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Chapter 2

Mind, Body, Spirit: Exploring the Mind, Body and Spirit Connection Through Research on Mirthful Laughter.

CONCLUSION

Voltaire, the eighteenth-century French writer and philosopher is credited with the statement, "The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease. For years, human experience has led people to conclude that laughter is good for their health. This belief is reflected in the well-known Reader's Digest feature (borrowed from the ancient proverb) called "Laughter, the Best Medicine." Now we are beginning to empirically demonstrate that laughter is indeed "good medicine." Positive emotions are a wonderful resource of self-generating pharmaceutical benefits within the body. Happiness breeds happiness. Positive emotions and behavior regenerate our cells and invigorate our lives The looking forward to and anticipation of positive experiences can potentially facilitate a psychobiology of "hope" for the benefit of mind, body, and spirit.

Norman Cousins, a man with great insight into the relationship between mind and body, stated: The best physicians are not just superb diagnosticians but individuals who understand the phenomenal energy (and therefore curative propensity) that flow out of an individual's capacity to retain an optimistic belief and attitude toward problems and human affairs in general. It is a perversion of rationalism to argue that words like "hope" or "faith" or "love" or "grace" [and "laughter"] are without physiological significance. The benevolent emotions are necessary not just because they are pleasant, but because they are regenerative. (1981, pp. 205-224)

An Apache myth relates the following story: The Creator who created human beings who could do everything. They could talk, walk, run, see, and hear. But the Creator was not satisfied. There was just one more thing he wanted his creature able to do, and that was to "laugh." And so men and women laughed and laughed. It was then that The Creator said, "Now you are fit to live!"

As we embark on the twenty-first century the new tools of molecular biology will provide us with further discoveries in psychoneuro-immunology and the interrelationships between the mind, body, spirit connections with positive emotions. This will provide us with a greater insight and an appreciation and for the use of complementary/adjunct and integrative (whole person) health and medicine care to serve mankind. After all the medical science may be said and done, "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine."

Chapter 3

Spirituality and Coping with Truma

CONCLUSION

Metaphorically, spirituality is painted into the "picture of coping in many varied images, brushed from a multicolored palate splashed with each individual's own unique style. People encounter coping situations against the backdrop of their stable burdens and resources. These resources and burdens compose the landscape from which the coping picture emerges. As part of this armament, the spiritual orienting system provides a framework colors how people will approach the task of coping with a stressful life event. This system may negatively influence the coping process if it is too one sided, too inflexible, too fragmented, or if the person's relationship with the sacred (e.g., God) is marked by insecurity. From out of this landscape, the coping strategies and themes comprise the action and movement that give the coping process life and meaning. As we have seen, they may involve problematic themes reflective of taking the wrong road, the wrong direction, or going against the grain. If we look closely at the details expressed in the coping portrait, we can identify coping strategies that may be either negative or positive in tone, marked by thoughts of punishment or abandonment, or visions of a higher purpose and a comforting God respectively. Finally, as we step back and take in the entire panoramic view of the coping process we may get a sense of how all these aspects of the coping process interact to lead to outcomes. Just as all the colors and hues interact to create the mood in a landscape, all these spiritual dimensions of the coping process interact and create the coping outcome. For some people, like Tony, that outcome is optimistic and hopeful. For others, the picture is far more bleak. Regardless of the outcome, to fully understand how spirituality is a part of the coping picture requires going beyond the limited conceptualization of spirituality as a defense mechanism, and looking more carefully at the rich and intricate ways that one's spiritual life is alive throughout the process of coping. Finally, health professionals are beginning to learn how they too can contribute to the picture of spiritual coping in ways that may enhance the color and texture of people's lives.

Chapter 8

Working with Difficult Patients: Spiritual Care Approaches

Conclusion

A difficult patient engenders a variety of characteristics perceived as prohibitive to effective treatment as defined by the health care professional. Treatment goals are relative to perception and interpretation of both the patients and the caregivers. In principle, goal alignment is the product of a collaborative effort between patients, their families, and clinical staff. This principle is also applied to spiritual care. A key provision of spiritual care is identification of the spiritual goal of patients. In their broadest sense, spiritual goals represent a qust for existential meaning incorporated in a process of discovery that varies by patient. A patient seems difficult because he or she has trouble organizing the life implications of a traumatic event such as physical illness as applied to self and others. Because the discovery of meaning is a personal journey, it is imperative for clinical staff to be compassionate and demonstrate a favorable attitude toward patients dealing with how to integrate the varying aspects of who they are (e.g., spiritual, physical, emotional, psychological, social) within the context of physical illness. Spiritual care requires understanding and a stable presence that listens.