Interesting article--a woman physician speaks of the true nature

[bliss_eternal]

of healing, chauvinism and other relevant issues... Very interesting read! I found this quite by accident. :hi:

Despite the extensive academic training I have received, I feel that I have been taught to practice medicine in a way that does not help me be a healer.

I love being a doctor, but I don’t think the field truly understands what patients need to heal. The system also doesn’t appreciate the perspectives of women, minorities, or the needs of people who don’t want to use drugs or surgery. Women tend to use their intuition when exploring their illness, and this is often not addressed in medicine. The word “care” means a lot to me; no one ever taught us as medical students how to take care of our lives so that we could take care of our bodies, through sleep, eating right, and doing daily exercise; or how to take care of our minds, with all the violence and inequity and discrimination we face. Most doctors don’t really know how to do that. Taking care has meant reorienting into holistic medicine, using my perspective as a woman and trusting my intuition as I practice. It is sometimes a challenge to swim upstream most days, but it is more of a challenge going to bed with Integrity if I just follow the system without trying to reshape it, using my role as a woman healer.

I’m the second of four girls in a Bengali Brahmin family. When we were young my mother would often hear consoling remarks from those who assumed she was disappointed in having no sons. My mom would smile and say that she was happier having four healthy, intelligent girls than having a boy for the sake of having a boy. Fortunately, girls tend to be more valued in Bengal than in many other parts of India, though people still want boys.

My father is an interesting man, trapped between society’s expectations of patriarchy and his own pride as a father. On one hand, he is chauvinistic, as he was raised in a traditional Bengali brahmin setting where men are the unquestioned head of the household. Men are expected to have more, be more and do more; they hold decision-making power for the entire family. At the same time, when my father didn’t have any sons, he decided that his daughters should have the privileges that his sons would have had. He brought us up with career ambitions, brought us to America to have the best formal education, taught us to ask questions about the universe around us, and gave us examples for questioning abusive authority.

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Taken from:

http://imaginingourselves.imow.org/pb/Story.aspx?g=0&id=402&lang=1

[spooky3]

1. lovely article--thanks for posting it

[Cerridwen]

2. Thank you! What a wonderful story..........eom