Issue 11 April 2011
Quantum Q
As a practitioner of narrative medicine, do you believe that the majority, or even perhaps all, illness at some level is born first in our
belief system or thought process? That’s a rather all-or-nothing statement, but it seems that much of frontier medicine seems to be moving in that direction.
L M-M: Let me clarify and say that instead of saying I’m a practitioner of narrative medicine, I’ll say that I’m a physician who has taken the narrative turn, which means that I am really interested in the stories that people tell about their illnesses and in the capacity of those stories to help them heal. I don’t know anymore why people get sick. There are hundreds of stories about why people get sick. But I do believe that it makes some sense that you do have some influence potentially on getting well and that the story you tell yourself about your illness matters a lot… I know people that tell themselves they can’t heal from cancer and they die. I know people who tell themselves they can heal from cancer and they get well. How come? I don’t know. My feeling is that if you don’t explore the story behind why you are doing what you are doing then there’s a risk you won’t maximise your capacity to heal. So why not get the power of the mind behind what you do?
And, also, I think that there are some stories that might actually mitigate against healing. Let me give you an example. I saw a women recently who was tortured–tortured!–by the story that she had to do everything perfectly if she wanted to heal from cancer. Her life was miserable. If someone came to her house wearing perfume, that was lethal. She had to live with others, she couldn’t afford to live alone, and sometimes they used non-green cleaning products or made non- organic vegetables, and it drove her bananas! So her story was torturous, and not necessarily true. Because her cancer was getting worse despite her story.
You know, I tend to sniff out rigidity and oppose it. That seems to be one of my character traits as coyote! So I asked her, ‘What if it’s not true?’ And she’d said, ‘What if what is not true?’ I said, ‘What if what you are doing doesn’t cure
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cancer? Avoiding all chemicals and toxins.’ She said, ‘It has to be true.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘That’s how it is!’ And I told her, ‘I know people who have done this, the way you are doing it, and died anyway. I don’t know either if it’s true. I do think that you are miserable living this way! Maybe there is more to it. And maybe there is more to it than toxic chemicals in the environment. Maybe there is another way to look at getting well that’s more fun. Maybe you need to have more fun!’ I am not saying that having more fun would cure her. But she sure was miserable and that can’t be healthy–in my story of course. That’s just my story–that it can’t be healthy to be so miserable… I saw her on a Sunday and I found out through a mutual friend that on Monday she ate a big, messy non-organic chocolate-chip cookie and really enjoyed it! And sadly she died on Wednesday… At least she got to enjoy one good cookie before she died.
But there are lot of people out there who think they have the formula for getting well–the right story for getting well–and they torture themselves with it. It may not work. So part of the whole storied approach is that if we think about of all of these things as story–including medicine and science–then we won’t take any of them too seriously. We’ll take them all as story and sort through them and pick and choose to come up with the best story to match our location, situation, personality.
Q
You used the word ‘coyote’ in your answer. You use that term in the titles of your books. What does it mean in the context of healing?
L M-M: Where I grew up and during much of my young adulthood, people who were of mixed blood were called ‘coyotes’. So, being a mixture of French, Scottish, Cherokee and Lakota, I am coyote… I always liked coyote because one of the things–if you read the traditional stories about coyote–is that coyote in a humorous way is always bringing about change and transformation. Coyote’s job is help people lighten up and not take themselves so seriously, in a sense to humorously offer other perspectives… But coyote is the image of cultural blending for
Quantum Health 11
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