Medscape Psychiatry and Mental Health recently published an article on Saving Primary Care that certainly got my attention.

Trained as a primary care doc myself, I firmly believe that as a society, we’ve got our priorities screwed up and the value chain inverted. Primary care doctors are the gatekeepers and guides for how patients use the rest of the medical system, and therefore, they are the first line of defense.

The discovery of antibiotics was found to be a first line of defense, and it revolutionized the practice of medicine.  So would a robust, thriving, and reformulated practice of primary care.

Supporting and investing in primary care docs for the time they spend as PARTNERS with their patients would reap enormous benefits to everyone. The educating, guiding, coaching, and healing that can occur through a great relationship with your primary care doc should be the amongst the most highly compensated interventions, not at bottom of the heap. For those are the activities that result in people learning how to take care of themselves such that they avoid coming down with chronic, degenerative, costly diseases that over time eat up huge amounts of medical resources.

What’s emotional intelligence got to do with it? There’s got to be a fundamental shift in attitude that drives how our broken medical system is rebuilt.

Just as all of us individually need someone to give us primary care [after all, why do we seek intimate and primary relationships?], primary care practitioners should get our deepest respect, translated into status and monetary value.

[Isn't this a "duh" moment?  I mean, isn’t primary care called primary because that’s what it is? It’s PRIMARY. It’s IMPORTANT, listen up everyone! Yeah, I know I’m being repetitive and yelling, but it seems like the powers that be still don’t get it.  That's why I started Heart of Healthcare, to facilitate leaders in making these kinds of fundamental shifts.]

Healing requires compassion and empathy. And today, primary care in particular needs healing, if healing is to become a mainstay of health care. Truly, it needs resuscitation.  Soon. Healing, based in wholeness and compassionate caring, is what allows people to become healthier. Healthier people are what will drive health care costs down. I can’t make it any simpler than that, folks.

[I tell you, it really gets me, how the most important jobs in society get the lowest (or relative lowest) compensation, childcare workers, teachers, ministers of all denominations who tend to the Spirit, and primary care docs. This speaks poorly to how we measure success as a society and a culture, but this is a post for another time.]

Of course, we need the highly trained specialists who spend 12 years in training to come in as the knights in shining armor to save the day when needed [And yes, I also believe they should be well compensated.]

But when will we start to value that which society and healthcare system need to flourish – healthy people able to take care of themselves because they’ve been educated, guided, tended to, and cared for by physicians who are there specifically to provide that most fundamental connection, guidance, and education for health?

We each need someone to “stand by me”, always, always, always. Well, primary care docs are those folks in healthcare, whether they’re on active duty or on reserve. If we want them there, we need to stand by them.

And in that spirit, I invite you to take 5 minutes to watch and listen to this gorgeous video that was produced by the group “Playing For Change.” Listen to this every day, and your life will change!

How is it that the world can be SO f**ked up? That despite all the marvels and advances of humankind over the millennia, we still collectively have the moral development of a nematode?  That we don’t recognize that violence against others – when there is still room for a political solution (even if it’s only a crack in the door)- is equally a form of self-destruction?

[Forgive me if I'm being arrogant or presumptuous here, not having researched nematode culture; for all I know, they could be more evolved in how they treat each other]

Reading the Sunday NY Times this morning  [I am addicted to Frank Rich], surfing the Internet this afternoon and learning of yet another late-breaking pay-for-play scandal, and following my Twitter social network threads, is at the same time a source of never-ending interest and overwhelming in terms of the barrage of information and emotions aroused in me.

I find myself buffeted between the awesomeness and the terrible folly of the human condition, both my own and others. What’s the solution?

Compassionate dispassion.

Personally, I have to continuously learn and relearn the lesson of compassionate dispassion, or in Zen fashion, being non-attached. Being able to observe what is, be truthful about its existence, and then to let it go, releasing judgment and resistance to that which shows up.

One of my mentor guiding lights, Havi Brooks, said something brilliant in a “blogging therapy class” I just took with her which bears repeating: “Struggle creates resistance creates stuckness.”

So staying attached, which really grows out of the fact that we judge something to be good or bad, happy or sad, rather than realizing “it just is” puts us in the place of resisting it or resisting the loss of it. Either way,  that’s where we get stuck. To release judgment is compassionate, to release attachment is dispassionate.  IN order to evolve, we need both.  

While I haven’t read the book yet, one of my new Twitter friends, Kat Tansey has written what sounds to be an awesome book about this, Choosing to Be, Lessons in Living From a Feline Zen Master. I plan to get it immediately, especially since I consider my 2 beloved cats, Guy and Chloe, to be my live-in Zen masters. You can listen to a 10-minute interview about it if you want just a taste.

I hope this quick note reminds you to be compassionate and dispassionate about whatever may be showing up for you right now that’s bugging you. After all, it’s all “here today, gone tomorrow”, no matter how you look at it.