#116 Looking for the Healing Connection
photo by Joan Naidorf
When physician Drew Remignanti was coming to the end of his career practicing emergency medicine, he noted many aspects of America’s medical system that were troubling. He saw that profit-driven health care insurers and hospital administrators were making decisions about medical care that were not appropriate. He noted that some folks got too much medical care and some, none at all.
What bothered him the most, was this answer from the chief executive of a multi-billion-dollar healthcare system when asked about one conviction in healthcare that needed to be challenged. She replied, “That every patient needs a primary care physician… People need primary care but not necessarily a physician relationship. “(The Healing Connection p. 128)
To refute this notion dismissing the doctor-patient relationship, Remignanti embarks on a lengthy discourse on why he believes that the partnership between patients and their primary care physicians is a sacred and beneficial relationship for both parties. His book is entitled The Healing Connection: A Partnership for Your Health. (Something or Other Publishing)
Remignanti goes to great lengths to assert that patient welfare should always supersede profitability and to explain how a rich and collaborative doctor-patient relationship should be the cornerstone of American healthcare.
The author weaves together illustrative stories of his own experiences as a young man with a severe autoimmune disease, his training as an emergency physician, suffering an incapacitating stroke, then recovering from that illness to become an emergency physician again. To demonstrate other ideas, Remignanti recounts some of the complicated cases of the patients he cared for over the decades as an emergency physician.
Beyond the medical memoir and narrative medicine components, Remignanti includes exhaustive research on multiple aspects of illness, wellness, spirituality, and healing. He explores how our healthcare system got here and where it seems to be going. For those booklovers who want to nerd out on the research, the electronic version features over 250 references that are summarized and hyperlinked.
What I enjoyed the most, and I am also trained as an emergency physician, were the oddball cases that challenged the doctor at his best and his worst. I wish he had given us more about his lengthy recovery from a debilitating stroke that he suffered at the age of 38. That part of the story is both incredible and inspirational.
With a unique perspective as a life-long patient and long-time physician, Remignanti, explores highly philosophical issues of beliefs, biases, the placebo effect, and uncertainty in the practice of medicine. Much to the chagrin of both physicians and the public, much uncertainty exists, particularly in the early stages of searching for a medical diagnosis.
When discussing the topics of uncertainty and inevitable human error,
“… as physicians, we can understand how it happens, while as patients we struggle with understanding the difference between foresight and hindsight when it comes to medical diagnosis and treatment.” (The Healing Connection Page 69)
The open avenues of communication and collaboration between the physician and her patients would ease both over the bumpy roads of illness, injury, and uncertainty. Forming the “healing connection,” Remignanti fervently believes, will go a long way in addressing the ills of our very complex and stressed healthcare system.
