own feelings and how his practice of holism
evolved. The article reads as follows:
In the early 1970s, Dr. Bernie S. Siegel found his
job as a surgeon becoming painful. The workdays
never ended, it seemed to him, and patients—so
many of them—died, making him feel like a fail-
ure. On the verge of despair, he decided to listen to
a “guide,” a voice within him, that urged him to
seek a way to go beyond the role of “mechanical”
life-saver. After years of personal growth, Siegel
wrote in Love, Medicine & Miracles: “I tried to step
out from behind my desk and open the door to my
heart as well as my office.... I began encouraging
patients to call me by my first name.... I commit-
ted the physician’s cardinal sin: I ‘got involved’
with my patients.”
Because of this, his patients and practice took
on a new meaning, and other books to describe it
followed: Peace, Love and Healing and How to Survive
Between Office Visits.In all his books, Siegel spouts
mind/body philosophy that contributes to and
augments the increasingly popular view of the
mind/body connection.
Along with the influential health professionals
including Drs. Deepak Chopra, Dean Ornish, Elisa-
beth Kübler-Ross, O. Carl Simonton, Wayne Dyer,
and many others, Siegel, who also teaches at Yale
University, literally operates on the premise that a
person’s temperament has great impact on his
physical state. In addition to being integral to
ancient Eastern philosophy, religion, and medi-
cine, the mind/body idea was summarized by Hip-
pocrates, the “father of medicine,” who said, “I
would rather know what kind of person has a dis-
ease than what kind of disease a person has.”
Q:What has stopped health care professionals in
the past from hooking into the idea of studying
spontaneous remission—the mysterious retreat of a
catastrophic illness—and other forms of wellness?
Siegel:The training: diagnosis-oriented, mechanis-
tic, not about people. If things such as spontaneous
remission happen they don’t understand, they say
it was either a miracle or a lab error.
Q:What is the impact of your philosophy these
days?
Siegel:All impact takes time, but in the past 10 to
15 years, there have been incredible changes and
opening. I’ve been invited to speak at hospitals,
medical schools, and on television, and I’ve
received recognition and awards. But what a strug-
gle I had at first telling professionals to see thattheir patients have a room with a view and to play
music the patients like in the OR! If you gave lec-
tures or sermons and got into the scientific realm,
you’d have an argument on your hands, because
so much of what we all read and were exposed to
was in the specialized academic journals. The med-
ical establishment is now saying let’s do research
on the value of this mind/body connection. That’s
truly exciting, because to have gotten to that point,
they had to accept the idea.
Q:According to your writing and the general liter-
ature, some of it considered “New Age,” accep-
tance plays a big part toward well-being in modern
health care and in everyday life. What accounts for
the acceptance?
Siegel:That no one is against success. That’s the
good part, the one that can bring about institu-
tional changes.
Q:Given your own story of how you had felt so
hopeless about your profession that you nearly
gave up surgery altogether, how did you come to
accept the more metaphysical ideas and apply
them to your practice?
Siegel:For me, it started with my mother telling
me: “It was meant to be. God is redirecting you,
and something good will come of it.” This way of
thinking sets you up to live an intuitive life rather
than one based on what’s officially “right” or
“wrong.” I also recognized that children taught me
how to take care of adults. Children aren’t into
failure until adults fill them with it. Children shift
into the spiritual realm more easily than adults.
For example, children with cancer have said inter-
esting things, such as “Maybe God gave me cancer
because I’d write a book and help other people.”
One child said, “I never want to be a doctor
because I don’t want to tell people there’s nothing
I can do,” while another child said he wanted to be
a doctor “so when their hair falls out, I can say
mine did, too, and it will grow back.”
Q:Would you say your handle on life, with or
without cancer or other disease, is one of keeping
the faith?
Siegel:My basic sense is—the basic message is—
the way you beat the difficulties in life is not in the
cure, but how you live, love, laugh, and have faith.
You can find your own way of giving love to the
world. I say happiness is a choice, not something
given to you. Cancer sometimes wakes people up.
Life for everyone is a labor pain and a prison sen-
tence: You can “give birth” to yourself and learnSiegel, Bernie S. 143