by Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar Book Presentation Overview Healing

The need for healing touch is eminent today in all medical care centres including the hospitals where there is an ambience of hi-tech medical practice. As medical practices are getting more and more technical and mechanical, the humane aspect is gradually disappearing. After all, for all healing purposes the doctor-patient relationship, which is sacred, cannot get overlooked. The busy schedules in the hospitals due to increased patients is resulting in mechanical, time bound, machine like functioning by the doctors and the assisting staff. The human touch is relegated to secondary position while it has to remain at all times in its primary position. It cannot be considered insignificant and unimportant. More and more power is accumulating around the peers and the specialists who are extremely busy attending to the schedules and consequently the same power permeates down the line through the hierarchy of health workers.

Power cannot be a basis for health practice. Love is the basis for all health and healing activity. Love generates healing. “Where there is love, there is the healing”, is the ancient dictum. The hospital ambience needs to be patient friendly. A humane approach is the need of the hour. The patient that visits the hospital today generally gets constricted and inhibited. Due to sickness the patient is already inhibited. In a many cases, fear hovers over them and inhibits further. Suspicion and doubt follow the fear and the patient remains subdued by the self-built negative and depressive thoughts. When he is exposed to the hi-tech ambience, it adds further to his trouble. It is too much to expect the patients to be knowledgeable of their sickness. They are generally ignorant and the little knowledge that they carry disappears due to the overpowering fear. Patients are inhibited and health practitioners are busy. The attendants of the patients get confused; it is specially so where surgeries are involved. It should be noted that today's average patient is full of fear and less of knowledge. They suffer from variety of psychological, self-assumed fears.

It is common knowledge that when a doctor checks blood pressure, the mercury level shows slightly higher than normal. When sugars are to be tested the next day, a patient works it up from the previous day, builds enough sugars to show higher level than what is normal with him/her. They need to be comforted, engaged in humour to create a friendly atmosphere. In a friendly atmosphere readings such as sugar and blood pressure are far more accurate than in a tense atmosphere. Many times the patient says that at home the sugars are not so high and the hypertension is not so high, which cannot be ignored. Homely atmosphere is the need of the hour.

Patients' positive orientation towards the doctor is of great importance and it can be built by doctors' friendly approach to the patients. The doctors need to gain the friendliness of the patients for healthy flow of energies from them to the patients. Since doctors work incessantly to improve the health conditions of the patients they carry abundant healing energies which they may not be conscious of. Friendly gestures of doctors enable transmission of these energies to the patients, which is rather a subtle aspect of healing. Healing energies are better transmitted through smile and through looks of friendliness and compassion. Soothing words are further helpful. Appropriate humour is ideal. It is said that a doctor without humour is no doctor. Humour and smile are but part of health and healing activity. They need to be cultivated, if one does not carry it and if one intends to be a good healer or doctor. What is said of the doctors is also true with the supporting team such as nurses and the cleaning staff. They need to carry the smile on the lips, utter words of compassion and give the patient the feeling that he/she is the most cared one by all concerned. These are few fundamentals to transform a modern hospital into a healing temple. More can be said in this regard.