Anatomy of hope

Oddly enough, this weekend, I finally picked up Jerome Groopman's latest book, The Anatomy of Hope. JG is a hematologist and oncologist and both performs research and sees patients. His book aims to explore the role of hope in healing. Some of the patients described had hope and died anyways; others needed to be encouraged to find hope somewhere before they could proceed with healing. And one in particular had no hope whatsoever, believing that she had brought God's wrath on herself and didn't deserve to hope or to live. Some of the people in the book were doctors, themselves, people who treated the very illnesses they were suffering from. And JG describes his own personal hopeful journey, an experience that I'm convinced makes him an even more compassionate doctor.

The book falls down in two places -- one a rampage against so-called "mind-body" studies. This may just be a matter of semantics -- there are certainly people out there who promote the idea that if you only believe enough in your own healing, it will happen. This view was prevalent in the early, more hopeless days of AIDS; Louise Hays, I believe, was a leader in this area. OK, I'm willing to trash that movement also; I'm not particularly invested in that "blame the victim" game. But the mind-body movement that I'm familiar with is actually very much in keeping with Groopman's approach, and I wish it hadn't been swept up in his disapproval.

The other area where I found the going a bit rough was in the later chapters where Groopman felt that he needed to describe the scientific ramifications of hope. After all the warmth in the earlier part of the book, the cold, clinical description just didn't do much for me, though it was interesting. I just felt like it was part of a separate work, like Groopman had to include it to validate his study of hope as a scientist.

I did, however, enjoy reading about his relationship with his patients and his growth as a person relating to patients. He talks about how in medical school, and even afterwards, doctors were encouraged to focus on the clinical aspects of a patient's progress, but to avoid all discussions having to do with emotion or spirituality. Having been around a fair number of hospitals, I'm especially grateful that he's grown away from what he was taught. He concludes that it is appropriate to focus on the less clinical aspects of a patient's healing. Or perhaps I should say that I'm grateful that he's recognized that emotions, spirituality, faith, and hope are integral components of a patient's healing, as defined for that particular person. And that perhaps is one of the most striking, yet unspoken, conclusions -- that healing does not necessarily reflect a "successful" clinical outcome.

This book is a keeper, one I expect to return to multiple times as life circumstances change.

More information: http://www.jeromegroopman.com