventional and complementary medicine hemispheres. I can sit in a room with people from different backgrounds and with divergent interests, and find common goals.

I’m here on WordPress to connect patients and physicians again! Technology, pharmaceuticals, and large medical organizations all contribute greatly to the fight against disease and disability, but they often get in the way of the patient-physician relationship. And it is only our relationships that truly heal. I have a specific point of view on this (see my first post), and blogging allows me to express it freely, in hopes of connecting with others to share and discuss.

When I go home to Colorado, I like to visit Red Rocks, the renowned natural amphitheater. The great iron-laden land formations inspire and soothe me. Once I happened upon a Native American drumming circle on stage. It was the middle of a typically sunny Colorado day, with tourists milling about, and local athletes taking advantage of the seating steps for interval training. The timbre of the drumbeats impressed me, and vibrated to my core. This is how I see my blogging. I beat my drum to my own authentic rhythm. The blogosphere is my amphitheater, which I share with other drummers from around the world. When those striking resonant sound waves find me, we drum in coherence. Our collective rhythms synergize and create a movement of communication and mutual respect, toward the health and well-being of patients and physicians alike. Wouldn’t that be great?

If I keep it up, by one year from now, I hope my style and content will have matured a little.  I look forward to making more friends in the blogosphere, and learning about people’s experiences in our healthcare system.  I want to contribute to productive dialogue and mindfulness of the common humanity that, in my opinion, should lie at the heart of all healthcare.

Gratitude, Generosity and Peace

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How does gratitude serve you? When someone expresses thanks to you, how do you feel? When you feel genuinely grateful to someone, what do you do?

Recently Dan Rockwell posted on his blog, Leadership Freak, on gratitude. He writes:

“Ungratefulness spoils everything it touches.

“Ungratefulness slithers out of a black muck that’s called, ‘don’t like,’ ‘don’t want,’ ‘don’t have,’ and, ‘not enough.’  There is no positive side to the slimy beast of ungratefulness.”

This post reconnected some dots for me between gratitude and generosity.

When I feel grateful, there is enough. I am enough. Even just saying the word, seeing it on the screen, brings me to a more peaceful state of mind and body. It brings to mind the people in my life—my parents, husband, children, friends, colleagues. I recall instances when someone went above and beyond to help me, or when they thought of me and took to the time to call or write. I feel humble. I feel connected.  I want to share what I have with others.

Maybe it was seeing the words of ungratefulness, ‘not enough.’ It reminded me of my favorite book, The Art of Possibility, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. The authors make a distinction between scarcity and scarcity thinking. Scarcity is when there actually aren’t enough resources to meet everybody’s needs; scarcity thinking is operating as if this were the case, when it really isn’t. Scarcity thinking at its best may foster healthy competition and innovation, and at worst, aggression, indifference, or even violence. In contrast, the Zanders discuss the notion of abundance. If we lived and operated in a world we assumed to be abundant, or at least enough for our needs, what would that look like?

For example, the woman parked down the street does not have enough coins to feed the meter. She asks me if I have change for a dollar. If money between us were actually scarce, then it would make sense to have an equal transaction—she gives me her dollar bill, I give her four quarters. In a world where we each need to look out for our own, we cannot afford to give anything away for free. But that is scarcity thinking, because I have spare change. Sure, I could spend those quarters to buy a candy bar later; or instead, I could trade them for human connection. If I stop even briefly to think about it, I know which one is the higher value purchase. But it’s not about buying gratitude from someone else.   It’s about the origin of generosity.

That peace that comes with thankfulness is the antithesis of scarcity. When I needed coins for my meter, and a stranger gives me her spare change, it shows me that there is good in the world. I can seek the help of strangers and they will offer it. And if that’s the case, how much more wonderful when I think of my amazing tribe of friends and family who stand ready to hold me up, as I do them? I feel safe. There is enough. So I can give away what I have today, because I know I will get what I need tomorrow, or whenever I need it.

When we practice gratitude, we practice peace. We exude it. It manifests in our expressions and actions. Gratitude makes us creative, by lifting the need to hoard and compete. We come together, collaborate, look for our common passions and visions. We offer more of ourselves to others because we have faith that they will do the same. We know because they did it before—that is why we are grateful.

For a much more eloquent and important view on gratitude, please read David Brooks’s most recent op-ed: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/opinion/david-brooks-the-structure-of-gratitude.html