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The Tall One

He rolls the flower cart down the sidewalk, and I watch him through the window. Six days a week he goes by with his cart of flowers. He comes by just before visiting hours and stays until all the visitors have gone into the hospital.

The Doctor Who Won’t Charge

An Interview With Patch Adams

People are not their diseases. They are the same weak fragile beings that we ourselves are. Traditionally, a physician in general practice follows patients throughout their lives, but without touching on the quality of a person’s life, their loves, concerns, and fears, we ignore a gigantic area of resource and of disease.

Bitter Medicine

Sunbeams

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley

The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues

(Part I)

They draw me into an arch so that they can run an eighteen-inch horse-needle in between the plates of my spine for an hour or so to get a copious sample of the cerebrospinal fluid. So the doctors can tell my family. What they know already. That I am very sick. That I might die.

Cholestiatoma

Cholestiatoma is a loving beast; as with other cancers, he comes like a string around the finger, a chain around the throat, to insure that we do not idly forget why we are here. Cholestiatoma (Chole when masculine, Choleste when feminine) lives in my skull between the meninges and the right orbit.

Doctors As Equals: Beyond The Medical Mystique

An Interview With Dan Domizio

It would be so nice if we didn’t have societal inertia, history, intransigence to deal with, but that’s a dream. We’ve got a system that was primitive, evolved to an enormously sophisticated set-up and is now riding on the myths and images and reputations of the past medical tradition. We need to recognize it, understand why it is what it is, and then step by evolutionary step take it apart and put it where it needs to be.

Mysteries And Metaphors

A New Look At Cancer

I’m on my way to the biggest — and for me the most enigmatic — of cities, New York, to attend Cancer Dialogue ’80, an historic gathering of physicians, scientists, and researchers brought together by the Omega Institute to shed light on the most frightening and puzzling disease of our time.

A Medical Doctor Diagnoses Reality

“There’s Nothing Out There. It’s All Happening On The Back Of Your Eyeballs.”

The suggestion coming down from the best minds in the scientific community today is that the world is crystallized thought. What you think creates your world. There’s an old Buddhist image of two mirrors facing each other — each one reflecting and creating the other. That’s the way it is with your consciousness and your physical reality.

Sunbeams

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Voltaire