Stanford Report, January 14, 2004
By MITZI BAKER
The basic principle of a healing relationship, according to Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, is that when someone is struggling to regain a sense of his or her own wholeness in the face of disease, the greatest gift a health-care worker can give is acceptance.Remen, author of two best-ºselling books about healing, spoke to a packed Fairchild Auditorium Friday in a talk she called "Being Good Medicine: Our Power to Make a Difference." The talk was the first lecture in a medical school winter quarter elective, "The Healer’s Art," a curriculum that she developed 12 years ago at UC-San Francisco that is now taught at 29 medical schools.
Remen uses humor and personal insight punctuated with plenty of hugging to give students and faculty the opportunity to discover the human side of medicine. A common theme for her is that the difference physicians make is often not with treatments and cures but with providing simple humanity.
The inspiration for Remen’s talk was one of her students who had become quite depressed after taking a two-hour medical history of a homeless man. The man had thanked the student profusely, while the student felt as if she had been unable to provide anything useful to alleviate the man’s physical, social, financial and mental problems.
"I think that that had been a very important two hours for him," said Remen. "We all need to matter to someone in order to know who we are and I think perhaps that’s why he was so thankful and grateful to her. Of course she wasn’t able to fix any of his problems, but she was able to remind him of a dignity and importance he had as a human being."
Remen, who is a professor of family and community medicine at UCSF, said she has been a doctor for 42 years and a teacher for 35 years, but a patient with a severe debilitating incurable disease for 50 years. Her own illness, which she said brought her to the brink of suicide, also gave her the inspiration to become an advocate of humanistic medicine.
