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Doctor's Office: Enter at your own Risk!

Paul Bahder, MD & Teresa A. Bahder, MA

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Visiting a medical doctor without being in the proper frame of mind can very easily reinforce and perpetuate your illness, rather than help you to overcome it.

When a patient comes into a medical office, there are invisible forces that are put into play. Correct understanding of what happens when you enter the medical office may mean the difference between your health and disease. The doctor is ready to strengthen your already compromised state of mind. He sees it as his duty to "fix your symptoms" and thus rob you of discovering what created them in the first place.

You, the patient, are frustrated, scared, intimidated, or overwhelmed by your symptoms, so you are good material for someone who tells you he will fix you right up. Even if you know somewhere deep inside that there is more to being sick than just your symptoms, a visit to your local doctor may put you at ease and reassure you that you had nothing to do with your illness. A visit to a doctor's office may cost you the clarity of your mind. One wrong encouragement at a moment when you are already tempted to see yourself as a helpless victim of your illness may be enough to fixate you in the drama of your disease for a long time to come.

Doctors are trained to "attack disease" and they forget that there is no such thing as disease, but only sick people. Focused on the illness, the doctor feels it is his duty to wipe out "the bad guys," the headaches, the fevers, the pains-no matter what it takes. He is prepared to pull out any heavy artillery at his command. Whatever will do the job is justified, because illness is his enemy and his sole reason for being a doctor. All his years of school, effort, and money tell him that he is right. Also, if he is successful in wiping out the symptoms, he becomes the conqueror, the good guy, triumphant over the bad. For this prize, a doctor will often spare no effort, waking at all kinds of hours of the night, working sixteen hour days, attending patients, consulting, worrying about the outcome.

Many doctors are sincere in wanting to overcome the disease; it's just that they don't know that healing has nothing to do with wiping out illness. In their zeal to wipe out the symptoms, they all too often forget the person behind the experience and wipe out his spirit as well. Not knowing that behind all those confusing and confounding symptoms there exists a real person, a soul, the only reality the doctor sees is the illness.

Doctors, as a rule, don't believe in health. Therefore, they are stuck fighting the only thing they believe in! Faith in the inner being of a person, in the essence that can never be sick, is a medical heresy. Not understanding that man in his essence is not of flesh, doctors are doomed to be overcome by the forces of contagion and decay. Forgetting the Christian teaching that "the Kingdom is not of this world" but rather it is "within," doctors find themselves victims of the only world they know.

Taking all necessary actions to eradicate signs of illness, the sick person ends up being just as much attacked as the illness itself. Strong and toxic drugs, surgery such as amputation, all become acceptable arsenal for medicine because they effectively eliminate symptoms. Even hideous schemes, using machines to keep living corpses alive, transplanting parts of carcasses, and allowing another woman to carry your baby, are seen as normal. That the person, the patient, gets compromised just as much as the illness, is often overlooked or ignored all together.

On top of the doctor's readiness to justify your lifestyle, you, the patient, already come with such an expectation Most people come with an unspoken request, "Take away my symptoms and my pain, but do nothing to change me." "I am fine the way I am, and the only problem with me is my discomfort."

In fact, most of the time it becomes an unspoken contract between the patient and the doctor to see the illness as the problem. This secret alliance binds the doctor and the patient in a covert conspiracy to conceal the real cause of suffering, which is his departure from the laws of Truth. Instead, it deals only with the visible symptoms, labeling them as the real cause. This confusion effectively blocks any hope of finding real answers and returning to the true ground of our being, which is within. By paying homage only to what is perceived and visible, the real and invisible cause is thus effectively denied. The world of matter, of pain and suffering, is seen as true, and the world of spirit, of truth and bliss, is dismissed as false.

This contract is not as innocent as it sounds. Because as long as the illness is the problem, then the patient is not. We get an illness in order to appear "healthy." Looking out, we forget to look in. Becoming sick becomes a way of becoming alright. And the greater the need of the patient to appear as a fine person, the greater the disease he must muster. The greater the problem the illness is, the less the person blames himself.

In disease, sickness becomes healthy and health becomes sick. We are made innocent by the aggressiveness of the illness. Its cruelty, its painfulness, its progression, testify to our being pure, righteous, and beautiful. The uglier the sick body, the more beauty the sick mind sees in it. The more you are victimized by your illness, the more glorified and innocent you are made in the eyes of the world.

In our culture a really serious disease carries much power. Many times we have heard from patients in our practice how much power cancer has given them. It becomes like a secret weapon that, they say, they can pull out and use. It never fails to command attention and respect. When a person says he has cancer, others listen. Family, "friends," even innocent bystanders recognize cancer as an authority. People are rallied to do things they never otherwise would, just by hearing that a person has cancer. It seems that throughout history there have been periods when a certain disease gained much public recognition and became a universally recognized status and power symbol. AIDS is one such example in recent years.

Drawing attention from the kind of a person the sick one is to the illness itself, the doctor officiates at the ritualistic glorification of the disease. He is like an auto mechanic who reassures you that your red warning oil lamp in the car is the problem, and proceeds to tell you how he will help you in making it go blank. This is the sort of answer the doctor gives you.

A doctor has many fetishes to help him in that role. Diplomas, special language, dress, even unintelligible penmanship. These elements serve to convince the patient that he is completely justified in surrendering his own common sense to the doctor. There is more: the usual wait before seeing him so that you may experience the necessary emotional tension for him to do his job, the high fee to let you know that something of importance has taken place, the prescription for magical chemicals which are an extension of the doctor, so that his spirit may go with you. However, do not believe for a second that it is a doctor's ill will that is creating your world of deception for you. It is your expectation that makes the doctor rise to the occasion and provide you with what you demand.

Traditional medical care is used to justify and even glorify the sick individual so that he or she never has to face himself, never has to give up the attitude, the emotional excitement, and the stress that led to the disease in the first place. To do that, however, medicine needs magic. It needs rituals, symbols, images that will convey and support the lie that patients demand.

To justify the insane position that your illness has nothing to do with your life, conventional medicine needs to have something to convince us that its lie is the truth. It needs, in fact, a way of hypnotizing people, of convincing them of its authority, above and beyond any other. Medicine in modern society, to fulfill its appointed role as the savior of man, needs to be higher than reason or common sense; it needs to be higher even than morality. Isn't that *the reason why you feel so awkward and helpless when you visit your doctor? The cure, by making you inwardly feel more uneasy than the illness itself, relieves the discomfort of the disease.

Strangely enough, it is that very awkwardness, the feeling of being affected by something greater than you, be it virus, pain, or anxiety, that you go to the doctor for. Because if you feel helpless in front of a doctor and his medicine, his machines and chemicals, his prognoses and diagnoses, then you are perfectly justified in feeling helpless with your disease. The awkward, uneasy feeling that you feel with the doctor justifies the "dis-easy" feeling that you have in the privacy of your home or in the secret fantasy of your mind.

You need your doctor to document your illness, to give it a name, and to give it credibility. In coming to the doctor, you are entering into an unspoken agreement that he will keep your secret hidden from the rest of the world, even from yourself. In exchange, you are given a diagnosis and a protocol to follow that will re-enforce your seeming innocence and your disease's own violence. Having a name of the illness that is "victimizing" you is a very important part of the covenant you have with your doctor. By naming it, the illness becomes something outside of your own volition or choice, and so it becomes a perfectly justified part of your life.

I remember a patient who came to see us with the diagnosis of manic depressive illness. She had periods of not wanting to get out of bed in the morning and periods of excessively spending her mother's money. After thorough examination and listening to her story, we became convinced that she did not have that illness and that her problem was a deep-seated resentment toward her mother, and we told her so. This patient, rather than being happy to hear that there was a way for her to not be sick all of her life, became angry that her symptoms were not taken seriously! We have had many cases where people are desperately searching for "metabolic" causes or for hereditary explanations, even though such information would not help to heal them in any way. Still, it dignifies their illness with an air of acceptability and recognition. Once a doctor can name the disease, it is his respectability, with his status and his diplomas, that stand behind the illness.

The doctor gives you the authority to feel unjustly overcome, victimized, or crucified by life itself. The violence of the disease testifies to your innocence. In the imperfection of the disease you find your own perfection. In its pain, your own pleasure. In its disability, your own power. In disease the order of life and death is reversed. Suffering and pain fulfill the ego while life hurts with truth. In disease we forget God and remember hell (pain). In healing we remember the truth and discredit the pain.