Over the past several years, I’ve met several healthcare professionals (PharmDs, RNs, MDs, and others) who have opted out of western biomedicine in favor of a holistic path when it comes to managing their own health and wellness. And they often credit a psychedelic or entheogenic experience as the turning point in what western biomedicine would describe as a “miraculous” healing. For example, one person’s plant medicine experience helped them develop a new spiritual understanding of psychosomatic causes of their chronic pain. As a result, their chronic pain finally improved, after years of no relief. Or how a new interoceptive awareness of their gut led to relief from IBS, along with a reduction in depression symptoms enough to discover a new life-changing passion. Here’s the thing — I’ve talked to many people in full-blown existential crisis from the inner conflict they felt when their own healing story is implicitly unwelcome among their colleagues and profession. And nobody is talking about this. Imagine going to work in healthcare but feeling like you’re giving people poison in comparison to what you experienced firsthand and now know to be possible. Because you have bills. You are now fully awake in a nightmare sickcare system. But you are wearing scrubs because you work there. You feel like a cog in some unspeakable machine of suffering and greed. And not being able to say or do anything because you’re bound to not only your professional livelihood, but also employers, payers, and the government that issues and regulates your license. I think the moral and intellectual agony people experience in this conflict is directly proportional to the level of compassion they have for patients. A career pivot often follows. Sometimes to whatever modality they experienced. Sometimes to more meaningful work that may even be outside healthcare altogether. Curious if anyone knows of any reading material or surveys on this topic. (And also glad we have a place like CanMar, where we can talk about things like this without feeling like we are being observed or judged by our entire extended professional network.)

Posted by Simi Burn at 2024-07-01 22:27:14 UTC