Jul 30, 2007
American Healthcare: From Hard to Soft
As a child I was sick a lot. I’d get three or four colds a year, always with a nasty strep throat. I missed most of fifth grade with mononucleosis. I’d been born with some sort of digestive difficulties (never diagnosed; I now believe I was allergic to baby formula) that persisted as chronic diarrhea. Then, around the age of nine, I started passing blood in my stools.
By that age I was already averse to doctors and especially terrified of needles. So as my condition developed I kept it secret from my parents. Somehow they missed the fact that I was going to the bathroom twenty times a day, and another two or three times at night, usually just to pass a dollop of mucusy blood. Nor were they aware of the belly cramps, so bad that I’d have to stop whatever I was doing for several minutes until they abated.
Thus I grew into a skinny, pale, chronically tired teenager. Finally, when I was fourteen, I was hospitalized and tests revealed an advanced case of ulcerative colitis — the interior wall of my large intestine was one open, bleeding sore.
The doctors were amazed, professing that they’d never seen such a serious case in someone so young. They said I had the insides of a 35-year-old man. They told my parents that, unfortunately, they could do nothing for me. There was not enough healthy tissue to perform a colostomy (the colon is removed and elimination re-routed to a hole in the side and a colostomy bag). So, they said, my parents should prepare for the worse; I was going to die.
As it turned out, I left the hospital in two weeks, the bleeding stopped. I recently turned 56, and suspect I still have the insides of a 35-year-old man. The experience set me on a path of exploring, experiencing, and eventually practicing various approaches to holistic healing and perfectly illustrates the contrast between “hardcare” and “softcare”.
All the doctors had to offer at the time was hardcare: a combination of prescription drugs and hyper-invasive surgery that would have fundamentally altered my bodily experience and led to a lifetime of continuing treatments and changing drug therapies. My 35-year-old insides would have continued to decline while spawning a variety of other symptoms and illnesses.
I would have been a radically different person, long gone by now. Indeed, five years after I left the hospital, my father was diagnosed with colon cancer. He endured radiation, chemo, a full colostomy, and was dead within a year. Clearly, that was my hardcare future.
For whatever reasons, I got lucky and responded to softcare, beginning with a simple switch to a blander diet. In particular, I gave up drinking Coca Cola, a staple in our family. I should add that no one actually offered any nutritional counseling. But hospital food is by nature bland, especially so for ulcer patients.
The second big piece of softcare came from my mother. Though she had no medical training, she was a smart lady and immediately decided that my problems were stress-related. Since one of my main stresses was that of being a slacker B student (who missed a lot of school due to illness) who had a straight A older sister and even straighter A younger brother, my mother, in a moment I’ll never forget, sat at my bedside and said, “Whatever you do with your life — whatever you do — is fine with us. We love you, just the way you are.”
In the years since, whenever someone talks about the healing power of unconditional love, I nod in agreement. It is the most important element of effective softcare.
Lastly, during one of my nights alone in the hospital I stumbled on a way to breathe — basically, the Lamaze technique that birthing mothers use to minimize pain and ease delivery — that stopped the cramping pains. I continued experimenting with breath after leaving the hospital, eventually devoting much of my professional life to breathwork.
A change in diet, a change in attitude, and a change in the way I breathed: such softcare had the power to heal, while the most advanced hardcare would only have made things worse.
Its just one anecdote, I know, but I believe my little story epitomizes the current and expanding crisis in American healthcare: we can go the way of ever-advancing hardcare that, for all of its expense and mystique, will only make matters worse; or we can transform our system, retaining hardcare practices for extreme cases, while shifting the vast majority of our practices and funding to sensible, proven softcare.
In the coming weeks, I will be using this space to delineate the differences between these two approaches. I welcome feedback, critiques, and personal stories. In a softcare system, the stories and thoughts of ordinary people are every bit as meaningful as the well-educated ideas of medical experts.
