Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (140 page)

In the highly entertaining feature film
Side Effects,
with actress Katherine Heigl, when a drug company rep finally wakes up to the tactics her company is using, her conscience can no longer tolerate her continuing to participate. The movie was written and directed by Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau, who spent a decade working as a drug sales representative for the pharmaceutical industry. She documented her experience and wrote the screenplay when she left. (By the way, many drug reps are absolutely charming people. Drug companies are very smart. They recruit good-looking and personable individuals, many of whom are former cheerleaders—individuals to whom it’s difficult to say no if you’re an overworked doctor. As Carl Elliott of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota wrote in a 2006 article in the
Atlantic,
“It is probably fair to say that doctors, pharmacists, and medical-school professors are not generally admired for their good looks and fashion sense. Against this backdrop, the average drug rep looks like a supermodel, or maybe an A-list movie star. Drug reps today are often young, well groomed, and strikingly good-looking. Many are women. They are usually affable and sometimes very smart. Many give off a kind of glow, as if they had just emerged from a spa or salon. And they are always, hands down, the best-dressed people in the hospital. . . . Many reps are so friendly, so easygoing, so much fun to flirt with that it is virtually impossible to demonize them. How can you demonize someone who brings you lunch and touches your arm and remembers your birthday and knows the names of all your children?”
¹⁷
Having been visited by scores of drug reps over the years, I can attest to the accuracy of those comments.

Big Pharma also has a lot of influence on most mainstream television news as well as the mainstream news magazines. As a result of this influence, safe, cheap approaches to health are almost always downplayed and even ridiculed in the press, while the latest drug treatment is big news. I feel the film
Side Effects
should be a must-view in all public schools as an intellectual immunization against the belief that there is a pill for every ill. The bottom line: Consumer beware!

STEP ELEVEN: FORGIVE

We must let ourselves feel all the painful destruction we want to
forgive rather than swallow it in denial. If we do not face it, we
cannot choose to forgive it.

—Kenneth McAll,
Healing the Family Tree

Forgiveness frees us. It heals our bodies and our lives. It is simple but not easy. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that what another person did to you was right or just. It simply means that you’ve decided to forgive and release the other person as a gift to yourself. It takes a great deal of energy to keep someone out of our hearts. When we forgive those who have hurt us, both of us are freed. Forgiveness and making amends are completely linked. Holding a grudge and maintaining hatred or resentment hurts
us
at least as much as it hurts the other person. Many times, the person who is hardest to forgive is yourself. Forgiveness means not allowing something from the past to adversely affect you in the present.

Forgiveness moves our energy to the heart area, the fourth chakra. When the body’s energy moves there, we don’t take our wounds so personally—and we can heal. Forgiveness is the initiation of the heart, and it is hands down the most powerful force for attracting vibrant health that I know. Fred Luskin, Ph.D., of the Stanford Forgiveness Project and au thor of
Forgive for
Good
(HarperSanFrancisco, 2002), has demonstrated that forgiveness can improve the health and quality of life even in those who’ve experienced enormous wounding. After Dr. Luskin gave a week-long forgiveness training workshop for seventeen residents of Northern Ireland, each of whom had had a primary family member murdered in the violence there, symptoms of stress (such as dizziness, headaches, and stomachaches) decreased by 35 percent, depression dropped 20 percent, and anger dropped by 12 percent. In addition, participants’ physical vitality (including energy level, appetite, sleep patterns, and general well-being) improved significantly.
¹⁸
(For more on forgiveness, including Dr. Luskin’s Nine Steps to Forgiveness and information about his research, visit his website at
www.learningtoforgive.com
.)

Forgiveness, quite simply, is good medicine. It has a positive effect on the heart because it opens it, allowing appreciation to flow in. (Resentment, on the other hand, closes the heart and has a negative effect on heart health.) Scientific studies have shown that when we think with our hearts by taking a moment to focus on someone or something that we love unconditionally— like a puppy or a young child—the rhythm of our hearts evens out and becomes healthier. Hormone levels change and normalize as well. When people are taught to think with their hearts regularly, they can even reverse heart disease and other stress-related conditions. The electromagnetic field of the heart is sixty times stronger than the electromagnetic field produced by the brain; to me, this means that every cell in our bodies—and in the bodies of those around us—can be positively influenced by the quality of our hearts when they are beating in synchrony with the energy of forgiveness and appreciation.
¹⁹

When I think back on my breast abscess, I feel great compassion and forgiveness
for myself
. How could I have known what I was doing? I had no role models of women in ob-gyn for balance between work and motherhood. I have forgiven myself, and because of that I have also forgiven my colleagues at the time.

It has taken years for me to come to grips with the concept of forgiveness. When I first wrote this chapter, I didn’t even think of putting this crucial step in. When we forgive someone because we think it is the right thing to do, we’re merely jumping through a socially acceptable hoop that changes nothing. Psychologist Alice Miller, Ph.D., states that when children are asked to forgive abusive parents without first experiencing their emotions and their personal pain, the forgiveness becomes another weapon of silencing. Leaping to forgive under these circumstances is not really forgiveness—it is just another form of denial. Many women think that forgiving someone who hurt them is the same as saying that what happened to them was okay and that it didn’t hurt them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many women have been brainwashed into submission by the misunderstanding of forgiveness. To get to forgiveness, we first have to work through the painful experiences that require it. Forgiveness is completely premature when a woman doesn’t even acknowledge that she has an emotional abscess, let alone that it needs to be drained. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that what happened to us was okay. It simply means that we are no longer willing to allow that experience to adversely affect our lives. Forgiveness is something we do, ultimately, for ourselves.

True forgiveness changes us at a core level. It changes our bodies. It is an experience of grace. As I write about this concept, I’m moved to tears by the holiness of what forgiveness really is. I experienced this profoundly a number of years ago when I was reported to the medical board in Maine by a general surgeon. One of this man’s patients had come to me for a consultation. Three months before, she had gone to this surgeon because of abdominal pain, weight loss, and narrowing stool caliber. He had attempted a colonoscopy (a test in which a fiberoptic scope is put into the colon to examine the inside and check for conditions such as cancer), but he had been unable to get the instrument all the way up her colon. He told her that she would need to have surgery to remove part of her colon, since he was virtually certain she had a cancer that was causing her symptoms.

She had gone home, changed her diet completely to a macrobiotic approach, and over a three-month time period regained the weight she had lost, was free of abdominal pain, and had normal stools once again. All of this had taken place before she saw me. When I first saw her, she was healthy, vital, and committed to avoiding surgery. Since she was so much better, she wanted to know if I thought she still needed the surgery.

I told her that no one could be sure if she did or didn’t have cancer without further testing. She had already taken a risk by not having the surgery earlier, but on the other hand, the actions she had taken had certainly reversed all the symptoms for which she had initially sought care. It was possible that she didn’t have cancer and that her symptoms had been from diverticulitis (an infection of the colon that can mimic cancer) that was now healed. She decided to continue doing what she was doing with her diet, then have her colonoscopy repeated in a few months. After all, it was her body and she was feeling better than she had in years.

She understood that this decision was in direct conflict with what her surgeon suggested, but at this point he wasn’t aware of her striking improvement. I felt sure that once he saw her, he’d agree to postpone her surgery and repeat her tests. Because I believe that people do best when they are cared for by a medical team that is informed, I sent a copy of our discussion to her surgeon.

As it turned out, he was furious with me for not “forcing” her to have surgery, and so he reported me to our state medical board. I had to submit a report of my end of the story and wait for the board to call me forward for a hearing. They met only every three months, so I had plenty of time to stew about this situation. I felt sure that a doctor-initiated com plaint against me would be taken quite seriously, and I was terrified.

This event was the most difficult learning experience of my career. I had spent my whole life in the pursuit of good grades, respectability, and worthiness. I came from a family tradition of “good” doctors. Yet here was the manifestation of my worst fear: The authorities were going to say that I was a “bad” doctor, that I couldn’t practice medicine in a way consistent with my own beliefs about healing, and worse, that my patients didn’t have the choice with their own bodies, either! I worked with and felt my fear daily for weeks. If I could change how I felt on the inside, I knew, something would change in the world outside. This had always been part of my belief system. Now I had to put it to a very practical test.

Part of any healing is “letting go,” relinquishing the illusion of con trol. For me, the letting-go was this conclusion: If I couldn’t practice medicine in a way that was consistent with the healing power of the human body and individual free choice, then I would willingly give up my license. I was helped and supported during this process by colleagues and patients who told me that they’d accompany me to my hearing if necessary. Nancy Coyne, M.D., a local physician, told me that if I had to go, she’d make sure that the place was “packed with feminists” in sup port of me. For that, I will be forever grateful.

One day while doing my writing practice, I spontaneously began a letter to this surgeon who had reported me:
Dear Dr. M., I know your fears. I know
why you are upset. . . .
As I continued, I felt compassion for this man. I knew who he was. I felt him as a frightened man fighting for control—and I forgave him. As I continued writing, I felt the fear in my solar plexus lift for the first time in weeks. It was a physical feeling, not an intellectual exercise. And at the same time, I knew that everything would be all right,
regardless of the
decision of the board
.

The next day, one of my colleagues who served on the board at the time saw me in the hospital and told me, “By the way, the board unanimously decided to drop your case. They felt that that surgeon was way out of line!” I never had to go before the board or plead my case in any way. They had upheld my patient’s right to informed care and my right to give it.

My ordeal was over. The most striking thing about this experience was the physical feeling of release in my solar plexus area when my fear finally healed and I felt compassion for my adversary. From this I learned that forgiveness is organic and that it is physical as well as spiritual and emotional.

My intent had been to heal my own situation, not necessarily to forgive the surgeon. But I subsequently learned that the only way to heal the situation was to withdraw my energy from it and to forgive my accuser. I learned that forgiveness comes unbidden, by it self, when we are committed to vibrant health. To experience forgive ness, however, we must first make a commitment to healing and to making amends, when they are needed.

I never intended to feel compassion and forgiveness toward that surgeon. What I did want to do was get rid of the knot in my solar plexus. This I did by being willing to stay with the knot, to be in dia logue with it, and to learn from it. I believed at a deep level that I could learn from this experience, and that in fact I must learn from it, so that I wouldn’t have to repeat it, in another way or another form.

Though I don’t recommend being reported to a medical board for personal growth, it was one of the most freeing experiences of my life. I had faced one of my worst fears, stayed with it, and transformed it. The patient’s tests were repeated at another hospital two months later. Her colon was perfectly normal, with no sign of a tumor. She had probably never had cancer in the first place, just an inflammation of the colon. She continues to be well. My former husband suggested that I report the surgeon to his board in Massachusetts and ask if it is the standard of care in his state to remove a normal colon. I said, “No. The war needs to stop somewhere. It’s stopping with me.” I did, however, write Dr. M. a note with copies of the patient’s normal tests and remarked, “Isn’t the healing ability of the human body miraculous?”

Stephen Levine teaches us that the quality of forgiveness is miracu lous for bringing balance. Most of us, he reminds us, have been given nothing in our training to help us work with resentment. Levine has offered us the following meditation.
²⁰