The connection between patient and practitioner

I didn’t sleep solidly last night. Naturally, the incident with Andrew was on my mind. At points when I woke, I could feel various sensations around my chest. These seemed to be mainly on the Kidney channel as it passes over the heart. Those points are not used much by TCM acupuncturists, but they are mostly related to the spiritual aspect of the Heart.

I’ve always noticed that I do connect strongly with my patients, during the sessions and afterwards. In the sessions, I often feel certain acupoints on my body activating, which relate to the patient’s condition, simply by me being in the presence of the patient. And I had a phase when I would clearly feel a representation of the patient’s symptom in my body whenever I took their pulses (I would feel a ghost of their symptom, a weaker echo of it, if you like). I believe that this sort of empathy is a part of being a healer, though I am conscious of doing what I can to limit this so that it does not impair my own health too much. I’ve heard some practitioners say that this sort of empathy is a bad thing, but I disagree, and think that they only have that opinion because they have never really felt this process in the same way that healers like myself do.

These ‘energetic connections’ exist between all living things, which accounts for things like ‘telepathy’ which I have personally experienced several times. As a healer, I readily connect with my patients, and I have an understanding of what is wrong with them and how I can change that, and the combination of that connection and my intention to heal them does have a powerful healing effect on the patient. And I believe that this is above and beyond the effect that the pure acupuncture alone could produce.

Anyway, I last night I was thinking again about my curious ‘illness’ on Easter Sunday. Since there was this connection between me and Andrew, like there is with all my patients, and since we had recently discussed all the issues related to the weakness in his Heart, I believe that as he was dying from his heart attack, he was ‘calling out to me’ in some way, or on some level, across this ‘energetic connection’. At the very least, our discussion on this topic would have been going through his mind as he was going through his ordeal. And he had strong energy. In Chinese Medicine, he was what we call an ‘excess’ type person. And I believe that the sensations that I experienced that day, and my succumbing to the ‘illness’ that followed over the following few days, was as a result of Andrew’s calling out to me as he was dying. The ‘illness’ I was left with for a few days was a weakening in my Lung energy, which is the organ concerned with the barrier between us and other people. It was like a Wind Cold Invasion (or common cold), only there was no pathogen involved.

Andrew is the first patient to have died while I’ve been actively treating them.

I’ve just checked my records. I last treated him four days before he died. Though I was aware of the constitutional weakness in his heart and was treating him for that and had discussed the issue with him, there was no indication that he was about to have a heart attack. And biomedicine had done everything it could and had ignorantly (as usual) proclaimed that there was nothing wrong with his heart. So, there was nothing more that I could have done. Except perhaps, been even more honest with him. Early on in my treatment of him, it occurred to me that the symptoms he had been experiencing were, in fact, minor heart attacks. Biomedicine had explained to him that his symptoms were all due to ‘pleurisy’. I was aware that this was a ‘hunch’ on my part, but I felt that I could not keep such a serious hunch to myself, so I did communicate this idea to him, but I didn’t use the word ‘heart attack’. I said that the symptoms were due to his heart complaining.

This is always a dilemma. But for natural healers it’s an even bigger dilemma. If, on the first or second session I had said to him. ‘You have been having a series of minor heart attacks,’ which is what I was thinking; if I had said this, then it is probable that I would have lost all credibility in his eyes, since biomedicine had done everything it could and had proclaimed that there was nothing wrong with his heart, and he had described all that to me, including the intricacies of their diagnosis. So, in such situations, to be able to go on treating the patient, in order to provide whatever healing we can, we have to be careful to not contradict biomedicine too much. At the early stages of treatment, biomedicine is all that the patient knows, and they have, naturally, swallowed (what I call) biomedicine’s propaganda in every way. So, to tell them that all that is nonsense, is barking up the wrong tree, is primitive, ignorant meddlings, is often the cause of their current illness, to tell people all this is not usually an option, even though it is usually all true.

To be a successful heretic is not an easy path to tread.

Last night, in one of my sleepless moments, I had wondered what I would have done if he had started to have a heart attack while I was treating him. I think it would have been clear to me, from his symptoms and pulses, that he was having a heart attack right then. I think I would have immediately used the appropriate acupoints to treat his heart and then called the emergency services and told them that he was having a heart attack. No matter what I think of biomedicine, and no matter what the ignorant quacks would have said about me later (if my own intervention had eased his heart’s symptoms, and they could again find nothing wrong with him), I think I would have had no choice but to do that. My own patient’s survival is more important than the healing profession suffering a little further abuse from the biomedicine dimwits.

 

4 April 2008