“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Everything should be done to insure that the patient is given a hand in whatever physical treatment is involved. He or she should be enlightened enough through doctor-patient discussions to make choices about the treatment. In some cases, however, patients will make it clear that they prefer to hand over all responsibility for treatment to the doctor, and in such instances their decisions should be followed. It is a good idea for the doctor to question the patient sometimes, to make sure that the decision is not one of the moment alone.

The patient might begin to collect jokes, for example, or funny cartoons from magazines and newspapers. Watching comedies on television will help — and so, in fact, will any distraction that is pleasing to the patient.

Crossword puzzles and other word games will also benefit, even if only done mentally. It might also be advisable for the patient to take up some completely new field of knowledge — to learn a language, for instance, or to study whatever books possible in any field to which he or she is attracted.

Whenever possible, it is far better for the patient to remain home, rather than live steadily at a hospital. When hospitalization is required, however, family members should try to act as honestly and openly as possible. It is a good idea for such family members to join other groups of people who are in the same situation, so that they can express their own doubts and hesitations.

Upon the patient a doctor often assigns and projects his own feelings of helplessness against which he combats. The interactions continue with the patient trying to please the doctor, and at best merely changing from one group of symptoms to another. Far too often the doctor shares the patient’s unshakable belief in poor health and disease.

The old medicine men often dealt far more directly with the patient himself, and understood the nature of beliefs and the prime importance of suggestion. Many of their techniques were adopted for their psychological shock value, in which the patient was quite effectively “brainwashed” out of the disease he believed that he had.

[...] Behind this is the psychic pattern of beliefs in which the patient often assigns to the doctor the powers of knowledge and wisdom that his beliefs have taught him he does not have. Knowing otherwise, the patient still wants to consider the doctor omnipotent.

[...] Here you have again, as in psychoanalysis, a hide-and-seek arrangement in which both doctor and patient take part. [...]

Doctors might suggest that a patient relax and then ask himself or herself what kind of inner fantasy would best serve the healing process. Instant images may come to mind at once, but if success is not achieved immediately, have the patient try again, for in almost all cases some inner pictures will be perceived.

Many cancer patients have martyrlike characteristics, often putting up with undesirable situations or conditions for years.

It is also vital that these patients are not overly medicated, for oftentimes the side effects of some cancer-eradicating drugs are dangerous in themselves. [...]

[...] Cancer patients most usually feel an inner impatience as they sense their own need for future expansion and development, only to feel it thwarted.

[...] He cannot divorce himself from the reality of his patient. Instead, usually, the doctor’s words and very methods literally separate the patient from himself or herself. The malady is seen almost as a thing apart from the patient’s person — but thrust upon it — over which the patient has little control.³

[...] The patient may silently shout out, “That is not just a blood sample — it is my blood you are taking.” [...]

[...] In his material after 11:23 especially, Seth discusses the doctor-patient relationship, and the feelings of powerlessness that can beset the individual during times of illness.

[...] My main point was that by displacing the cause of their troubles outside themselves, the patient freed himself or herself of guilt and responsibility for their own welfare. It made me wonder just how many ills are treated in this way, with the “cure” being given to the patient through conventional treatment, where if the patient understood what mechanisms were operating within, the cure could be attained without medical intervention. [...]

[...] Last night she’d been struck by a patient. [...]

The attitude even of doctors and nurses toward the handling of such patients shows only too clearly not only their fear of the disease itself, but their fear of homosexuality, which has been considered evil and forbidden by many religions. Emotions run at top pace in such cases, and the AIDS patients are often shunted away, out of human society. [...]

[...] It should be remembered that it is the beliefs and feelings of the patients that largely determine the effectiveness of any medical procedures, techniques, or medications.

[...] But the individual, even as a patient, must always have a choice, and have the right to refuse any treatment being suggested.

[...] In many cases, even when hearts are repaired through medical technology, the same trouble reoccurs at a later date, or the patient recovers only to fall prey to a different, nearly fatal or fatal, disease. This is not always the case, by any means, but when such a person does recover fully, and maintains good health, it is because beliefs, attitudes, and feelings have changed for the better, and because the person “has a heart” again, comma, in other words, because the patient himself has regained the will to live.

[...] Old-time family doctors understood the patient’s sensitivity to family members and to the environment, of course, and they often felt a lively sympathy and understanding that the practitioners of modern medicine often seem to have forgotten.

[...] The medical profession is fond of saying that such individuals prevent patients from seeking proper treatment. The fact is that such patients no longer believe in the doctors’ system of belief, and so could not be helped by them.

[...] In your society regression is often involved; the patient will remember and relive a traumatic experience from the past. [...]

[...] The doctors will simply see no other way out, and unfortunately neither will the patient.

(Pause.) A modern Western physician — granted, with the greatest discomfiture — will inform his patient that he is about to die, impressing upon him that his situation is hopeless, and yet will react with scorn and loathing when he reads that a voodoo practitioner has put a curse upon some innocent victim.

[...] Judy said the latest now is that six patients—including Jane—are to stay where they are in Surgical 3. “Thank God,” Jane said. [...] Judy seemed to think that what she’d been told about the six patients was pretty reliable. The section is down to 13 patients, she said. [...]

[...] Oftentimes also those in attendance, the doctors or other healers are themselves tired, prone to the patient’s emotional fears, and automatically in self-defense respond by giving voice to the patient’s subconscious dread, picking it up telepathically but feeling it is directed at themselves, on a subconscious level of course.

[...] And in an unwary, emotionally upset personality, particularly if under stress, such a suggestion could cause a harmless and protective nodule to be changed by the strong powers of adverse expectation, or rather expectation poorly used, into the form of what is feared; as a slight but harmless irregularity of heartbeat, with the unthinking suggestion of a doctor, can become through the patient’s fears an actual functional disorder, so could suggestion turn a relatively harmless formation like Ruburt’s into an arthritic condition.

[...] Again, subconsciously, the patient would wish to give his illness literally away, shove it from himself, so that often a healer responds subconsciously to what he considers a legitimate threat.

Nevertheless, because the patient is in a condition where he is most susceptible to suggestions, a great responsibility lies upon the shoulders of those who would treat illness. [...]

(11:15.) The healer’s purpose and function, however he or she operates, is to convince the patient that healing is not only possible but inevitable. [...] Faith is required because healer and patient alike are directly encountering a set of circumstances evident to the senses. The healer is usually equipped with his or her own beliefs, to which the patient is highly suggestible, because this is the area of conflict.

The healthy man or woman, in excellent condition, may be quite as blind in other areas, but the healer and the patient are united in a strange fashion by their belief in the existence of dis-ease as far as personal experience is concerned. The doctor is usually as obsessed with dis-ease as his patient, though from a different viewpoint.

[...] Whatever mechanisms or methods are used in any illness, they are efficient and productive only to the extent that they convince the patient of his or her power to overcome the condition.

(I couldn’t help noticing as I walked down the hall on my way out, how busy all the patient rooms were, the cacophony of sounds, the numerous visitors, patients and nurses and aides. [...]

[...] They may become professional patients, favorites of their doctors because of their wit and repartee in the face of their affliction. [...]

[...] On the one hand some epileptic patients feel a cut above the usual run of humanity, while on the other they perform far more awkwardly than normal persons. [...]

[...] But the experiences undergone by the patients — and all of this applies to massive doses — represent the enactment, through terrible encounter, of the species’ birth into consciousness, and its death as consciousness falls back annihilated; followed by its rebirth as the individual patient struggles to emerge again from dimensions not native under those conditions.

[...] So patient and therapist share the belief that the conscious mind does not have easy access to the needed knowledge.

Now this is simply another system of belief in which patient and therapist operate. [...]

I am like a doctor, able to describe the condition of the patient, or the subconscious. In hypnosis the subconscious, as the patient, speaks for himself, or is spoken to.

[...] You must also be patient with him. [...]

[...] She also told us that another nurse will be out for at least a week with a strained back, which she evidently got from trying to lift a patient. [...]

[...] A nurse took Jane’s vitals — temperature, 98.5. When all was clear and quiet — except for the patient, Karina, hollering next door — Jane said she’d like to have a short session.)

[...] Patients are obviously in hospitals because they are ill. [...]

[...] 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.

[...] 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. [...]

(Pause.) In your hospitals however you take your patients out of their natural environment, and often deny them the comforts of creaturehood. [...]

[...] Some of the rooms in Surgical 3 were dark, their beds freshly made and lying in wait for patients in the gloom. The latest talk now is that new patients will be coming in later this week, to bring the census back up. [...]

[...] Everybody’s mad—the doctors, the nurses, the patients, the nurses, the aides. [...]

[...] A couple of the nurses told us that Surgical 3 is back up to full operations again—with a load of some 15 patients coming in this morning, for a total of 22 or 23. [...]

[...] Discovering it involved a patient combing of many sessions and notes. [...]