Compassion and Healing in Medicine and Society

On the Nature and Use of Attachment Solutions to Separation Challenges
Erscheinungsjahr 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4214-0220-8
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 552 Seiten, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 839 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fricchione, Gregory L

Fachgebiete

• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Klinische und Innere Medizin Innere Medizin
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Medizinische Ethik
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Biologische Psychologie, Neuropsychologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface
Part I: Introduction: Knowledge, Meaning, and Healing, and the Consilience of Medicine
1. The Medical Mission and Evolution
2. Two Realms of Knowledge—Or One?
3. Knowledge, Meaning, and Healing
Part II: The Biological Foundations of the Evolutionary Need for Attachment Solutions
4. Evolution of the Protocell
5. Cellular Evolution
6. Animal Evolution
Part III: The Foundations in Brain Evolution of Knowledge, Meaning, and Healing
7. Evolution of the Brain
8. Structuring the Brain to Know and Act
9. Memory and Motivation
10. Meaning, Healing, and the Brain
Part IV: The Neurobehavioral and Cultural Foundations of the Need for Attachment Solutions
11. Separation, Attachment, and Human Development
12. Separation, Attachment, and the Life Cycle
13. The Social Neuroscience of Separation and Attachment
14. Consciousness, Language, and Their Origins
15. Evolutionary Consciousness
16. Implications for Society, Culture, and Ethics
Part V: The Theoretical Foundations of the Need for Attachment Solutions
17. An Evolutionary True Cause?
18. Investigating the Separation Challenge–Attachment Solution Hypothesis
19. A Testable Hypothesis
20. Analogies and Analysis
Part VI: The Implications of the Separation Challenge-Attachment Solution Hypothesis
21. Implications for the Mission of Modern Medicine
22. Implications for Medicine at the End of Life
Postscript: A Commentary on Human Evolution
References
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Fricchione, Gregory L
Gregory L. Fricchione, M.D., is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and associate chief of psychiatry and director of the Benson-Henry Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is coauthor of The Massachusetts General Hospital Handbook of General Hospital Psychiatry and The Heart-Mind Connection.