I need a healer

"The Doctor's Dilemma
Returning Service, Grace, and Meaning to the Art of Healing"
This is a cool article that someone sent me. Apparantly this woman initially had crohn's (hence the friend sending me the article) but what speaks to me is the need for healers in our society. She teaches a course for first year med students entitled "The Healer's Art" which sounds wonderfully interesting.

I've been around a lot of doctors in the past few years of my life. I almost always leave their presence on the verge of tears. They are the ones who you go to at your weakest and most vulnerable, yet they only have a couple of minutes with you no matter what, even if they want more time, even if you have spent the past 3 hours in their office. It's mandated by our current system. I longed to be looked at as a whole person, not as a back or a colon or a heart. I have sooo many doctors and doctors appointments and yet I never feel like I've completly been looked at, or listened to.

I was so tired of being treated as an illness or a body part, so I thought I would get myself a referal to a pain management clinic. I have 3 pretty chronic pains that have different etiologies. I have doctors for each ailment, but i have pain from all of them. So i thought it would be a good idea to deal with pain as a thing itself and learn how to deal with it in general (besides taking medicine), so that no matter what the cause, i have a coping technique.

So they poked and prodded and had me fill out about 20 pages of questionaires on "the ONE main complaint that brings you here today" The biggest is my back, so that's what i filled out the paperwork on. When I acutally got to talk to a real person, they said: well, let's just look at your back and we can troubleshoot the other stuff later. I told them that my back is precisely as bad as it is because the incident that caused the pain happened in a series of events, of which the back was the least acute. At the time I was saying "but my lower back is KILLING ME" and the doctors were like "no, I'm not even going to look at that until we deal with this broken ankle" etc. so here i am 7 years later, still dealing with my lower back. Noone had wanted to deal with it before. Now that's all they want to hear about. I kept saying "look, I just want ways from you of dealing with pain, I have a back doctor, I have a GI, I don't need a new diagnosis and treatment plan, I came here today for a pain mangement plan, give me breathing techniques, SOMETHING" So what was the suggestion? surgery on my discs that may or may not relieve ONE of the pains, and which carries risk of infection, spine damage, and all that good stuff with it. I threw up my hands and left.