Stuart’s Philosophies

I’d recently had the opportunity to consider my own mortality in the face of a friend’s Stage 4 cancer. Seemed pretty dull, but it really got me thinking about the kind of thoughts that people have in their mind and how it affects them.

Situation 1: This friend was taken to a counselor who was trained to consider emotional aspects of a patient’s state of being. The patient ended up feeling better.

Situation 2:  This friend meets former colleagues who ‘advise’ him that the cancer is ‘critical’ and there is a lot more ‘complication’. At the end of the day, the patient walks out feeling dejected and depressed. The colleague is a former nurse who asserts authority in proclaiming what is said is gospel truth.

Well, the trouble is this. There  are MANY medical professionals out there who are killing their patients. Doctors or nurses who can’t communicate, and lack the tact. While I joke about it in my seminars, it’s actually real. While this is happening, doctors and nurses are trained to look at literature but fail completely in seeing the big picture and multiple variables. My brother, who is a specialist pathologist, also knows that there are limitations to the current model of thinking in doctors. He formulated a way of systems thinking - the maximal relational capacity - of how different factors interact with each other. This is contrasted against the limited and linear way in which doctors treat or tackle the symptoms they see in their patients.

Some people have exclaimed that many doctors are so smart, but so stupid at the same time. How can you tell a patient “you will die”, in front of the patient’s family? Well, that’s a really stupid thing to do. I do believe that there is going to be a lot more that will be done now that the Singapore Health Promotion Board is beginning to create funds for training in mental health.

#1 - All medical professionals must see the need.

Medical professionals in Singapore  are killing their patients if they do not create communicative value in their consultations. I’m not sure if you are aware of this - you are charged a consultation fee. If you realized that the doctor was issuing you medicine, and saying things that kept the illness going, you’d wonder what the purpose of the medication was, right? But that’s something known as the Placebo effect. Doctors have authority, so they will impose their belief system and their own model of the world on you so that you will end up taking what they say to be gospel truth.

Yet we know for a FACT that medical science is a science of probability. How do you know that a drug works? It’s through statistical and empirical evidence across a representative sample. That means, for drug A, (1) they will do a double blind test against a placebo to see how effective it is. This means that drug A compared with a Placebo, will need to out perform the placebo. Ironically, the placebo itself accounts for around 55% of cures. (2) They will assess it based on a small group of people that they deem to be representative. This means for a fact that they do not test on ALL people (and we know that human beings, while sharing biological traits, react differently to different things).

What this means is that doctors and psychologists/psychiatrists have to bear in mind the priming effect their LANGUAGE has on their patients, and learn how to cope with and manage their language. With more meta research done on this area, doctors will begin to realize how damaging their words are… sometimes even more so than the illness itself, because it could destroy hope, faith and the desire to live.

#2 - Medical practitioners need to be more open-minded

Is NLP a fad? Or does it totally not work? I’d probably be thick skinned now to say I’m probably the NLP-mental health expert in Singapore, possibly in Asia. If you are going to throw out something that doesn’t have empirical proof, then let me assure you (1) NLP is NON-invasive, (2) there is evidence that positive spirits improve healing, (3) language is a primer to expectations, (4) expectations create cognitive realities (e.g. mental images) that are primed by language. Tell someone that they have a bad case of whatevercephalitis, and they will listen to the sound and fear it, generating an additional problem - morale.

So, doctors, do you have a drug for poor morale? Or is it going to be another adrenaline or even morphine shot? We all know that our physiology controls our emotional state. When you are behaving a particularly negative way, you will ruin your chances in not just health, but in everything you do.

#3 - Medical practitioners need to be willing to learn.

Given the time frame and the enormous responsibility placed on medical practitioners nowadays, it’s extremely stressful. You have people dying, AND you have to attend classes! WTF! In any case,  it’s probably up to the Singapore Health Promotion Board to make changes to the system and structure of the medical education system

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