As a result of my work with brain injured patients over the past 8 years I have come to think of the practice of medicine in some very different ways.  I see the practice of Western Medicine organized around a reductionist, fragmented, drug treatment-based system as being fundamentally flawed.  A person should be defined by their subjective experiences and not solely by their data, lab values, X-rays, or symptoms.  I agree with Dr. Andrew Weil’s suggestion that Western Medicine works well in about 10% of cases, mostly emergency based.  But what about the other 90% of cases?  I believe we need a different approach for our patients that involves understanding symptomatology as opposed to one diagnosis, the importance of impairments over diagnosis, and the development of a healing ecology unique for each patient.  In addition, I believe we need to see the person who has the disease, not just the disease the person is struggling with.  And going one step further, we need to take a much wider approach to our patients that involves working with homeostasis, allostasis, and the understanding that all illnesses and disease flow of allostatic load.  To illustrate this approach to our patients, I will be presenting a case history outlining the value of symptomatology over symptoms and a single diagnosis.  Exploring how a focus on the patient’s impairments is more helpful than simply coming up with a diagnosis, although an accurate diagnosis is important.  And why it is vital to the patient’s recovery that a healing ecology is set up them that treats the person who is struggling with illness, disease, or injury, and not just the illness, disease, or injury.   My hope is that we can begin to adopt this kind of approach to our patients over what has been the traditional perspective of Western Medicine: fragmented, reductionist, drug based, with a focus on the illness, disease, or injury while leaving out the person.  I recognize that this approach represents a huge change in the practice of medicine requiring more time and effort from the doctor-patient relationship.  But in the end, I believe this approach is much more effective in the treatment of illness, disease, and injury.   

Leighton J Reynolds, PhD is a certified psychoanalyst. He is the author of “The complex architecture and healing of a traumatic brain injury: Listening to the brain” (to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2023) and a chapter “The complex architecture of a traumatic brain injury” in “Topics in surgical trauma” published through Open Access Press (March 2023).