In this book an eminent physician explores how patients and caring doctors can help lessen suffering when illness occurs. Dr. Howard Spiro urges that physicians focus on their patients' feelings of pain and anxiety as well as on physical symptoms. He also suggests that patients and their doctors be receptive to the emotional relief that may be obtained from nature and from hope.
Drawing on his previous highly praised work on the doctor-patient relationship and the problem of pain, Dr. Spiro tells how people can be helped by a combination of alternative medicine and mainstream medicine-a treatment of mind, body, and spirit that energizes patients, strengthens their expectations, and starts them on the road to feeling better. In various forms of alternative medicine, from meditation to massage, from faith healing to folk medicine, from herbology to homeopathy, practitioners heed patients' complaints and help them to help themselves. Dr. Spiro encourages physicians to talk and listen to their patients as much as they look and measure, to treat the whole patient and not just the disease, and to integrate a scientific approach to medicine with alternative approaches that may alleviate pain and suffering.
In this book an eminent physician explores how patients and caring doctors can help lessen suffering when illness occurs. Dr. Howard Spiro urges that physicians focus on their patients' feelings of pain and anxiety as well as on physical symptoms. He also suggests that patients and their doctors be receptive to the emotional relief that may be obtained from nature and from hope.
Drawing on his previous highly praised work on the doctor-patient relationship and the problem of pain, Dr. Spiro tells how people can be helped by a combination of alternative medicine and mainstream medicine-a treatment of mind, body, and spirit that energizes patients, strengthens their expectations, and starts them on the road to feeling better. In various forms of alternative medicine, from meditation to massage, from faith healing to folk medicine, from herbology to homeopathy, practitioners heed patients' complaints and help them to help themselves. Dr. Spiro encourages physicians to talk and listen to their patients as much as they look and measure, to treat the whole patient and not just the disease, and to integrate a scientific approach to medicine with alternative approaches that may alleviate pain and suffering.
Howard Spiro, M.D., professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine and director of the Program for Humanities in Medicine there, established the gastrointestinal section at the Yale School of Medicine in 1955. He is the author of Clinical Gastroenterology, now in its fourth edition, and Doctors, Patients, and Placebos. He is coeditor of Empathy and the Practice of Medicine and Facing Death, both published by Yale University Press, and When Doctors Get Sick.
Retackling the subject of his previous book (Doctors, Patients and Placebos,1986), Spiro, a professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine, finds placebos everywhere in American medicine: "in clinical trials as a substitute for treatment and in practice as therapy." After defining a placebo as a "medicine prescribed more to please the patient than for its therapeutic effectiveness," Spiro carefully investigates the ethics of using placebos (especially in scientific research); the mind-body connection in the "placebo response"; and the nature of pain. He asserts that complaints for which no disease can be found "often seem unreal to physicians." Spiro argues, quite eloquently, that when physicians consider all the aspects that go into managing a patient's pain and suffering‘physical, emotional, spiritual, financial, etc.‘any treatment offered, be it pills, procedures or even surgery, will be more successful if it serves to engage the patient's power of hope. For the doctor, the key to this "placebo response" is creating a bond between patient and physician. Sometimes, he notes, the bond alone can serve to heal‘although Spiro adds that in the age of managed care it is becoming ever more difficult to create that bond. His book is an excellent addition to the literature on the mind-body connection and on the power of the mind to relieve pain and suffering. (Dec.)
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