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Binding and healing: the power of generosity to create community: comment on Arthur Frank's Generous Medicine.

Article Excerpt
In this issue of the journal, Arthur Frank offers a gift to clinicians who would be healers (Frank, 2008). Modern medicine has become such an unholy tangle of transactions, options, deals, requirements, negotiations, mandates, demands, and pressures that from time to time we lose our way. Dr. Frank reaches into this tangle for a first principle on which our usefulness as healers can be organized, and he pulls out, like a bright red thread running through it all, generosity. This generosity, however, is neither simple nor straightforward. It starts with the humility of seeing our place as a small vector among many large and longstanding forces that bear on another person's life and health. We may influence but we do not control, and the sooner one releases the delusion of control, as does Tolstoy's General Kutozov, the better. This is half of the generous gesture. One response to the surrender of control is disengagement, but Frank suggests that a better response is attentive engagement, as if by close observation we might win a chance to influence the course of health; thus, even absent the capacity to control health outcomes, we take responsibility for them, and influence them as and when we can. This is a generous posture, and it transforms us from clinician to healer.

I am so in tune with and inspired by this...

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