TELLING ALL
CAN BE GOOD MEDICINE
Journal of Healing – Jan. 7, 2004

By Mary Koch

What is it with our obsessive secrecy when it comes to our health?

Give me a loud-mouthed, hypochondriac complainer any day over folks who want to suffer ill health in martyred silence.

More and more, I find myself apologizing to people well after the fact, "I didn’t realize you’d been sick," or, "I’m so sorry; I wasn’t aware of your surgery." The inevitable response is a stoic shrug and "I didn’t want anyone to know" or "I didn’t want to bother you with my problems."

More and more I turn uneasily to the obituary page: Now who’s died before I even knew they were sick, before I could send a get-well card?

Our growing obsession culminated last year with HIPAA, the confusing and seriously punitive Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which establishes federal privacy standards for medical information.

HIPAA is so draconian, its rules so complex that well-meaning folks are running scared. Over-reaction has descended to the absurd: Churches declining to issue prayer lists in their newsletters and doctors no longer sending appointment-reminder postcards for fear someone unauthorized would see them. I read in a newsletter from a retirement community that names of those who are memorialized with donations will no longer be published for the sake of privacy.

* * *

WHAT!? WE'RE invading someone’s privacy by observing that they’re dead? Under HIPAA, a person’s "general condition" can be made public, and death certainly is a "general condition." So, whether it embarrasses them or not, it is permissible to publish names of the deceased.

Sure, we all need a degree of privacy. We need to limit how deeply insurance companies, government and would-be employers can dig into our personal records.

And I can understand a certain dis-ease that comes with illness. It's humiliating! Our bodies have betrayed us; we are forced to admit that we are not all-powerful, that we are not totally in charge.

But this penchant for burrowing into a private cave of misery, well, it’s just not healthy. We humans were put on this earth to care for each other and take care of each other. Taking care of the sick goes well beyond dispensing medicines and stitching up wounds. Healing is accelerated when we are buoyed by a nurturing community of friends and family – people who give us hope, humor and prayer. There’s all kinds of scientific evidence to prove as much.

* * *

TEN YEARS AGO as my husband lay in intensive care, there was a flood of cards, flowers and heart-felt messages. John never saw the flowers, because they’re not allowed in ICU. It didn’t matter. They were dispensed throughout the hospital, improving the spirits of all who saw them. It was that spirit that reached John.

He didn't hear the messages either. The words were beautiful – too beautiful for him to bear. He just wanted to hear the names of those who’d called and written. Slowly, one by one, I read each name and we thought about each person. It was a form of prayer, of accepting the prayers that had been made on his behalf. He needed no words beyond that.

More than all the medical intervention, I believe it was the sustaining strength of community that saved John’s life then and has kept him alive, healthy and vital through the years.