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Healing and Spirit: Medicine, Politics, Civilization and the Making of an Extraordinary Physician

by Gershon Lesser MD with Mitchell Harding

222 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #00-0058; ISBN 1-55212-394-4; US$21.50, C$29.15, EUR19.00, £13.20

What medicine is like for a deeply caring physician with 30 years of medical experience, in lawyer-ridden, profit-oriented, souless, uncaring America today. For far too long there has been no book like Healing and Spirit; a partial autobiography of courage, love, depth, awareness, intelligence, and healing

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about the book      about the authors      excerpt      catalogue info

About the Book In the book Healing and Spirit by Gershon Lesser MD and Mitchell Harding, you will experience the bared soul of an extraordinary MD. He is warm, humorous, loving, and rich with mindfulness, spiritual light, and hope in these dark days of HIV and AIDS; cancer; heart, artery and sexual diseases; arthritis; gut troubles; depression and exhaustion and unbearable assaults on our immune systems. You will experience three outrageous and amusing Lesser Arcana "dramatic" productions, learn how to pick your doctor, read stories from Lesser's life and medical career, see the appropriate place for television and sex, and experience an extraordinary, terrifying, and uplifting "dark night of the soul" which may not have been equaled since St. John of the Cross wrote 400 years ago! Healing and Spirit is an inspired polemic rich with 30 years of medical practice. In places it is savage, mysterious, and complex; in others utterly magnificent, horrifying, and beautiful. This is a book you can use. It faces who you are and what needs to be done. In Healing and Spirit, a well-known physician, teacher, and early author of the wellness movement indignantly describes the spiritual and political crisis of healthcare today; the crisis of so-called "modern medicine," with special fury reserved for the accountants who play a derelict role in some HMO denials, who view you as an encumbrance, a cost, as a pain in their "equity appreciation". Dr. Gershon Lesser fearlessly exposes the malignancy of government corruption, and of a conspiracy to destroy medical care. Old and new, accepted and controversial, allopathic and alternative, all the richness of multicultural health concepts come together on these pages, as Complementary Medicine. Dr. Lesser dares to bring God into the healing equation as well. Within this book, you will witness the ignition of thought in yourself, and your own healing power. Here is fear, joy, laughter, moral and religious bedrock, and the gentle mix of compromises which can make life worth living. Health in its broadest sense, is indistinguishable from citizenship, a healthy ecology, and civilization; and ultimately is a measure of our physical and mental freedom. Whether either of you know it or not, your doctor is inviting you to be free! For far too long there has been no book like this; a book of courage, depth, love, and awareness. Healing and Spirit goes far beyond herbs and pills and vitamins, beyond the trappings of New Age thinking, to profound physical and moral healing. Reviews of Healing and Spirit "Healing and Spirit is definitely not a walk along the beaten path. It's upsetting. You are not the soothing "take a pill, you'll feel much better in the morning" kind of doctor. People are more and more complacent and this book is "different" and "disturbing" which makes people stop and think. They have never seen this Dr. Lesser before. It doesn't tell them they are wonderful and that it does not matter how unwisely they treat the planet and themselves and that everything will be fine. They know it won't, but they want to hear it anyway. This is not to say you should never have written Healing and Spirit. It had to be done by someone, and who better than Dr. Lesser to do it. It needed to be said!" -a reader "Ultimately triumphant" - Tacoma Review Early returns "Just picked up your book to read last night. It was so fascinating, and well written, and so good (that) I put in over 50 pages last night before going to sleep. Marvelous book." -author's 96-year-old aunt

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About the Authors Gershon Lesser MD Dr. Lesser, a graduate of UCLA and USC medical school, is an internist and cardiologist, and a founding member of the International Academy of Preventive Medicine. Also an attorney, he has received White House honors for his efforts in bringing preventive medicine to the public. He has practiced medicine in Southern California for over 30 years. Every Wednesday afternoon for 18 years Dr. Lesser hosted a call-in program on National Public Radio. He has also had scheduled programs on nine commercial radio stations and 10 television stations in Southern California, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Alaska, as well as Canada and South Africa. His programs have been carried from time to time on network radio and television and national cable, as well as being picked up occasionally by hundreds of other radio and television stations around the country. He is the author of other books, including Growing Younger.

Mitchell Harding Mitchell Harding has been, since 1959, familiar to non-commercial radio listeners in Southern California as both an announcer and for his hundreds of eclectic radio productions. He engineered a call-in health program for 15 years titled 'The Health Connection', hosted by Dr. Gershon Lesser.

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Excerpt from Chapter Four - "How To Choose Your Doctor"

It's likely that the doctor we want is the doctor most other doctors will not want. What I mean by that is we want a doctor who will try to combine basic science, with the perceptions of psychoimmunology, and a healing journey beynd Pythagoras, someone who will see us whole.

A doctor who is a generalist, who might also happen to be a specialist, is far more capable of seeing our whole picture where our problems usually lie, and less likely to be looking at just our left nostril.

We want a doctor who is enchanted by, and satisfied with, standing away from and out of the crowd, not a doctor who is an extension of his charts and rules and facts. Facts eliminate the need to think and understand. They establish only the need to remember.

Beware of Dr. Netmare whose enchantment lies with technology. She will be paralyzed in an electrical failure. SHe is relieved that it is the process that makes the decisions, leaving her innocent.

Seek a doctor who believes in miracles as well as pills. Seek a doctor who practices standard medicine but understands and respects the values of alternative and complementary medicines, and utilizes them when appropriate. Your doctor should perceive your life style, exercise patterns, diet, attitudes, and psychology.

If you ask an average physician, who has diagnosed a terminal illness, to compile a list of options and methods as an alternate healing strategy, nine times out of 10 she would be totally paralyzed. The textbooks just don't give her any lists and she hasn't done her own thinking.

The physician must use resilience as a healing force, use of thought and process, of lifestyle change, and of prescriptives. The doctor needs to understand that there are cultural differences in medicine.

Love any doctor who has garlic on his breath, despite what Frank Muir said, "I did not realize what it had done to my breath - one doesn't with garlic - until this afternoon when I stood waiting for somebody to open a door for me and suddenly noticed that the varnish of the door was bubbling."

We must know that our doctor has listened to the questions he asked as well as to our answers, and that he has made the effort to explain the process of his thinking to us.

We need a doctor who doesn't always do everything we want, but who can be relied upon with respect to moral values. A doctor must consciously state the truth as he sees it. A doctor who isn't compassionate isn't a doctor.

A teacher of mine said, You can't take every patient home to bed with you," and yet that's an ancient healing metaphor for the doctor who symbolically must get into an intimate relationship with the patient, and the patient who must issue the invitation. On the other hand I don't think a doctor who carries all her patients on her back is a healthy doctor. The doctor can serve her patient without fusing to the patient. It may be unfair to younger doctors, but we also want an experienced doctor.

Working with our doctor entails more that auditioning potential physicians. We have an important part to play. We might do our part to play. We might do our part by presenting a medical portrait of ourselves.

A physician has to be smart. He or she has to do everything to stay up to date, secure in the new knowledge collected daily, intelelctual abilities honed to the best edge possible, with the objective of humane, balanced, and reverent care of others, under any circumstances. Doctors run from this responsibility too often. They too easily refuse people in need who are complex, either medically, psychologically, or financially. Too many physicians are arrogant.

Beware of the doctor who has answers for every question. Many physicians learn to relieve worries over life-and-death decisions by developing feelings of infallibility, which are reinforced because their judgment is so rarely questioned. This reflects ego, not intellect. This sense of infallibility may spil over into other aspects of physician's lives. Doctors who fly private planes, for example, have much higher accident rates than other pilots.

Our doctor has to be able to admit that quite often he or she just doesn't understand what is going on with us. We need a doctor who can suspend judgment. You should always seek second opinions in complex or lethal medical problems. This is in your best interest. In the past the assumption made by the insurance companies was that the second opinion assured honesty. Today insurers avoid second opinions because they are expensive. The bean counters only understand first opinions.

While I have enjoyed my 30 years of having patients looking to me alone for medical guidance and expert counselling, it has always been welcome when they told me they wanted to see more than one physician. I have always felt it wise to get several different points of view. I don't think much of medicine as a scientific absolute. The physician should make it easy for us to move to another, perhaps more experienced, physician, to btain our records with ease, to feel unintimidated, loved, and concerned and cared for, no matter what we decide.

A good test of a physician is the prescriptions he or she is presently writing. They contain powerful molecules. You can ask doc what will happen when you mix three or more of these together; probably not one in ten will go to a computer and check. The others will guess without even bothering to pick up a Physician's Desk Reference (PDR), and they are likely to make the same mal-assumption you will, that if it's prescriptive, it's probably okay. If you are taking several different pills you should be concerned, and so should your doctor.

Doctors can find nothing wrong with more than half the people who consult them. To determine whether the patient is sick, therefore, according to Ian Robertson, both parties commonly enter a subtle negotiation in which each may make compromises in order to reach a mutually acceptable decision. Some patients appreciate a doctor's candor, but others are likely to see it as an admission of incompetence. In such cases, the physician implicitly negotiates a diagnosis with the patient. If the patient refuses all diagnoses, the negotiation has broken down.

Even when the diagnosis is accepted, it must usually be reinforced by a prescription, or patients are likely to feel that they have not received value for their time and money. Just to keep the patients happy, many doctors implicitly accept the patient's suggestion ("Strep throat") and irresponsibly prescribe antibiotics, knowing that the condition will probably improve soon in any case. More than half the doctors in the United States admit to having prescribed antibiotics for the viral disease against which these drugs are utterly ineffective, the common cold.

In other cases, patients view doctors resorting to medication as a failure. Even doctors sometimes do, feeling that if they had done a better job, perhaps the patient would have felt better without medication. Everybody has opinions about medicine.

What about your responsibility? The primary care physician we finally choose must know that his patient is genuine. What if she isn't? A malingerer can badly hurt medicine, destroy your doctor's faith in humanity, and destroy your doctor.

We want our doctor to understand the difference between irrational concepts on the patient's part, and original and/or unusual ideas and requests. He should have no fear of cautioning us, if we should choose the easy way, instead of the wise way. Our doctor must see the difference between fantasized ills and real ones, still being aware that fantasized ills also need treatment, of a different sort.

Evaluate to what degree the doctor understands that the problem of a patient is the problem of a family. A family can be supportive and curative, or destructive. Even a loving family, left outside in the hallway of the hospital and treated as if they were in the way, is destructive.

Too much of modern medicine is mechanical and unfeeling and becoming more so. Too many patients, as well as doctors, like it that way. You and your family should be partners with your doctor in any discussions of diagnosis, options, and prognosis. You know a great deal about how it feels and what might have caused it. and your doctor is more able to apply his or her expertise, when the information flows both ways. A great deal of medicine is still an art. We are not yet ready for computers to take over.

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Catalogue Information

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