Writing Practice Prescription

It’s time to think outside the pill box.

Sir William Osler had a lot to say about this:

• “One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.”
• “Man has an inborn craving for medicine. Heroic dosing for several generations has given his tissues a thirst for drugs. The desire to take medicine is one feature which distinguishes man, the animal, from his fellow creatures.”
• “If many drugs are used for a disease, all are insufficient.”
• “The battle against polypharmacy, or the use of a large number of drugs (of the action of which we know little, yet we put them into the bodies of the action of which we know less), has not been fought to the finish.”

The most important thing he had to say about thinking outside the pill box was this: “The true polypharmacy is the skilled combination of remedies.”

After having used personal expressive writing for years to be more productive and focused, I stumbled upon the work of James W. Pennebaker, PhD and colleagues who have demonstrated that expressive writing when focused on past traumas can improve health status.

At the time I came upon their work, I was directing a Violence Intervention Prevention center at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, TX. The majority of patients we cared for were victims and survivors of domestic violence. It soon became clear to me that the survivors carried the burden of the health consequences of their abuse, mental as well as physical. As a result, I wrote a book for survivors of trauma and abuse called WellWriting for Health After Trauma and Abuse. The feedback from readers remains encouraging and convinces me that we should probably be handing patients paper and pen to speed their own recovery.