imtalkinghere

Can you see health from your place?

Over at Lance Mannion's shop, he's musing on the many weirdnesses in the voting last night for the imperfect House health reform bill. Imperfect, indeed. Anyone who thought it could be otherwise is a magical thinker of the first order. The fact is our approach to health and medicine - two waaay different things, by the way; genuine health may be further from standard medicine than Russia is from Sarah Palin's porch - is a mess almost beyond measure. Some kind of government health reform is a necessary step; but without a shift in consciousness it's just an insufficient finger in the dike. Some examples:

Today's Sunday Times Magazine features Dr. Brent James and "The Theory of Evidence-Based Care", a completely rational approach to bringing down health care costs:

PROBLEM :  For any given diagnosis, a doctor can consider a number of ways to treat a patient. But how does a doctor know which treatment to use?

SOLUTION:  Committees of doctors and others track treatments and their outcomes by medical specialty, developing treatment protocols based on the data.

RESULT:  A doctor may choose to ignore the protocol. But patient care should improve as  doctors see evidence for the most successful treatments.

Yay-Rah for Dr. James. Thanks for helping. It's not enough. Everybody, stay suited up. We've got so much more to do.

In part, because there is this:

"It is possible to rely too heavily on numbers and patterns when treating patients but the BIGGER RISK - the one we are now taking - is relying too heavily on intuition."

May I just step in here to mention that I would prefer to have a physician WITH intuition? Not just some intuition, but I want my guy or gal to have major, mind-boggling intuition! The problem is not so much that we are "relying too heavily on intuition", it is that we are relying on faulty intuitions, because our current medical education is designed to thump the intuition out of these people, when it should be actively nurturing just the opposite.

I'm remembering a conversation I once had with a family physician who had been practicing  for about ten years. He told me that he'd recently heard at a seminar that, while examining a patient,  it would be good to place his free hand on said patient in such a way as to establish  more human connection, and that he had found this to be true. To quote SNL, "REALLY?!" Here was a guy supposedly "called to healing" who couldn't figure this out on his own in ten years of practice... with kids, mothers... "REALLY??" - I asked him how he'd come to medicine. Answer: "Well, I could have gone into law or engineering or medicine and it just happened to go this way." In other words, income was the call. I'm okay with income being the call to to law or engineering. With medicine, I'd like a little something more. But I can tell you from having attended a top pre-med school, income is primarily the call. So when people fret that government health reform will lower doctor salaries and drive people away from medicine, I smile and say, "Bring it on. Alter the damn universe. Up the proportion of actual healers in the ranks. It can only improve the system in the long run."

* * *

If the doc attending me cannot be an intuitive genius, then I want him or her to at least have some deeper awareness of subtle energies. In Chopra's latest book, he tells the story of a patient with a pulled muscle that grew more and more painful.

"I knew from doing this kind of thing before that it was tendinitis... I was given the name of a really good acupuncturist and made an appointment... he stuck needles in a few places. not just in the afflicted muscle. When the treatment was over and I was about to leave, (he) surprised me by asking if I was depressed. My mother had died the year before, and I told him that I had been feeling down, though I didn't think I was still grieving. He told me that he had detected weak energy around me. That was how he recognized that I was depressed, and he suggested that I let him do a few things...he pressed a few points along my spine, very gently... The whole thing took no more than ten minutes, and he didn't charge me... As I was walking back to my car...I felt very good. I was buoyant, my footsteps lighter. Only then, when the gray cloud over me had lifted, did I realize I had been feeling down for quite a while. The next day I was still in a good mood, almost elated...The visit stands out for receiving a healing I never expected."

How many doctors today spend enough time with each patient to make or cure such discoveries, or for that matter know you as a human being?

Findings have estimated that on average, patients can expect to spend no more than 10 to 16 minutes with their doctor, depending on the negotiations that doctor has made with that patient's insurance company.

Sixteen minutes once or twice a year.... Now, there's a meaningful relationship. With pressures to move 'em through as quickly as possible, physicians need to become extraordinarily perceptive and sensitive. How many do you know like that? Name one required med school course that addresses this need.

* * *

Another example of "off" thinking: The Placebo Effect. As Dr. Andrew Weil points out every time he speaks at medical schools, the placebo effect is the most interesting thing in drug  studies, it's the place of power and potential: How exactly did those patients heal without drugs?  That's what we should be looking into - not to the exclusion of all else, but certainly we should be giving it more respect than it gets.

Meanwhile, we're all drowning in TV pharmaceutical ads... Ugh. Or should I say glug?

* * *

For some people, the decision to not buy health insurance is based on a desire to commit to prevention: "I can either spend $600/month on coverage, and have nothing left over for personal maintenance or I can use that $600 to buy better food and have regular acupuncture, massage, Ayurveda, etc. to keep my body in the best possible shape." Some people might call them irresponsible. Really? At least they are consciously applying themselves to health.  How many health plans make room for that? It will be interesting when those people have to - by law - put that  $600 into insurance. We should all hope that they - who know whereof they speak -  will start demanding a health care system that allows for a much more flexible and intuitive approach  to prevention. 

* * *

In short, yada-yada-yada - reform the system, change the system. Yes, do what you can and as soon as possible. But until we fundamentally transform the works through a shift in consciousness, the current beat will go on and on and...

PS. More on "Many Ways"

I wrote in my last post that if we want an effective public school system, then the old system – constructed on a very narrow (antiquated and false) notion of intelligence – must be completely transformed to incorporate Many Ways of educating children.

A logical first step might be to transform some of the ways we talk about education.

Just one example: A friend who teaches fifth graders in the LA County School District was telling me about the challenges of bringing certain kids up to speed.  He gave the example of the kid who arrives in fifth grade without having mastered his multiplication tables – this in spite of the fact that third and fourth grade teachers drill this material relentlessly. My friend described the many (brilliant) encouragements and techniques he used to get the child caught up so he could proceed with fifth grade math, all to no avail.

“Well, that kid needs to be taken to another kind of class.”

“Oh!” the teacher exclaims. “They call that warehousing and it’s a dirty word.”

Warehousing? A warehouse is a place where you store things that you aren’t using. I’m not talking about anything close to a warehouse! I’m talking about a place of great activity and experimentation and educational commitment to awakening that kid to learning – to tapping his way.

Perhaps we could think in terms of Staying Conscious. Taking the non-learner to another environment says "Let’s be very conscious about what’s going on here.” Keeping the clear non-learner in class is the go-unconscious choice. It acts as if the child is a full, operating member of this learning group. He is not. It acts as if this kid is not sapping energy from the rest of the group. He is. To maintain his reality within this group makes him a failure and a negative influence as if that were a healthy choice. -- It’s a big lie. Big lies are not conducive to learning. Big lies make children anxious and angry. At a largely unconscious level. Which is dangerous and destructive.

Yes, I'm talking about a much more complex educational system – a network of approaches rather than a slim progressive line. In other words, it is a more natural, whole, and realistic approach to learning.

Or, we can just keep pretending…

_____________________
UPDATE: 1 August 2008

Recently, I heard of a prison program where young offenders are sentenced to three months of dance. Three months of intense daily discipline and repeated practice in a creative endeavor that requires working well with a group. At the end of three months, they give a performance. Apparently, it has been remarkably effective. Think about this as a paradigm shift. Put young offenders in the punishment of what we call prison... OR... put them in a place where they have to accomplish something new, spend their physical energy productively,  experience grueling discipline - and the satisfactions thereof, tap their creative energies, and conclude with a beautiful event where they can be appreciated for all of that. Of these two choices, which is more likely to turn a life around and provide a positive return on what society has invested? --- Not a prison/warehouse. A vital change center. There are so many ways we could utilize an intensive artistic discipline  - not just dance, but all the arts - to wake up and re-motivate the kids who are currently suffering through school and making their classes a suffering for kids and teachers around them.

Okay, okay, okay – I admit it! I’m truly, madly, deeply in love with Ken Robinson.

By the way, that’s Sir Ken Robinson to you. So there.

Do you know him? We should all know him.

Because he’s the only person I know who is pointing in the right direction when it comes to transforming our failing education system.

This was brought home to me even more painfully this week as I watched a public education panel sponsored by The New Republic (fora.tv) … which was excruciating. Five extremely experienced and deeply committed white men talking about how to reform the public school system to do better what it was organized to do in the past. This way lies more failure, fellas.

We need a Whole New Way. And that new way needs to be Many Ways All At Once.

My views about education were formed during ten years as an adjunct at a small liberal arts college, where every year I faced a sea of largely blank student faces. Their shocking lack of critical thinking skills and creativity was enough to make any serious teacher cry.

More than one colleague lamented, “Teaching college today is like teaching high school thirty years ago. These young adults are nowhere near ready for what we used to call higher education.”

My own college mentor – a dream prof, born to teach – at another, better college with smarter, more adept students  retired early because he said he didn’t know how to teach the students who started showing up in his classes starting in the 1980’s.

One day, a masseuse asked me why I stopped teaching, then added, “You know, I have a lot of college professors as clients. They all say their students are a mess,  that college is not what it used to be. They all just seem so beaten down by it.  So I was just wondering what your experience was.”

I don’t really like chatting when I’m on the table, so I kept it short. “Too many dead people,” I replied.

Now, I was teaching at a Christian Brothers college – think repressed gay guys, think sexual confusion, think profoundly embodied denial – so we had more than our share of dead there*, but the saddest kind was the one the students brought with them.

Yes, there were some stand-out students - the ones who knew how to study, who enjoyed reading, who revealed a deep and adventurous curiosity, who knew how to make an argument, who had original thoughts. You could see something clicking behind their eyes. They would take chances.  Sometimes you might even get as many as two of these in one class. And, believe me, you were grateful for them. But the vast majority came in damaged.  Something about their world had squashed their spark and now they were just going through the motions of education – as consumers, not learners.  “Just tell me what you want. Give me the recipe for a good grade. And I like lots of videos in class.”

NB: Some research indicates that classroom groups do not rise to the level of the best students; rather, they descend to that of the worst. This matches my personal observations.

While many tenured profs talk frankly about these realities in the faculty lunch room, they know better than to spew this honesty more widely. For one thing, if word got out that the college is full of lame students, it might further diminish the number of good students who apply – and that would be a bummer. For another, when one’s lifelong dream is to be a college professor and then “college” turns out to be so much less than you had dreamed of… well, it's embarrassing to admit that one’s professional life is not all one cracked it up to be.

But others are talking. Retired profs, adjuncts, and consultants are starting to call things what they are.

So what’s going on? How did it all go off course? Clearly, it is a convergence of multiple elements, many of them external to the educational system. Today’s students have been raised in a world of constant distractions and too little quiet, focused silence. That has to be part of it. To hear their stories, a majority of them have had dreadful diets throughout most of their youth. Lots of pre-packaged foods done in the microwave.  I recall a talk by Joseph Chilton Pearce in the early nineties where he outlined the negative brain chemistry effects of ingesting the artificial hormones in beef and chicken; brain development effects which cannot be turned around, by the way. And non-parents would not believe how many pharmaceuticals these kids have taken by the time they reach eighteen. Constant antibiotics. I once had a class in which 8 of 20 students were on Prozac – and that’s just the only one I knew about. This appalling statistic revealed itself in the course of a public speaking class. From a more positive perspective, I could argue that today’s children have evolved to a level of sensitivity and right brain development that is at odds with our archaic, left-brain approach to education. So it's all of this and more.

As for the education system itself, a bulb lit over my head about ten years ago as I watched a PBS documentary on the history of our national school system. Before 1950, fewer than half of all students made it to high school graduation and out of that, a very small number went on to college.  The others either fell away for lack of “fit” or left to go to work in jobs that did not require college or even all twelve years.  (This was back when the USA made stuff.) In short, our educational system was conceived for a fairly narrow band of intelligence. The elite who went to college were the ones who fit the form.  Today, we give a lot of lip service to “higher ed for everyone” but we have not altered the pipeline to adequately serve a wider range of intelligences. Result: Most public schools cannot and do not honor and awaken enough souls to create healthy, thriving learning environments.

Every time I hear one more expert – or worse, politician – talk about the need for better math and science classes, I want to scream. Channeling kids into particular fields is not the solution.  Awakening them to the joy of learning (something, anything they love)... nurturing their creativity...disciplining and expanding their critical faculties - these are the essentials. With these in play, they will be drawn to the correct courses for their own needs and interests – and they will learn in spite of whatever shortcomings exist in their classes or in their teachers.

I fell in love with Ken Robinson because he’s the first expert I have heard who gets this – completely - and argues brilliantly that we cannot “reform” our way out of our education crisis. Transformation is the ticket.  Hence, Robinson’s honored place under Essentials on the right bar. 

Please give yourself the treat of him. In short form (20 minutes).  Or longer (55 minutes). Preferably both. Then start demanding a paradigm shift. Loudly. Often. One beauty of the web is that these talks can be accessed, projected, and discussed at PTA meetings, teacher meetings, civic group meetings, etc. So  get cracking.

This is where we live, in a time when so much that needs fixing requires radical restructuring. Let's stop wasting our time - and undermining children - with less than that.

* And really, parents, don’t throw all that tuition money at a place where denial is a central organizing principle! The odds of something tremendous flourishing in this kind of soil are wildly against you. Period. End of story.