Medical Monday 1

Hey everybody! So this my first Medical Monday, and it is also my first Monday not being a teenager! Yup, I turned 20 yesterday, so I am officially old. I know a lot of people reading this are probably older than me, but I just joined the club.

Today's Medical Monday is going to be about hands. We can do a lot with our hands, we can make things, we can use them as a musical instrument and among other things, we can use them to comfort somebody. I will never forget the moment when my GP put his hand on my back to help me sit up after an exam a few years ago when I was dealing with a pretty severe illness. It was a simple gesture, but that moment he went from being a doctor to being a friend, from being the person with the prescription pad to being a comforting presence. Its a pretty incredible thing that we can do with our hands.

On Friday, I went to my volunteer shift at the Children's Hospital. For about an hour, I just held this four year old boy (he was about the size of a two year old, and developmentally a year). We read stories, but mostly we just cuddled, and he would smile and giggle. There was an other girl, B, and she has her good days and her bad days. Friday was a bad day and on bad days, B doesn't stop yelling, screaming and crying (she is a non-verbal communicator). The morning was actually going pretty good until music therapy...then it all went down hill. So I took her to the sun-room, where she continued to scream until I started to gently rub her back, and then she stopped. As soon as I removed my had, she would start crying again, so I kept rubbing her back until she fell asleep, and then once she was asleep I wheeled her back to her room as quiet as humanly possible.

People seem to have this notion that medicine is about learning about diseases and treatments, and that patients are their disease. I am even guilty of this thinking and I'm not even in medical school yet, but there is something more to medicine than just that. People say that their doctor is amazing because they not only make correct diagnosis but they actually listen, and don't get me wrong, that definitely adds up to some respect points in my book. I think though, that we easily forget that sometimes all people really need from medicine is a comforting hand.

I encourage you, if you are a doctor, want to be a doctor or have anything remotely do with the lives of people who are ill, terminal or are just having a crappy day to extend your hand to them and bring them a sense of comfort that drugs and other treatments cannot. That is real medicine.