Hello to the Preventative Health Journal Forum Community.
My name is Dr David Wignall; I am a doctor who at the end of this year has been practising an exclusively non-pharmaceutical and conversational approach to medical practice for two decades. I have practised in the inner SouthEast of Melbourne throughout this time - my current practice is in Prahran, at the High St Medical Clinic where I see people for a wide range of presenting issues.
My work arose out of the observation as a GP that my patient’s physical problems and illnesses often occurred in association with emotional and interpersonal issues in their daily lives - the same of course being true for their psychological and mood problems. I observed that talking through these issues and dealing successfully with them, they often demonstrated a valuable double resolution: a resolution, or significant alleviation, of their presenting problems in mind or body, and a parallel resolution of issues within their personal lives.
So a person might present with a problem of nausea and vomiting: and in getting to the bottom of this, find permanent relief - through a breakthrough in ‘speaking their mind’ with a significant person. That person had not only ‘spoken their mind’ - they had effectively ‘spoken their body’ as well: the body’s return to normal function and freedom from the presenting symptom being a sort of ‘tick of approval’ from deep within.
The positive power of such double-edged healing processes led me at the end of 1989 to choose to work within a conversational, whole-person, mind/body and healing-based model full-time. Over the past twenty years I have been honing my craft - employing cognitive and self-reflective approaches, tools to help people with their emotional literacy (their ability to put feelings into words), resources focussing on understanding the interpersonal dynamics which might contribute to their presenting problems or overall stress levels, visualisation techniques aimed at marshalling the healing and creative powers of the right brain, and general relaxation techniques.
My father is a physicist and passionate general scientist and instilled in me a deep sense of their always being reasons behind the phenomena I encountered in my world growing up. As a result of this, I found myself somewhat underwhelmed and unconvinced by a lot of the pharmaceutical and surgical treatments I was trained to utilise in my medical training.
It felt as if those treatments which only adjusted or reversed the physiological mechanisms of my patients’ presenting symptoms were a bit like putting plaster filler in the cracks of a wall, sanding it smooth and painting the wall - and as a result, ignoring the underlying problems in the foundations of the building.
There is an illusion of the problem being solved on the surface - but the underlying problem lies undealt with, and, if anything, is likely to just get worse in the blissful ignorance of the newly painted wall. More cracks may come - if we just keep filling them and painting over them, the day will eventually come when some serious consequence of ignoring the developing underlying problem will rear its ugly head.
I have come to believe very strongly in my twenty-five years of this sort of practice, that there is always a underlying reason behind the symptoms people present. This may be in the physical environment or lifestyle of the person; it may lie within their mental and emotional processes; t may be within the persons life- within their interpersonal and broader social environment and interactions; it will typically be some combination of all of these - but there will always be logical reasons why we have symptoms or suffer ill-health. As we seek - so shall we find.
I hope there can be some discussion of some of these sorts of issues in this Forum - I will be posting some discussions in the near future to start this process off.
Thankyou for taking the time to read this.
Dr David Wignall, MBBS
High St Medical Clinic,
139 High St, Prahran, VIC, 3181,
Australia
August 2009
