Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing

In her latest book, Slow Medicine: the way to healing, Dr. Victoria Sweet returns with her familiar style of humble, compelling prose and well-crafted anecdotes, artfully stitched together to form a tapestry of 40 years of medicine.Dr. Sweet’s gentle, but competent voice and comforting, familiar tone, is well suited to distill the complexity of medicine for the layperson. Her approach leaves the novice reader with an informative education, while offering the advanced practitioner the joy of running mental traps on the patients she employs to propel her story – or to simply nod along as she peels back the curtain of modern medicine, exposing the absurdity, chaos, and minutia that spawn from the unhappy modern marriage of economic efficiency and old-fashioned healing.She avoids excessive jargon and the swagger of inflated self-regard so common in those with her expertise, while her gift for descriptive parsimony draws us into the corners and corridors of hospitals and the lives of her patients with a gentle hand, leaving room for our own imagination and contemplation.Slow Medicine is a retrospective that fittingly resembles the medical definition: an examination of the patient’s history and lifestyle. Dr. Sweet guides us through a constellation of her life experiences that culminate in the illumination of some of the most pressing issues of modern medicine.She curates from her experiences such that we don’t merely watch her transformation with distant fascination, but are instead pulled into the examination ourselves, where we experience the power that slowness has to change many things, not the lease of which is the perspective of the observer.This perspective, gifted to us from such an experienced practitioner of medicine, is a fascinating body of work on its own accord. Slow Medicine is, however, far more than an autobiographical story marked by well-planted signposts of insight along some forgotten path of medicine; it is a narrative discovery, both personal and universal.Slow Medicine explores questions about life that transcend medicine without being pretentious, a testament to Dr. Sweet’s humility and authenticity, undoubtedly honed through her experience healing the long-suffering and forgotten souls of Laguna Honda Hospital.Accordingly, Slow Medicine is not a manifesto or a panacea for all of what ails medicine. Nor is it an unwieldy indictment of modern “fast” medicine. It does, however, propose that there is a different way, a “…way of seeing, doing, and being” that re-unites doctor and patient in the craft, art, and science of healing.She writes for the human reader, not just those in her craft. The story is hers but the message is for all, patients or practitioners - for those are the very boundaries she seeks to deconstruct. Slow Medicine will challenge the practitioner, inspire the patient, and remind us all that to heal is above all else, to be human.- Healthy Hildegard

Great read. Victoria Sweet delivers as both a medical historian and clinician who values slowing down and the value of understanding patients whole story. This book left me pondering how have we moved so far away from the physical exam and lasting doctor-patient relationships. Slow medicine is the medicine of the future.

I was very eager to start this book, I truly love the concept and support the idea of slow medicine. the book starts out excellent setting a stage as to why we need a change in our healthcare system. Chapter by chapter I kept waiting for some form of solution in all the stories but found none. What I heard were stories from a privilleged author who liked to point out how much better they were at medicine than others. At how much more attention to detail and caring they were but ran at the first sign of resistance to what they believed in. This is eveident when the the description of the pharmacist is given. The words can't hide how much the author loathes her colleagues in other disciplines who most times and as two other accounts have given save her from death mistakes. Instead there's a pattern of running from those hard challenges. I hope you enjoy but this was not the journey I expected and that's fine, it's good to disagree and here the other side.

Victoria Sweet seems to have trouble wherever she works.. She can't seem to accept any Organizational structure that prevents her from doing it her way. In the book she accuses too many collegues of incompitence, malfeasance, malpractice or even criminal behavior. Her case is that medical practitioners need to listen more and take more time in the diagnostic process. Yet, when a Seventh Day Adventist explains that she doesnt drink, Victoria tells her to cultivate a taste for wine. Unless she had releases from all the patients she treated and their families, she violated patient confidentially laws. What an unprofessional approach to write about a patient's husband, giving his name and saying he wasn't handsome and his stomach hung over his belt. To me, she comes across as one who believes that only she went to the mountain top and was blessed with unique knowledge that no other medical practiobers have.I was angry reading the book selected by my Literature Class, and I get angry every time I look at.

I loved Victoria Sweet’s first book, God’s Hotel which I just “happened” upon at the library. I was excited to see she had written another book, Slow Medicine. I was more than willing to pay for it since the library didn’t have it. What a great writer and a wonderful storyteller. Sweet reminds us of how medicine used to be and how corporate practices,in an effort to make it more efficient have,in reality, made medicine inefficient. She weaves interesting cases, personalities, procedures, and a bit of history into a book you won’t want to end.

Dr Sweet tells us that practising medicine must learn from the Slow Food Movement, going back to the basics of what doctors do. She begins with a story of how her father was admitted to the hospital for a seizure but was mistakenly diagnosed as having a stroke. From that moment on, the callousness of the doctors and staff began. Dr Sweet provides story after story in which she extolled the virtues of a sincerity and empathy, and how these qualities transform both doctor and patient. She also tells of the time she spent as an intern, and how she learns from doctors and nurses who care, and who made the lives of their patients happier if not heathier.Slow medicine is contrasted to fast medicine in the same way slow food is contrasted to fast food 'which is technical and methodical, and the pitfall of its style, which is missing the obvious'. Slow medicine thus requires the doctor to be patient, to open his eyes and ears, to observe and listen before strutting out all the knowledge he might have thought he knew.For those who, like Dr Sweet, who refuses to see doctors and nurses as mere 'health-care providers' and patients as 'consumers', this book will warm your heart and instil some faith back in a profession fast becoming cold and robotic.