Healing Healthcare

Not long ago, “bedside manner” was a physician’s most potent medicine. Now that skill has dwindled to bland, generic amiability, and has been all but lost behind today’s compelling healthcare technology. The bedside manner’s shrinkage would be tolerable if medical high tech could cure everything, but these amazing tools are alarmingly cost-ineffective in treating most patients—those who suffer from chronic, incurable illnesses and the effects of detrimental lifestyles. Paying far too much for too little return, Americans are understandably demanding healthcare reform, which we’re told lies in rearranging national finances. But beyond financial adjustment, authentic reform will have to come from reinstating ancient, intimate healing relationships between patient and doctor.

Healing Healthcare describes how we arrived at this sorry impasse and where we need to go with a system that is as damaging to its doctors as it is to patients. Dr. Jeff Kane pinpoints and examines America’s love affair with medical technology, insistence on evading death at any cost, and practice of enabling unhealthy lifestyles. At its heart, Healing Healthcare shows that healing can begin only once doctors see patients clearly as individuals, and that through intimate contact, suffering can be productively treated.

Jeff Kane, MD, fascinated by his patients’ stories, began limiting his practice in the mid-1970s to facilitating cancer support groups. He founded the support programs at Sutter Cancer Center in Sacramento and Sierra Nevada Cancer Center in Grass Valley, California, and teaches medical practitioners bedside manner in workshops nationally. He is the author of several book and dozens of periodical articles on the healing relationship. He lives in Nevada City, California, with his wife, Ronnie Paul.

"An eloquent account of where we’ve gone wrong with medicine and how we might go right again, Healing Healthcare is a harbinger of the change that’s needed. Jeff Kane’s wise and eloquent voice pervades this beautifully-written and highly readable book, putting both patient and doctor back in touch with their common humanity."—Katy Butler, author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death

"With both empathy and tenacity, Jeff Kane delves into the heart of contemporary medicine. He is candid about what ails our healthcare system, and audacious enough to offer a prescription.”—Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

"Important insights into the challenges we are facing arise from Dr. Kane’s ability to illuminate the facts with stories of context, focusing on what is most meaningful to both patients and providers. You will leave this book having been both informed and touched, which is his hope for how our patients will feel after experiencing a better healthcare system."—Diane Pinakiewicz, Principal, DCP Consulting LLC, Distinguisheed Advisor and former president, National Patient Safety Foundation

"Jeff Kane is by turns lyrical, funny, deeply moving, and profound, but always focused on the art of healing. Reading this beautiful book gives me hope for American healthcare."—Shannon Brownlee, MS, Senior Vice President, Lown Insitute

"If you read one book about health care this year, I urge you to read Healing Healthcare. In the future, healthcare will put the needs of its most important stakeholder, the patient, first. Dr. Kane’s book pushes us closer to achieving that vision."—Dr. Paul Rosen, MD, Clinical Director of Service and Operational Excellence, Nemours Foundation