Month: January 2018

Living with Heart in Medicine. Is it possible? Is it of benefit…

/ Dr Maxine Szramka / 2 Comments

Living with heart in medicine adj.jpg

In medicine we are taught to think and live life from our heads.

We are taught facts and figures, and we are taught to be rational.

We are taught to approach things logically, from our heads, and we learn to relate to people from our heads.

We are perpetually analysing data, from our heads, and we end up talking from our heads.

There is a focus on mental acuity, mental strength and mental perspicacity.

But given that medicine is people and people love and care from their hearts, then where is the focus on connecting with people from our hearts?

We all know deep within that love and care for people is the foundation of medicine and healthcare. Its absolute bedrock.

When we are ill, we do not crave our mothers or fathers to speak to us with mental acuity, or to rattle off facts to us about the latest studies. We seek to be met with their hearts, with love and care. And deep down this is what we all seek. To be loved and to be and to feel cared for.

Given that medicine is about people, and at our core we all seek to be loved and to feel cared for, and this is a vital part of healing and feeling well – then why do we not make this a focus in medicine?

Where did the heart of medicine go?

Continue reading →

Self-Care. The pillars of well-being

/ Dr Maxine Szramka / 3 Comments

Colonnade green adjIn steps 1 1a and 2 we discovered that self-care is about taking care of yourself in all areas of your life so that you feel amazing and have an amazing life. That we are here to thrive in life and not to survive in life. We learned that self-care begins with developing a way of being with ourselves and that every small change that we make that builds quality in our lives has a knock-on effect in other aspects of our life. We learned to start with what the biggest thing is in front of us and go from there.

If we understand that self-care is about taking care of ourselves in all areas of life, then what areas of life might that be?

In classical ‘work-life balance’ training we learn to separate work from something that is called life, but in truth everything is life and we take our quality and our sense of well-being everywhere, and our well-being is affected by how we are in all areas of life.

To develop a true sense of well-being we need to take care of ourselves in all areas of life, because it is ourselves and our bodies that are living in all areas of life.

If we are not well in one aspect of life, that affects all other areas of our life.

Deepening our self-care and our well-being is a continuous process of learning about ourselves.

To start to understand where we can learn and grow it helps to consider the different areas of life that are key to our well-being.

I consider that these pillars are: Continue reading →