TWO PATIENTS WHO CHANGED MY LIFE
Heal with bare hands? I wasn't thrilled when people who struck me as odd brought this possibility to my attention. I resisted it until, as a doctor, I saw the possibilities it presented.
As I said, I was always a medical rationalist. For example, one day during my studies I had to choose between a psychiatric and a neurology exam. The psychiatric script was the size of a women's magazine. Neurology, on the other hand, consisted of four thick scripts. I always tried to make do with the necessary while studying. Nevertheless, I decided on neurology. Psychiatry was too abstract for me. I could imagine something under neurology, the science and teaching of the nervous system, its diseases, and their medical treatment. Compared to psychiatry, which was more nebulous to me, it was something haptic, something explainable that I could relate to.
An encounter that I had a little later, in 1984, when I was a young assistant doctor at the University Hospital in Vienna, seemed even more absurd to me. Sometimes we have formative experiences, the meaning of which we can only properly understand many years later. That was also the case here. At that time, I was initially amused, irritated and slightly annoyed.
At that time, an extremely wealthy man, well known in Viennese society, consulted the head of the department for radiation oncology at the university hospital where I worked. He insisted on choosing his therapist, no matter how much he had to pay for it.
We were about twenty doctors in the department. I didn't think much about this celebrity's request. But when he walked through our station with a pendulum, I shook my head. My colleagues too. We exchanged looks and rolled our eyes. We were hardened when it came to questionable behavior from our patients. In a department that often treats with matters of life and death, people also show their hidden facets.
His choice fell on me. My boss asked him why."She has it," was all the patient said, and we accepted it without comment. I wondered what his pendulum might have told him, b