A Day in the Life of a Heilkünstler
“Variety is the spice of life”.
As a general practitioner, the variety of health conditions and types of patients can be all over the map within a given day in clinic.
Due to my practice being of a general scope, I’ll typically see a great variety of health conditions and personality types show up within my clinic schedule on any given day. My first patient of the day may be working on healing from a sprained ankle, the second from a migraine, and the third might be researching alternative treatments for their recently diagnosed lung cancer. By lunch on some days I can feel like I’ve been on a 5-continent world tour. Just to be clear — this is one of the things I most love about my work. I would not enjoy being any kind of medical specialist, seeing the same condition or body part over and over again for 40 hours per week. My patients regularly take me to every point along the health spectrum, and help to keep my mind and approach continually refreshed.
Fortunately, with the full system of Medical Heilkunst under my belt, I have the therapeutic tools and diagnostic frameworks available to me to make sense of what is going on with each patient, and what it will take to move them to a state of greater health. Without such a map, it would be impossible to know which end was up in each case. It would also be very difficult to determine over time if the patient was headed towards a state of improvement in health which is real, or only apparent.
While these therapeutic tools and maps give me a tremendous advantage in understanding how to approach each case, there is a uniqueness and individuality of each person which I need to understand on its own terms. By analogy, the phone and internet providers talk about “the last mile”, in terms of where the greatest capital expense is for creating an infrastructure of connecting individual households into the “grid” — in this sense, my therapeutic maps bring me to the “doorstep” of each patient, but it is the unique engagement with them as an individual which must be done in a fresh way each time.
This is the point where art and science meet in a complete practice of medicine.