A Doctor with a Difference

Many people think I'm eccentric. How can a doctor help people get well with poetry? How does making them laugh, making them pause and making them think help to heal? Who ever heard of a doctor prescribing poetry?

It all started about 1997 when I attended a patient with terminal cancer. Over his last few weeks we became very friendly and I spent many hours at his bedside talking about life and living, death and dying. After his death I was very upset and confused and felt the need to journal my thoughts. They seemed to flow out of me as a poem. I realised how powerful a medium it is, how it allowed me to concentrate, clarify and convey my feelings. It was a wonderful emotive release.

I started writing more poems, especially about patients. When I read them to the patient they were moved emotionally and energetically and began to follow some of their wisdom within. It is as if the poem unlocked their inner healing.

At this time I was getting interested in body/mind/spirit medicine and began to realise that curing patients' symptoms was totally different from healing the underlying cause. One without the other is unsatisfying and incomplete. My medical training was wonderful in curing patients but I felt orthodox medicine had started to forget the importance of treating the whole person.

I have learned that any modality that invokes the relaxation response and connects us to our inner guidance system is a powerful pathway to healing. To my own amazement it seemed that my poems and their messages were highly effective in opening up patients' perceptions of their illness and their capacity to heal themselves. We all have great strengths and a natural impulse to heal, hidden within, and using poetry to help people to pause, relax and reflect often allowed them to find their own best way.

I love public speaking and have a natural humour which continues to seep out. Health is such an easy subject on which to speak. Everyone wants to be healthy and are keen to learn of ways to improve it. Audiences also find the latest ideas in body/mind medicine fascinating, innovative and often challenging.

I embellish my talks admitting a wealth of private mistakes, sharing a store of personal experiences and a myriad of patient successes that demonstrate how we can all help ourselves to not only be healthy but also to grow with meaning and purpose.

My experiences working on medical humanitarian missions around the world have been life changing. They have enriched both my personal journey and influenced my writing and speaking.

In 1994-5 I witnessed the horrors of cholera, dehydration, malnutrition and dispossession on a massive scale in the Rwandan refugee camps whilst working for the Red Cross, I saw tens of thousands of refugees die in only a few weeks.

In 2000-01 I endured new challenges working and living in northern Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. I was continually confronted with the effects of chronic poverty, political repression and religious fanaticism. Luckily my mission ended just before September 11th.

These experiences changed me. They have shown me the worst and best of humanity, the tenacity and tenderness of the human spirit, the power of faith, hope and courage. At times I saw the impossible happen, survival against all odds.

Twenty five years in general practice has shown me that there is far more to health and healing than we know. Just as watching the stars every night will show the patterns of the universe, so too watching diseases everyday shows the patterns of lifestyle and health. It reinforced my growing awareness that our health is a harmony of our body, mind and spirit and that once it becomes unbalanced then dis-ease will often eventuate. The treatment must include addressing the underlying cause which frequently has an emotional base, as well as curing the disease.

I have spent my life travelling and living around the world and I draw upon these diverse experiences in my speaking and writing, I was born in Liverpool, England. and have worked in Nepal, Kenya, Gibraltar, Rwanda, Afghanistan and Australia, where I still reside. This has allowed me to follow my other passion in life, scuba diving. I had a medical practice in the Whitsundays, on the Great Barrier Reef in Queesland, for over twenty one years where I incorporated scuba diving medicine into my normal practice. This interest led me to write the book "The Sports Diving Medical" whose second edition has just been released (2002). I am also a diving medical adviser to the South East Asia and Pacific branch of the Divers Alert Network and write a column in their magazine, Diver Alert.