Journal of Sacred Work

   You can give medicine without compassion and still help someone feel better. But you can’t give medicine compassionately without feeling better yourself. – Erie Chapman

   In the business and science-based world of modern health care, the person who raises the subject of love may be looked at with skeptical eyes. What does love have to do with profits? What does love have to do with curing disease?
   The odd thing about these questions is that if you ask business and science people to name anything more important than love they can’t do it. If love is so important, why do we view discussions of it as awkward in settings where care giving is essential?…

   We now know that a strong business case can be made for the wisdom of
love. Care givers treated with respect and encouragement are more
productive and creative than care givers who are ordered around like
robots. Patients treated with love develop a strong loyalty to the
organizations where they received it. But the case for love as scientifically effective has been harder to advance – even when we feel the impact of love in the face of the care giver in the photo above* (click on photo to enlarge).
   We can cure a broken leg without love, but loving caregivers never give disrespectful care to the person with a broken leg. A person with a compound, comminuted fracture of his or her left leg is likely to hurt in more places than the leg. The injured limb changes the quality of life, may impact earning power, and certainly affects the ability to get around.
   When we are injured, we hurt in more ways than physically. 
   What if the patient is a single parent with four small children at home? What if the leg was broken by an abusive spouse? And what if care givers dehumanize the patient with the broken leg as "the broken leg."
   In a letter to the editor of The New York Times, Barbara Tone spoke for many patients when she wrote:
   "In March, 2004, while in the hospital having a knee replacement, I asked a nurse when she thought I would go home. Without missing a beat, she replied, ‘Knees go home after four days.’ I remember feeling so hurt and angry. I had the instant image in my head that I was just a knew, sitting in my wheelchair, not a person, but a body part. It is a very painful memory."
   We can answer patient’s questions without love, but we can’t love and answer a patient’s question disrespectfully.
 
How can we lift compassion up so that it becomes as important to care givers as it is to their patients? The late Norman Cousins, author of the fascinating book, Anatomy of an Illness, offered hope when he wrote that "The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it with his means to nourish the former and outgrow the later."
  Will science one day be able to prove that compassion impacts a patient’s recovery? I believe that it will. Perhaps it already has and we haven’t yet appreciated this truth.
   Meanwhile, some may ask more practical questions – Why should I make the effort to reach out with compassion? What’s in it for me? For these people, the Dalai Lama may have the best answer: "If you want to make others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion."

-Erie Chapman

*The photo of caregiver and patient was taken at Yale-New Haven Hospital by my daughter, Tia, as part of her work for the Hartford Courant.

The photo of the Dalai Lama was taken during his visit to the University of Wisconsin Medical School and Hospital in 2001.