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Interview by Valerie Reiss
We talk to a physician about glimpsing God
through his patients' souls--and how you can stay spiritually
sane in a hospital.
 In
30 years as a Harvard-trained brain surgeon, Dr. Allan Hamilton
has not only seen disease and healing--he's also glimpsed the
mystical side of medicine. After suffering a devastating back
injury while serving in Desert Storm, Dr. Hamilton learned to be
a patient. It infused his life with new purpose: While in a body
cast, he invented a now widely-used method for treating tumors. As
a medical professor at the University of Arizona, he
teaches surgeons to avoid fatal mistakes. And he runs an
equine-assisted therapy program for cancer patients and
survivors at Rancho Bosque outside of Tucson.
Dr. Hamilton's new book is, "The Scalpel and the Soul:
Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power
of Hope." He recently talked to Beliefnet about
his most inspiring patients, how to stay positive in medical
settings, and the spirituality they didn't teach in medical
school.
What inspired you to write about your spiritual experiences
as a surgeon?
I felt I had gone far enough in my career
that I could say I was totally unprepared for the spiritual
challenges that I encountered in taking care of my patients.
When people are facing a severe illness or a major surgery, that
may be may be one of the most significant opportunities for
spiritual transformation that they will encounter.
So as a doctor, if you don't take that into
account, you’re missing a big piece of the picture?
I tell residents, if you gave me two patients
with identical problems and one of them had family at the
bedside with a lot of laughter, plus photos and a quilt from
home, and next door was another patient who was alone every time
I came by I’m going to be very nervous about the isolated
patient's mental status.
Have you observed that affecting their
physical outcome as well?
Well, there are plenty of studies that have
shown that depression is associated with decreased immunity. So
I want to harness all of the positive emotional energy I can in
a patient to get better. If there’s not a lot of energy there,
or if it's very negative, that’s going to make the task of
getting them through surgery and having a good recovery much
more difficult.
In the book you talk a lot about hope.
There's one moving story about a patient named Donald.
That was one of the saddest experiences I
have ever had as a physician, and probably one of the most
insightful. This was a young man I got very close to. He was an
avid fisherman. And he had a malignant brain tumor. He did very
well with the surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. This was a
kid with an irrepressible spirit--it was exactly the kind of
shining emotion that you love to see.
And one day he took me aside and looked me
square in the eye and said, When it’s time for me to 'go
fishing'--and you know what I mean--tell me. I gave him my word
that I would.
Over several more years there were problems,
but we fought them off. But, finally, the tumor was really
invading his brain. One morning I said, "I promised you
that I would tell you when it was time to go fishing. It is now
time.
He went home, and the next morning his mother
called and told me that he had died. You could say he died of
his disease. He didn’t. He died because I cut his string of
hope. It taught me how powerful that is, and that nobody, no
physician, ever has the right to take away somebody’s hope. As
well as intentioned as it might have been, I literally just
snipped it, and it was a mortal snip.
But you also want to honor a request like
that.
Yes, you do. In retrospect, he was saying,
You tell me when you’ve given up hope, and then I’ll give up
mine. If the conversation had been in those words, I would
have said, I’ll never give up hope.
Can you talk about the patient whose brain
had to be shut down so you could repair an aneurysm?
This is a technique that’s used on a
handful of difficult cases. They put the patient on a heart
pump, then cool down the blood. The heart flutters and stops.
There’s no blood flow to the brain, and no electrical activity
in the brain. Now you can operate on a very significant blood
vessel while no blood is flowing through it.
Once the procedure is finished and you
realize you’re within the time limit of 20 minutes or so,
everybody breathes a sigh of relief. And then the team gets
ready to slowly warm the patient up. Sometimes there’s some
banter. One of the nurses said she was getting engaged, and that
they had gone to this restaurant, and had gotten the ring at
this particular store, etc.
When the patient woke, she reported the
entire conversation. While her heart was stopped, while her
brain had no activity, she somehow remembered that conversation.
And that is scientifically impossible. If the
brain is essentially dead, then how can it make a memory? A case
like that shakes you up. You’re getting very close to the Holy
Grail: "Is this what we mean by a soul? Is this what
we mean by an entity that can exist separate from the physical
body and the brain?"
And what do you do with that, personally?
People think of science as rolling back the
mystery of God. I look at science as slowly creeping toward the
mystery of God.
Here I have an example of consciousness
existing outside of the body and any physical parameters that we
associate with somebody being conscious. That really changes how
I look at what happens when the functions that we associate with
life disappear.
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