The New Medicine

Hosted by Dana Reeve (wife of the late Christopher Reeve) before her untimely death from lung cancer in 2006, this documentary film presented for television by PBS explores the optimal future of medicine on the horizon where technological and human discoveries are harmonized.

Part one of this film explores the mind-body connection in this new era of medicine, by going inside hospitals, clinics, research centers and academic centers to explore new ways of knowing about the influence our body has on our mind and vice versa. The filmmakers uncover the paradigm shift on the medical horizon from patient to person: the whole person, including the mind. Allopathic medicine has always used feeling terms such as “hope”, “worry”, and “broken hearted” in relation to the patient’s experience which suggests an understanding that the mind and body have a relationship of paramount importance. Why then doesn’t the current medical model treat the mind and body as one, or at least treat the mind concurrently when treating the body?

The film highlights many different research studies with favorable outcomes when the extraordinary power of the mind-body connection is embraced. At Duke University Medical Center, Tammy was 26 weeks pregnant when her water broke. Duke offers Tammy daily guided imagery sessions aimed at controlling her stress level knowing that stress in an uncomplicated pregnancy can induce labor and in a healthy person can suppress the immune system. By treating her mind, Tammy’s stress level is lowered and best possible outcomes are likely to improve, and they do. This is one of many examples highlighted where the use of integrative (alternative, complementary, holistic, etc) medicine is used to cross the mind body chasm.

Part two of this film explores the physician patient relationship, and the dehumanizing of patients in a technologically advanced healthcare system. The neglected “softer side of medicine” is being taught at Drexel University School of medicine using actors to role play with medical students in the discussion of difficult conversations. Like when a doctor has to inform a mother that her child’s fight with cancer is coming to an end since there is nothing else modern medicine can do. Drexel recognizes the inadequacy of the current model where physicians spend an average of six minutes with each patient, and are “so enamored of technology and specialization” that they have lost sight of the individual. The individuall, that we know after viewing part one of this film, has the power to heal themselves if guided so. Drexel recognizes the tendency for seasoned physicians to replace optimism with cynicism.

Part two goes on with several vignettes of patients whose failure or success in the healing process was directly related to their relationship with their own healing; guided or misguided as it was, by modern healthcare. While probing into our current healthcare system’s propensity to give science an embrace (and leave the patient in need of one), it is asserted that “science can inform medicine....but it can never explain it all” and the human condition is in direct relationship to healing. It wraps up with the notion that “caring is at the root of the physician patient relationship and in the absence of curing, healing is still taking place that involves caring.”

At this writing this film is five years old. We still have not reached the caring equals healing horizon. Arthur Kleinmen, MD at Harvard University states “There is no reason we can’t be as humanly sophisticated as we are technologically sophisticated” and I agree. I criticize the film for embracing only the physician patient relationship in part two and excluding nursing and the other disciplines. The film doesn’t have the cinematography, bells and whistles of other nationally released big screen documentaries. It forgoes any red carpet aspirations and puts the spotlight on the patient, which is where it belongs.

3 out of 5 boxes of popcorn
This film is not rated.
Directed by Muffie Meyer
Available on DVD and Netflix.