Why attentive medicine?

I come from three generations of doctors, and I have seen firsthand that doctors are often as ill as those they care for.

This is not limited to my family – I have seen it among colleagues too.

Doctors fall sick with the same conditions, at the same frequency, and within the same socio-economic patterns as their patients.

This simple observation, from childhood onward, led me to question the foundations of medicine itself:

if those who heal are not themselves well, what kind of knowledge are we practising? 

We are not separate from nature.
The sea, the sun, the trees, and the human body arise from the same source.

To say that a change in the body is a mistake is to say that nature itself has gone wrong.
But we are nature – so how could we tell nature that it has made a mistake?

Nature does not fail – it transforms, adapts, and seeks new forms of balance.
Attentive medicine invites us to listen within this movement –
to hear what nature may be expressing through the body’s transformations.

When illness is seen as something to act on, every form of intervention – chemical, surgical, or manual – becomes a way to regain control.
Each carries its own cost.

• Medication can relieve symptoms, and in certain cases it can replace what the body truly lacks.
  Some drugs act by restoring a missing element – for example, folic acid in deficiency anaemia, or insulin in type 1 diabetes.
  These are corrective in the literal sense: they give back to the body what is absent.
  
  But these are the exception, not the rule.
  The vast majority of chemical treatments act not on the cause of illness, but on healthy physiological systems.
  They work by altering normal functions – reducing acid secretion in the stomach, lowering blood pressure, blocking nerve signals, modifying hormonal rhythms, or suppressing inflammation.
  In doing so, they act on what is still functioning, not on what is “broken.”
  Their apparent success comes from dampening the body’s own adaptive responses – the very processes through which the organism tries to restore balance.
  
  Side effects, therefore, are not mistakes or accidents: they are the visible expression of this interference.
  They remind us that no chemical action remains confined to one target.
  Every function in the body is interwoven with others; to modify one is inevitably to affect many.
  This is the cost of acting chemically – an intervention on the living whole in order to silence one part of its expression.
  
  

• Surgery can save lives, yet every incision carries the risk of complications. It treats what can be removed, not always what needs to be understood.
  
  

• Manipulations of the body – osteopathy, physiotherapy, chiropractic – may offer temporary relief. But when the cause remains unseen, the same pain often returns.
  
  

These approaches are not wrong. They arise from the same logic – that to heal is to correct.
Attentive medicine does not oppose them – it questions the premise they share.
It asks whether our need to act might sometimes silence what the body is trying to say.

When illness is seen as something to act on, every form of intervention – chemical, surgical, or manual – becomes a way to regain control.
Each carries its own cost.

Medication can relieve symptoms, and in certain cases it can replace what the body is lacking at that moment in time.
Some drugs act by restoring a missing element – for example, folic acid in deficiency anaemia, or insulin in type 1 diabetes.

But these are the exception, not the rule.
The vast majority of chemical treatments act not on the cause of illness, but on healthy physiological systems.
They work by altering normal functions – reducing acid secretion in the stomach, blocking nerve signals, modifying hormonal rhythms, or suppressing inflammation.
In doing so, they act on what is still functioning, not on what is “broken.”
Their apparent success comes from dampening the body’s own adaptive responses – the very processes through which the organism tries to restore balance.

Side effects, therefore, are not mistakes or accidents: they are the visible expression of this interference.
They remind us that no chemical action remains confined to one target.
Every function in the body is interwoven with others; to modify one is inevitably to affect many.
This is the cost of acting chemically – an intervention on the living whole in order to silence one part of its expression.

There are also situations where medication must be taken chronically to sustain life or prevent serious complications – and it is entirely appropriate that this be so.
Yet even then, it remains possible – and meaningful – to ask what the body was expressing through illness.
Even when treatment is indispensable, the question remains: why did the body need to express itself in this way?

Surgery can save lives, yet every incision carries the risk of complications.
It removes an expression of the body that is affecting the vitality of the whole, rather than addressing the initial disturbed vital relationship that altered vitality in the first place.

Manipulations of the body – osteopathy, physiotherapy, chiropractic – may offer temporary relief.
But when the cause remains unseen, the same pain often returns.

These approaches are not wrong.
They arise from the same logic – that to heal is to correct.
Attentive medicine does not oppose them – it questions the premise they share.
It asks whether our need to act might sometimes silence what the body is trying to say, acting without first exploring what made the body change.