In this chapter, the author describes why the self of a healthcare practitioner matters. Contrary to the impressions of both patients and biomedical healthcare practitioners, which include all who may be reimbursed by the medical insurance industry, the attitude and presence of the practitioner may often be more healing than the technical methods that are employed. The reason for this is that care is rendered through a person and is received by a person; their states of being inform their interaction through measurable bio-fields that significantly include the heart. When healthcare practitioners consciously include awareness of their own state in the provision of care, they are healed along with their patients.
TopWho And What Practitioners Are
Healthcare practitioners who stay in their field as long as possible despite the structural difficulties of their professions are often people who have a calling, by which I mean a desire to be of service based on a love of people (Malatt, 2022) and an interest in alleviating others’ suffering (Brigham Young University, 2024). This may constitute an almost inexorable draw to a field of endeavor that may exceed their own ability to rationalize. For many practitioners this has arisen in their lives as a response to early exposure to the trauma of illness, death, or the extreme distress of family members who were themselves victims of terrible experiences beyond their control (see for example Badia, pp. 12, 14). Early in their lives they were exposed to a level of suffering that then came to define for them a large part of existence itself. Early in their lives they become aware of uncertainty and would experience emotional overwhelm as they were confronted with the apparently tenuous nature of health and well-being. Many are covert spiritual seekers because they are searching for a meaning to life beyond its intrinsic pain (personal communication – see further below).
Often, they were the teenagers who found an intellectual home in existentialism and then struggled to know what to do with their own lives, burdened by the ever-present perception of the Damocles sword of illness and death. Sensitives, intelligent, tender-hearted, they struggled to engage with the expectations of their families and schools and the unspoken ones of their social environment that seemed immune to the one aspect of reality of which they were sure: that pain and death were real (see for example Attia, 2023, pp. 377-408). The challenge they faced was two-fold: what to do that could possibly be meaningful in this context, and how to find the necessary resources and support for this path of personal heroism (Badia, 2020, pp. 23, 24).