THIS IS THE FIRST IN A SERIES OF BLOGS 
 - WALK WITH A SURGEON-SANGOMA

The purpose of these blogs will be to delineate some of the principles that can help anyone want to make a significant life change. They did mine and they apply to us all in different ways. In order to understand this journey its necessary to understand the difference between the 
"wounded" physician 
and the true 
"wounded healer archetype."

The true shamanic wounded healer archetype usually suffers a "calling sickness" which may vary from seizures to migraine headaches to unexplained aches and pains anywhere in the body. These often result from spirit guides intruding on their auras - the energy of which causes "dis"- ease. Medical evaluation will find nothing "wrong"in spite of sophisticated testing. In South Africa the calling sickness is always recognized by a competent sangoma (simplistically speaking - Zulu for the equivalent of a shaman.) The remedy is initiation after which the mysterious illness disappears once the spirit guide energies are channeled in the right direction.

Alternatively a severe illness can turn the victim inwards because of compassion arising from their own predicament, resulting in them wanting to help and heal others. This is not the true shamanic wounded healer but rather someone who feels their destiny is to take what they have learnt from the illness to heal others. Here there is usually no explicit assistance from the spirit world.

Medical doctors, however, are "wounded" in a different way - by the ordeals of the training and then the profession itself such as; managed care, medical insurance companies, big business, the bottom line, malpractice fears, possibly a large mortgage and significant debt incurred by the training. Electronic medical records now increase work time and aggravate the stress for no extra renumeration and patient loads increase as the numbers of doctors decrease. Add to this burn out, a high divorce and suicide rate and sometimes substance abuse and you have the full picture. Patients understandably are becoming impatient with their physicians.

Small wonder that now medicine has become more of a job than a calling. Income revenues are strained but a compromise may be a benevolent call schedule enabling the physician to leave his cares behind to a colleague who may not have the same "feel" or concern for the patient.

All these factors may get in the way of compassion and caring and the doctor fits in better now with the warrior archetype, fighting  battles rather than the healer archetype which originally drove most individuals to want to do medicine. Certainly now there is little in the way of financial reward to match the stresses and strains. Most physicians feel they are being manipulated by forces beyond their control and that they are not treated with dignity. 

Medical school, internship and residency for specialty training can fulfill all the conditions of a rigorous rite of passage on a hero/ine's journey but the incorporation  or integration phase of the true healer is now difficult, creating a lot of unhappiness. The bottom line has eroded the dignity and power of the profession. Physician incentives for doing medicine are declining rapidly. Many regard it as just a job and no longer a calling. Medicine should not be just a job. Todays physicians are are thrown into a cesspool of compromising choices and many are wondering why they embarked on the career. Many older doctors also say that if they could they would retire.

This is different to the archetypal wounded healer. The doctor is wounded by the training and the profession and tends to lose compassion in the face of all this adversity. 

In the case of the true wounded healer archetype it is the wound that drives the individual to to be compassionate and heal with his or her new found insights and the desire to learn healing skills.

It was my wounded-ness that created a calling to do something different but still keep my day job to support the family. The journey began in 1987. I hope the principles I came to understand - sometimes in retrospect - will be helpful to others.

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