In Search of Meaning
by a clinician
While Joe was having lunch, he thought about Mike, who had been his patient for more than a decade. Mike was the typical archetype of candidate for lifestyle changes: healthy eating, regular exercise, normal weight, no-smoking, little or no alcohol and adequate sleep. Factor in work-life balance and you'd have the ideal goal for all your patients. And, most of all, if you managed to do it all with few or no medications, you were certainly the idealised patient.Did Joe have any patients that fitted that perfect human pattern? Maybe, but certainly most of his patients deserved a gap analysis and resetting of goals and changes in their daily activities, habits and eating to attain the cherished ideal.After more than three decades of practice, Joe felt that much of what he had done—and was to a great extent still doing—was preaching in a quasi-religious mode, the expected behavior to deserve a better and healthier future. Although he still strongly believed in stopping unhealthy habits like smoking, heavy drinking and eating junk food, he had slowly shifted from being the priest hearing his patient's health sins and prescribing the tests, medicines and behaviors expected to prove repentance, to hearing his patients' life stories, goals, values, meanings and purpose.Joe had come to understand that health care is but one more of the many paths that people follow to fulfill their search for meanings. For some, health care had become a confessionary to take the blame and seek forgiveness for their unhealthy sins, only to return to the self-destructive patterns again, as Mike had done, especially after his wife had left him.