Healing Medical Trauma

When I went on my Mind Over Medicine book tour in 2013, I toured the country, from hospitals to churches, from conferences to community centers. Because most of my audiences included doctors and patients, nurses and acupuncturists, caregivers and energy healers, what struck me most was that everyone in each room that I visited had been traumatized by the medical system. Countless patients told me the stories of how they had been hurt by their doctors. Nurses and alternative medicine practitioners told me horror stories about how they had been invalidated and abused by people higher above them in the medical hierarchy, and patients told me how their doctors had mocked them for seeking health care outside the doctor’s office.

Yet, after ten years of doing healing work with physicians in the Whole Health Medicine Institute, I also knew that some of the people most traumatized by the medical system, by medical education, and by doctors- were the doctors themselves, especially the female ones.

Each live event I did during that tour resulted in healing tears from all sides, as people shared their stories of how they’d been wounded by the medical system. Doctors wound up hugging patients who told their stories. Nurses bonded with caregivers, and naturopaths reconciled with physicians. Medical students expressed their pain and received empathy from attending physicians. I realized everyone in the room had PTSD- because of medicine, because of each other.

That tour inspired me to write a blanket apology to patients, on behalf of all doctors, which I posted to my blog at the time. The hundreds of responses touched my heart but also left me feeling hopeless. Was the medical system so far gone that we were harming the very people who vowed to heal?

Around that same time, we started hosting “Heal The Healer” workshops for physicians, most of them female. We asked our doctors how they had sold out their bodies in order to become doctors. Their answers led to late night storytelling, one horrific trauma after the next. I told the story of how I had been sick with the flu during my residency and forced to operate with an IV in my arm and a diaper collecting my diarrhea until I passed out in the OR and was put in a gurney, wheeled to the recovery room, tanked up with a liter of fluids and injected with Phenergan, then ordered to scrub back into surgery.

Others told of working through their labors until they were 8 centimeters dilated or walking around on a night shift in agony with a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. All of us had ignored our own medical issues, not to mention our sleep, our food and toilet needs, our relationships, and our own basic self care, to prioritize the medical problems of others. No wonder we wind up behaving so badly to our patients.

And yet, this is no excuse to traumatize the very patients we’ve vowed to serve.

Ever since that Mind Over Medicine tour, I’ve thought about hosting a workshop aimed specifically at tending to the very raw, very tender wound of what I’ve come to call “medical trauma.” But I knew I couldn’t wade into those shark-infested waters lightly.

So I’ve gathered the very best people I know, from all walks of my Sacred Medicine research, to help me help those who feel ready to mend some of the wounds caused by medical trauma. I’ve invited my former IFS therapist Nancy Morgan, PhD, who is also a cancer survivor, to help us tend to our wounded “parts.” I’ve invited NIA dance founder Debbie Rosas, who will bring her “Move To Heal” process to us. I’ve invited artist and Intentional Creativity founder Shiloh Sophia, Memoir As Medicine author Nancy Aronie, and BREASTLESS playwright and cancer survivor Emma Jarrett to help us work through our wounds with storytelling, art-making, ritual, empathic witnessing, and a performance of Emma’s play. And I’ll be teaching you a practical tool you can use to defuse medical trauma while it’s happening, even if you’re in a dentist’s chair, being wheeled into surgery, or going through an MRI machine.

We’ll be gathering together on Zoom over a six week period to gently open the Pandora’s Box of medical trauma, as safely as we can, with as much lightness of heart, lovingness of spirit, and playfulness of our little child parts, using music, creativity, and IFS to help us heal. If you feel called to join us, or if you know someone who you feel would benefit, you are welcome.

Learn more and register here