1 result for (book:nopr AND session:661 AND stemmed:patient)
[... 42 paragraphs ...]
As I have said before, your thoughts are reality. They directly affect your body. It seems that you are highly civilized people because you put your ill into hospitals where they can be cared for. What you do, of course, is to isolate a group of people who are filled with negative beliefs about illness. The contagion of beliefs spreads. Patients are obviously in hospitals because they are ill. The sick and their doctors both work on that principle.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]
The individual is made to feel powerless, at the mercy of doctors or nurses who often do not have the time or energy to be personable, or to explain his [or her] condition in terms that he can understand. The patient is therefore forced to transfer his own sense of power to others, which further deepens his misery; this in turn reinforces the sense of powerlessness that initiated his condition.
Furthermore, the natural elements of sun, air, and earth are refused him. The stability of familiarity is withdrawn. Now with your set of beliefs you are indeed more or less obligated to go to hospitals in severe conditions. I am not saying here that many doctors and nurses do not try their best to promote healing, and certainly healings occur — but they do so despite the system and not because of it. In many cases the belief of a doctor in a person who is ill revives him and rearouses his own belief in himself. The patient’s confidence in the doctor will then reinforce the entire medical procedure, and he may then be filled with faith in his recovery. But as there are natural healing processes within animals, so there are in your race.
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
(Pause.) In your hospitals however you take your patients out of their natural environment, and often deny them the comforts of creaturehood. There is little emotional involvement. (Long pause.) The senile, in their efforts to run away from their closeted rooms in sanitariums, often show far greater sanity in their way than the relative or society who imprisoned them. For they intuitively recognize the need to be free, and they sense the lack of the mystic communion with the earth that has been denied them. (See the 650th session in Chapter Thirteen.)
[... 6 paragraphs ...]
When and if it is killed by its brothers, this is not an act of cruelty but an innate understanding that the creature can no longer operate physically without agony; a quite natural euthanasia is involved, in which the “patient” also acquiesces. In your society such a natural death is most difficult, and because of the power structures can hardly be promoted. No one who decides upon death is saved from it by the medical profession, however. On deeper levels the quite normal desire for survival requires that the individual leave his or her body, in your terms, at one time or another. When that period arrives the person knows it, and the great vitality of the spirit no longer wants to be encased by a suffering physical body.
[... 4 paragraphs ...]