Medicine and spirituality: a personal adventure.
Perhaps more than any other profession medicine gives power to its practitioners. "It is difficult to remain emperor in front of a physician" claims the Roman emperor Adrian in his memories. When I found myself as a doctor endowed with the power of telling people what was good for them I realized that I had become the arbiter of normality, that I could have told people how to live there lives, without having any idea of how living my own. While I cannot identify a single experience as a turning point, certainly an accumulation of experiences, personal and professional contributed to the abandonment of this facade and the embracement of the spiritual dimension in the practice of medicine. Like Chesterton describes in his book 'Orthodoxy' the discovery of the spiritual dimension in medicine was a long pigrimage home, toward myself, to learn how to love and dignify myself.
Balducci
Lodovico
L
Department of Interdisciplinary Oncology, University of South Florida College of Medicine, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, Tampa, FL, USA *For correspondence: Lodovico.Balducci@moffitt.org.
D006262:Health; D006801:Humans; D029181:Spirituality