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Meaning, Medicine, and Healing

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Clinical Perspectives on Meaning

Abstract

The evolution of contemporary medicine has wrought miracles in the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and cure of acute disease. The success of these ventures has fostered a growing population of patients who live and suffer longer with incurable, chronic illnesses. The management of this population incurs a moral obligation for physicians to become holistic healers who accompany patients on their chronic illness journeys. Healing involves the transcendence of suffering. Suffering occurs when the meaning of an illness threatens the integrity of an individual’s personhood and is carried as a personal narrative that encompasses the major existential dimensions of humanity. Illness is a harbinger of death, compromises freedom, isolates the ill, and causes a crisis in meaning, all of which result in suffering. Healers use the powers of the therapeutic relationship to create a community that alleviates the loneliness of illness, encourages the exploration of the meaning of physically compromised life and impending death, endorses the patient’s freedom to make choices congruent with his or her values, and affirms the generation of a life story infused with meaning and dignity. Toward this end, existential and positive psychology can greatly augment medicine’s ability to fulfill its mandate to relieve suffering. As medicine struggles to develop systems of care focused on the alleviation of suffering, new opportunities for existential and positive psychology therapists are emerging. The challenge to professional education is to equip doctors and therapists with the skills necessary to thoughtfully and meaningfully engage patients to help them transcend suffering. The responses of practitioners, policy makers, and educators to these challenges will define the soul of medicine in the postmodern era.

Whether he wants to be or not, the doctor is a storyteller and he can turn our lives into good or bad stories, regardless of the diagnosis. Anatole Broyard (1992, p. 53)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tacoma Family Medicine, Tacoma, WA, USA

    Thomas R. Egnew Ed.D., L.I.C.S.W.

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  1. Thomas R. Egnew Ed.D., L.I.C.S.W.
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Correspondence to Thomas R. Egnew Ed.D., L.I.C.S.W. .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Counseling and Human Development, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Pninit Russo-Netzer

  2. Department of Psychology Clinical-Disaster Research Center (UM-CDRC), University of Mississippi, University, Mississippi, USA

    Stefan E. Schulenberg

  3. International Academy of Philosophy, University in the Principality of Liechtenstein, Vienna, Austria

    Alexander Batthyany

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Egnew, T.R. (2016). Meaning, Medicine, and Healing. In: Russo-Netzer, P., Schulenberg, S., Batthyany, A. (eds) Clinical Perspectives on Meaning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41397-6_15

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