s a physician, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen knows firsthand how hospitals, clinical trials, and aggressive treatment protocols can cure patients.
But as a therapist and a patient herself, Dr. Remen says medicine's emphasis on curing disease often isn't enough.
Curing, she says, happens only at the level of the body. But healing, which encompasses the patient's self as well as the body, requires more than mere technique.
Dr. Remen views illness as a challenge that often becomes a spiritual journey for her patients. And the healing they find -- whether cured of their illness or not -- they must ultimately find within themselves.
"Healing is a form of growth, if you want to think of it that way," she says. "Curing is a form of repair. But healing is our birthright. We are all healers."
Dr. Remen, a best-selling author, therapist, and pioneer of the mind-body health movement, will be the keynote speaker for the third annual Women's Health Forum on April 22 at SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics) in Mountain View. The event is sponsored by the Mountain View Voice, the Almanac's sister paper.
Focusing on her new book, "My Grandfather's Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging," Dr. Remen plans to speak about the relationship between story-telling and healing during her presentation.
A self-described "recovering doctor," Dr. Remen says health care workers need to relate more compassionately to patients as fellow human beings, rather than presenting themselves as experts dealing with problems. "We must relinquish the single-minded pursuit of mastery," she says. "Medicine is a front-row seat in mystery."
But doctors aren't her only audience. For Dr. Remen, healing and wellness are part of being connected to the world outside ourselves. She first explored that need for connection in "Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal," an unexpected 1996 bestseller that has been translated into 11 languages and is now used in introductory clinical medicine courses in 18 medical schools across the country.
The book's thesis that telling one's own life story and hearing the stories of others can connect people and help them to heal struck a powerful chord in patients, caregivers, and physicians alike.
"The whole human race wrote me back," she muses. "I got over 7,000 letters after the book was published, and many of them made me cry. We Americans are a wiser, better people than I ever imagined. But there's a real need for people to tell their stories, to listen to others and to feel that they've been heard in turn. That s essential to healing, to becoming whole."
True strength
Having spent much of her life straddling both sides of the doctor/patient relationship, Dr. Remen is in many ways a study in contrasts. A gifted physician who studied medicine at Cornell Medical School, trained in pediatrics at New York Hospital, and served as the associate director of the pediatric clinics at Stanford University Medical Center, she says she became discouraged by medicine's tendency to treat patients as problems, not people.
That tendency, she says, comes from a mistaken sense of professionalism. She recalls an experience she had when she was a fledgling doctor and cried in front of the parents of a 2-year-old child who had just drowned. "The chief told me I'd let those people down," she says. "They were counting on our strength."
But strength, she contends, isn't defined by lack of connection, lack of emotion, lack of display. As a 45-year veteran of Crohn's disease, an inflammatory bowel disease, she has developed a very personal notion of what strength is. And it isn't dispassionate.
"For the first 10 years of my illness I was enraged," she says. "But rage will only take you so far. Eventually you have to feel the will to live without feeling it as anger. You have to feel it as a love of life, a willingness to take whatever you've been given and make the most of it."
Personal credo
Making the most of what she's been given has become a personal credo for Dr. Remen, both professionally and personally. Looking for something beyond conventional medicine's emphasis on merely curing illness, she co-founded the Commonweal Cancer Help Program in Bolinas, where she remains medical director.
She also founded the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness, one of the first post-graduate training programs for physicians in relationship-centered care accredited by the California Medical Association. A clinical professor at UCSF, she has also cared for thousands of people with cancer in her private therapeutic practice for the past 20 years.
She's also been learning to make the most of her personal legacy. A doctor's daughter who came from a long line of fact-centered physicians and scientists, she remembers her grandfather's presence in her early life as a foreign, mystical influence.
"He was a student of the Kabbala," she says. "He believed that we fill ourselves up with blessing, with wholeness, and overflow onto others. That was very different from the modern view of service as sacrifice, as science.
"It was only after my medical education that I began to appreciate that outlook again."
Healing the wounded
While her grandfather's stories are the anchor for her second book, that attraction to the wisdom science can't reveal is part of her earlier effort, "Kitchen Table Wisdom," as well.
"The world isn't made up of facts," she says. "It's made up of stories. And in a technological society, that takes us by surprise.
"Stories take the facts of a life and infuse them with meaning. They inspire us, feed us, heal us when we've been wounded. It's not possible to live well without stories, I think."
She recalls a letter she received from a Texas man whose father was dying. The men had fished, played ball, and hunted together. But now that the father was dying, neither knew how to talk to the other.
"They read the stories (from "Kitchen Table Wisdom") and discussed them first, and that gave them the voice to tell their own stories," she says. "When you know someone's story, you can connect to that person; he can never be an enemy. It's a form of connection."
It's also a form of being vulnerable, a favorite theme of Dr. Remen's. "There's this myth in our culture that you have to be perfect in order to serve other people. But some of the things we are most ashamed of as our weaknesses or vulnerabilities are just what enable us to connect.
"What we have learned from our wounds is what enables us to be compassionate, to be of service," she says.
The final step
That sense of service is the central theme of her newest book, due out from Riverhead Press this month. "Often we are a blessing to others and we don't even know it," she says. "When we recognize this, we can know the value of ourselves and who we truly are."
That knowledge may not show up on the surgeon general's list of ways to prolong our lives just yet, but it makes lives richer.
"It's really the final step in the healing process -- to know ourselves as connected to life and to others," Dr. Remen says. And given the number of studies that indicate people live longer when they feel supported by family and friends, connected to a community, and perhaps even to a spiritual practice, service just might be a step toward greater physical health, as well.
Characteristically, Dr. Remen's thinking on the matter mixes the personal with the cosmic, the practical with the practically unknowable.
"There is emptiness at the center of all our busy lives, and that can be filled only with love and connection," she says. "Every person on this earth needs to feel connected."
Remembering her grandfather, she tells another story, a mystical tale. "The Kabbala says, in the beginning light was broken up into countless sparks of goodness buried in everyone. It's everyone's task to find that hidden holiness, that wholeness, and restore it. It's a beautiful story."
It's also how she has spent much of her professional life. Uncovering the stories and strengths of her patients, she's helped them become whole. It's a task she thinks we're all capable of, in our own ways.
"We need to remember we are all healers," she says. "We can bless life inside us and around us. And that can repair the world."
