The Medical System
5 January
2004
THE MEDICAL RENAISSANCE
GROUP
Dear Friends
I must apologize for my
rather emotional outburst regarding illness and morbidity caused by hospital errors.
I would like to point out that I have deep respect for the altruism and
dedication of all my Doctor colleagues. Medicine probably includes every
discipline under the sun but has as its common pathway the relief of suffering
of all human Beings. As The Buddha Nichiren Dai Shonin said
However, life itself is the most precious of all treasures. Even the
treasures of the entire universe cannot equal the value of a single human life.
Life is like a lamp, and food like oil. When the oil is gone, the flame will
die out, and without food, life will cease
To practice Medicine
requires empathy ,compassion ,healing ability ,understanding of the nature of
life ,empathy ,tolerance ,love, creative thought, quick decisions and an
enormous sympathy for human vulnerability. None of us start this way. It is an
enormous learning curve.
Ina way we are still in the
dark ages
The story of Semmelweis is instructive
Ignaz Semmelweis, a young Hungarian doctor working in the
obstetrical ward of Vienna General Hospital in the late 1840s, was dismayed at
the high death rate among his patients. He had noticed that nearly 20% of the
women under his and his colleagues’ care in "Division I" of the ward
(that is, the division attended by physicians and male medical students) died
shortly after childbirth. This phenomenon had come to be known as
"childbed fever."
In an effort to curtail the deaths in his ward due to childbed fever, Semmelweis instituted a strict handwashing
policy amongst his male medical students and physician colleagues in
"Division I" of the ward. Everyone was required to wash their hands
with chlorinated lime water prior to attending patients. Mortality rates
immediately dropped from 18.3% to 1.3% and, in fact, not a single woman died from
childbirth between March and August of 1848 in Semmelweis’
division. Despite the dramatic reduction in the mortality rate in Semmelweis’ ward, his colleagues and the greater medical
community greeted his findings with hostility or dismissal. Even after
presenting his work on childbed fever (more technically referred to as
puerperal sepsis) to the Viennese Medical Society, Semmelweis
was not able to secure the teaching post he desired, and so he returned to
Perhaps we have a similar
situation today. Doctors dedicated and devoted to their profession are not
trained firstly in the Art of healing and secondly in the Nutritional,
environmental and Mind Body Medicine which can prevent and also cure disease in
an optimal fashion especially if combined judicially with allopathic medicine.
Thirdly the hospital system is an alienating process probably for the Doctors
who work there as well as the patients who become quickly institutionalised.
The pressure on Doctors and Nurses is intense. In Casualties Nursing Staff are
harassed and sometimes attacked by patients. The organisation of the conveyor
belt system of operating lists and treatments and imaging is enormous. Changes
of staff on shifts and a patient being seen or put under different Doctors
means the flow of information is not there as the patient is not seen as a
whole Human Being but as an ill Organ or a
Sincerely
Michael Ellis
Yahoo! Groups Links