“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I called Upjohn nursing service last Tuesday, noting that starting next Monday we’ll want a nurse at the house only three times a week instead of five. I’ll do the dressing-changes required for Jane’s decubiti the other days. The nurse, Peggy Jowett, has already been informed of the change in routine. Our idea is to soon cut down the visits to two a week, then one....

(Roe Cantando, head of the local Upjohn service, visited a couple of days after I called. She brought with her a student nurse, Julia, from Arnot-Ogden. [Roe also brought a student nurse on her previous visit, by the way.]

(One thing that led to our decision to cut down the visits was that I felt that often Jane seemed worse after the nurses left than she was before they arrived, although her being stirred up for a couple of hours may have contributed to my feeling. But it does seem like a mixed blessing at best. We’re always on the watch for negative suggestions, and some of the nurses dispense these very freely. One of them, Eleanor, visited Jane the last two Mondays and Tuesdays. She is now on vacation, and we trust that the reduced schedule will do away with Eleanor’s visits. She is a nice person who means well, but who also broadcasts negative suggestions like a radio beacon, quite unwittingly. It’s easy to see that she has built her life around such feelings, and is quite pleased with it. [She told Jane she’s had five operations herself.] Jane got so that when Eleanor was here she was constantly saying “no, no, no” to herself as the nurse talked, in order to protect herself from that steady barrage.

Give us a moment.... It is a wise idea to cut down your nurses’ visitations. Those visitations, however, show you in quite clear light that the medical profession’s idea of preventive medicine can often lead precisely to the conditions they seemingly wish to avoid.