Slow Medicine

In Slow Medicine: The Way of Healing, Dr. Victoria Sweet reviews her training and formation as a doctor. She talks about how she came to appreciate the space and quality of time with patients that slow medicine allows. Her book is a collection of stories about her approach to patient care, shaped by various significant moments when some element, some facet, of this Way of Healing was revealed to her.

Sweet’s first experience of “slow medicine” came as a medical student learning how to draw a patient’s blood. Taught by a seasoned lab tech, Celsa, she learned how to sit down on a patient’s bed and make herself comfortable. She says:

I would look at the patient, and sometimes we would even smile at each other. It would take more time but I never forgot to take off the tourniquet, and I rarely missed a vein.

Plus, she said, Celsa had given her an added lesson:

I had learned that I could sit on the patient’s bed, and that sitting created an intimacy, a sharing, a common goal. That getting comfortable, that composing of myself, made a pool of calmness for me and my patient within the crazy cacophony of the hospital.

Medicine, not “healthcare”

What is slow medicine? Like “slow food,” which is the opposite of fast food, slow medicine takes time. It’s about presence, attention, judgment (therapeutic skepticism), kindness, and responsibility.

And for Sweet, it’s personal. She begins with the story of her father’s illness, misdiagnosed as a stroke. She says:

I’d known that healthcare was getting ever more bureaucratic; that doctors and nurses had less and less time to take care of their patients; that they were spending more and more of their time in front of a computer screen entering health-care data.

Everything looked so good in the computer, and yet what Father had gotten was not Medicine but Healthcare—Medicine without a soul.

“The essence of Medicine is story,” she says—”finding the right story, understanding the true story, being unsatisfied with a story that does not make sense. Healthcare, on the other hand, deconstructs story in thousands of tiny pieces—pages of boxes and check marks for which no one is responsible.”

Spiritual Inspiration

Sweet’s formation as a doctor began with an interest in Carl Jung, and culminated in Hildegard of Bingen. She says:

Hildegard’s implicit idea, which for me was revolutionary, was that as a doctor I should be not only a mechanic of the body, looking for what is broken and trying to fix it, but also a gardener of the body, nourishing viriditas, a patient’s own healing power, and removing what is in its way, fortifying it.

Craft

Coming from acute care, I used to joke that the pace of rehab would kill you it’s so slow! But I appreciate now how I can get to know my patients much better than before, over much longer periods of time in hospital admissions that can last months and sometimes years.

Yet rehab environments are changing too. Discharge is the primary focus. Palliative Care patients are coming in sicker, with shorter lengths of stay. And documentation risks prioritizing data collection for funding requirements over patient narratives (e.g., Hunt, Bell, Baker, and Howard 2017).

Is slow medicine impractical? Perhaps. But I know it’s the kind of care that every nurse wants to provide and can’t. Still, Dr. Sweet’s enduring focus on the original essence of care inspires:

The craft of medicine is a beautiful thing, very human very much about body, not only the patient’s . . .  but through and in your own body. . .  You can’t fake it. It takes a warm human energy, a commitment, a struggle, a giving up of a piece of yourself to attain that craft.

Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing, by Dr. Victoria Sweet, is available in my shop at a bargain price – BUY HERE

Hunt L.M., Bell H.S., Baker A.M., Howard H.A. (2017) Electronic Health Records and the Disappearing Patient. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 31(3), 403-421.

Sweet, V. (2017) Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing. New York: Riverhead Books.