Reconciling the scientific principles of medicine with the love essential for meaningful care is not an easy task, but it is one that Gregory L. Fricchione performs masterfully in Compassion and Healing in Medicine and Society. At the core of this book is a thought-provoking analysis of the relationship between evolutionary science and neuroscience. Fricchione theorizes that the cries for attachment made by seriously ill patients reflect an underlying evolutionary tenet called the separation challenge–attachment solution process. The pleadings of patients, he explains, are verbal expressions of the history of evolution itself. By exploring the roots of a patient’s attachment needs, we come face to face with a critical component of natural selection and the evolutionary process. Medicine engages with the separation challenge–attachment solution process on many levels of scientific knowledge and human meaning and healing. Fricchione applies these concepts to medical care and encourages physicians to fully understand them so they can better treat their patients. Compassionate humanistic care promotes physical, emotional, and spiritual healing precisely because it is consonant with how life, the brain, and humanity have evolved. It is therefore not a luxury of modern medical care but an essential part of it. Fricchione advocates an attachment-based medical system, one in which physicians evaluate stress and resiliency and prescribe an integrative treatment plan for the whole person designed to accentuate the propensity to health. There is a wisdom or perennial philosophy based on compassionate love that, Fricchione stresses, the medical community must take advantage of in designing future health care—and society must appreciate as it faces its separation challenges.

"In Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference, physician scientists Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli uncover the eye-opening data that compassion could be a wonder drug for the 21st century. Now, for the first time ever, a rigorous review of the science - coupled with captivating stories from the front lines of medicine - demonstrates that human connection in health care matters in astonishing ways. Never before has all the evidence been synthesized together in one place."--Amazon.

“This book explains not only the healing power of compassionate human connection, but in the most accessible and practical ways, how to cultivate our capacity to create that connection and thereby empower others to find their best selves.”—John Makransky, author of Awakening through Love All of us have an innate capacity for compassion. We recognize when others are hurting, and we want to help, but we’re not always good at it. There is another way. In The Compassionate Connection, Dr. David Rakel explains how we can strengthen our bonds with others—all the while doing emotional and physical good for ourselves. As founder and director of the University of Wisconsin Integrative Medicine program, Dr. Rakel discovered that we become the most effective helpers when we use the tool of human connection. Drawing on his own research and practice, as well as thirty years of published studies in medicine, sociology, psychology, meditation, and neuroscience, Dr. Rakel "stacks the deck" in favor of healing and introduces the concept of bio-psycho-spiritual authentic awareness. Not only are our bodies and minds connected, but also it has been scientifically proven that our capacity to feel beauty, awe, and compassion enhances our health and wellbeing. In The Compassionate Connection, Dr. Rakel provides an innovative approach to enhancing health in others and strengthening relationships through the art of connecting. These tools guide us to improve our connections—whether between doctor and patient, husband and wife, parent and child, or boss and employee—and live with clarity, wisdom, and good health.

Compassion in Healthcare gives an account of the nature and content of compassion and its role in healthcare. While compassion appears to be a straightforward aspect of life and practice, Hordern's analysis shows that it is plagued by both conceptual and practical ills, and stands in need of some quite specific kinds of therapy. Starting from a diagnosis of what precisely is wrong with 'compassion'—its debilitating political entanglements, the vagueness of its meaning, and the risk of burnout it threatens—three therapies are prescribed for these ills: an understanding of patients and healthcare workers as those who pass through the life-course, encountering each other as wayfarers and pilgrims; a grasp of the nature of compassion in healthcare; and an embedding of healthcare within the realities of civic life. Applying these therapeutic strategies uncovers how compassionate relationships acquire their content in healthcare practice. The form that compassion takes is shown to depend on how doctrines of time, tragedy, salvation, responsibility, fault, and theodicy make a difference to the quality of people's lives and relationships. Drawing on the author's real-world collaborations, the way in which compassion matters to practice and policy is worked out in the detail of healthcare professionalism, marketization, and technology. Covering everything from conception to old age, and from machine learning to religious diversity, Compassion in Healthcare draws on philosophy, theology, and everyday experience to expand our understanding of what compassion means for healthcare practice.

This is an updated and expanded version of Mr. Ortiz Hill's previous book, Conspiracies of Kindness, and is written especially for medical professionals and those in the helping professions, as well as students learning these professions. In this book, Ortiz Hill includes several additional interviews with medical doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals, as well as those involved in the world of healing, who speak about how compassion is an essential quality for maintaining their own health, mental and physical, as well as insuring the care they provide for their clients is of optimal value. From his own experiences as a nurse, Ortiz Hill creates a web of achingly beautiful stories that brilliantly show us how richness, compassion and wisdom can arise while encountering the most challenging circumstances of severely ill and dying patients in an institutional setting. This book is essential reading for anyone in the helping professions who risks burnout and "compassion fatigue."

Cruel Compassion is the capstone of Thomas Szasz's critique of psychiatric practices. Reexamining psychiatric interventions from a cultural-historical and political-economic perspective, Szasz demonstrates that the main problem that faces mental health policy makers today is adult dependency. Millions of Americans, diagnosed as mentally ill, are drugged and confined by doctors for noncriminal conduct, go legally unpunished for the crimes they commit, and are supported by the state—not because they are sick, but because they are unproductive and unwanted. Obsessed with the twin beliefs that misbehavior is a medical disorder and that the duty of the state is to protect adults from themselves, we have replaced criminal-punitive sentences with civil-therapeutic 'programs.' The result is the relentless loss of individual liberty, erosion of personal responsibility, and destruction of the security of persons and property—symptoms of the transformation of a Constitutional Republic into a Therapeutic State, unconstrained by the rule of law. Szasz shows convincingly that not until we separate therapy from coercion—much as the founders separated theology from coercion—shall we be able to get a handle on our seemingly intractable psychiatric and social problems. No contemporary thinker has done more than Thomas Szasz to expose the myths and misconceptions surrounding insanity and the practice of psychiatry. Now, in Cruel Compassion, he gives us a sobering look at some of our most cherished notions about our humane treatment of society's unwanted, and perhaps more importantly, about ourselves as a compassionate and democratic people.

Since the efforts of Dame Cicely Saunders and the founders of the modern hospice movement, compassion has become a fundamental part of palliative care. In this ground-breaking book, international experts give their critical thoughts on the essence and role of compassion, in both palliative and hospice care over the past half-century. Compassion: The essence of palliative and end-of-life care provides insight into the motivations for, and practice of, compassionate palliative and hospice care, featuring the reflections of leading healthcare professionals, social workers, chaplains and educators. Chapters utilise case examples and first-hand experiences to explore the historical and contemporary discourse surrounding the concept of compassion in palliative medicine. This book is relevant to a multidisciplinary audience of palliative care practitioners, including undergraduate and graduate students in sociology, psychology and theology, and healthcare professionals in oncology and gerontology.

Whenever you enter a town and they receive you, eat what is set before you; heal the sick in it and say to them, 'The kingdom of God has come near to you.'" Luke 10:8-9 When Jesus sent seventy disciples on ahead of him, part of their mission was to heal the sick. In fact, they were supposed to heal the sick before they preached the Gospel. Best-selling author Mike Aquilina calls this command the healing imperative. And it's an imperative that ushered in the world of modern medicine. In The Healing Imperative: The Early Church and the Invention of Medicine as we Know It, Aquilina reconstructs the fascinating history of a uniquely Christian institution: the hospital. Underlining how the virtues of charity and hospitality motivated the first generations of Christians, along with Jesus' explicit command to heal the sick, the author shows just how revolutionary the actions of Christian doctors and nurses were and how they transformed society in ways that still reverberate today. The radical developments in health care spearheaded by Christians influenced culture, society, and civilization. As The Healing Imperative proves, now more than ever, the compassion of Christians is needed to guide the world of medicine. Jesus' command still resonates, and Aquilina urges us to respond.

Caring for our family members, friends, and others is a central part of a rewarding life. For those in healing and helping professions such as medicine, nursing, education, psychotherapy, social work, ministry, and the military, the potential for a meaningful way of being may even become more possible. But, compassion is not easy. At times, concern for others can be personally devastating when we don't possess the right attitude and approach. Reaching out (and reflectively within) without being pulled down requires the wisdom that only arises out of the right combination of humility and knowledge. Night Call offers the stories and principles gleaned over many years of writing and mentoring for those in the helping and healing professions. The stories are offered in ways that foster compassionate caring while encouraging initiative in those who seek to personally deepen and share their lives with others -- especially in times of significant need. With this in mind, Dr. Wicks presents information on: · being a healing presence · mining fruits of the failures all of us must experience at times · the need to enjoy the daily "crumbs of alonetime" · the importance of a spirit of "unlearning" · developing a simple realistic self-care program · valuing informal or formal mentoring · recognizing the "3 calls" to which we must respond to as we psychologically develop · honoring life's most elusive psychological virtue (humility) Purposely brief, the chapters, as well as the sections in the "personal resiliency retreat" section at the end of the book, have as their goal a reconsideration of values, signature strengths, and simple approaches to living a resilient, rewarding life. Rather than presenting new breakthroughs, Night Call is designed to dust off what most of us already know, at some level, so we can freshly view the key approaches and techniques that provide increased psychological self-awareness and a potentially healthier sense of presence to others. The themes offered may have been forgotten, or become undervalued/set aside because of some of society's dysfunctional norms or unhelpful family influences. In response, this simple, countercultural book combines the value of essential self-compassion with caring for others in ways that provide the impetus for further exploration of a fuller narrative for both the readers of this work and unforeseen opportunities as well for those who are fortunate enough to cross their paths.