Medicine Across Borders

Medicine and healing don't reduce to knowledge transfer. Patients have what doctors need most: the experience of their pain and symptomatology. Doctors have nuanced expertise with actual patients—beyond the generic data. As they build the doctor/patient relationship, and the broader health team, of medical experts + family + friends + caregivers, that's when the magic happens.

Medicine and healing don't reduce to knowledge transfer. A Google search is no replacement for a healthy doctor/patient relationship! Dr. Susan Massad has spent a lifetime helping doctors and patients build healing relationships. The essays and articles in this book present a social therapeutic approach to the subjective/relational side of medicine—without which medicine, she argues, becomes dehumanized and sometimes deadly. Patients have what doctors need most: the experience of their pain and symptomatology. Doctors have nuanced expertise with actual patients—beyond the generic data. As they "cross borders" to build the doctor/patient relationship and the broader health team of medical experts, family, friends and caregivers, that's when the magic happens. www.eastsideinstitute.org

Susan Massad, M.D., is a retired physician with 51 years of practice and teaching in internal medicine, co-creator and leader (with Mary Fridley) of The Joy of Dementia (You Gotta Be Kidding!) and a founding member of Reimagining Dementia: A Creative Coalition for Justice. In 2006, Susan launched a senior theater workshop for the All Stars Project and is a faculty member of the East Side Institute, where she leads conversations on health, wellness and growing older. She is the co-author of several articles on the Joy of Dementia, including a chapter that appears in The Applied Improvisation Mindset published in August 2021. Susan has also written a play, Remember? Remember!, that deals with aging and memory loss, as well as a short opera, The Crisis.