The Medicine and Compassion Project
The Medicine and Compassion book and courses are part of an ongoing effort to raise awareness of the greater need to focus on compassion as part of modern medical care. As science became the predominant basis of medical care, doctors started to focus more on the science and less on the patient. This trend was noted by a prominent medical educator over 75 years ago:
He discerned a great irony: at the very time that medicine was improving, a decline in the physician-patient relationship was taking place. Physicians, he argued, were in danger of forsaking the patient for science.
- Francis Peabody, 1928
The Medicine and Compassion Project has as its goal trying to balance the emphasis on technical achievement and scientific advancement with a renewed focus on the needs of the patient. Compassion can be defined as the desire to ease suffering in others. As Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche states in Medicine and Compassion:
If we could have more of a balance between the development of intelligence on one side, and the development of a loving, compassionate frame of mind on the other side, this world would be much more in harmony, much more at peace.
The more one contemplates this statement, the easier it is to see how true it is. We don’t need to abandon our scientific achievements and the great comfort they have given us, but we can begin to try to balance this with the desire to be truly kind in the the delivery of these marvels.
Is this a Buddhist project?
The concept of compassion and the techniques for expanding one’s capacity for compassion in the Medicine and Compassion Project are clearly derived from Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. However, the goal is not to create Buddhist adherents, but to raise the question of whether compassion can be expanded through training, and what is the best way to do this. Whatever way truly works will be a valid method. Simply getting the medical and caregiver community to start discussing compassion and ways to expand it is the ultimate goal.
