Reconciling the scientific principles of medicine with the love essential for meaningful care is not an easy task, but one that Greg L. Fricchione performs masterfully in Compassion and Healing in Medicine and Society. At the core of this book is a thought-provoking analysis of the relationship between evolutionary science and neuroscience. Fricchione theorizes that the cries for attachment made by seriously ill patients reflect an underlying evolutionary tenet called the separation challenge / attachment solution process. The pleadings of patients, he explains, are verbal expressions of the history of evolution itself. By exploring the roots of a patient's attachment needs, we come face to face with a critical component of natural selection and the evolutionary process. Medicine engages with the separation challenge / attachment solution process on many levels of scientific knowledge and human meaning and healing. Fricchione applies these concepts to medical care and encourages physicians to fully understand them so they can better treat their patients. Compassionate humanistic care promotes physical, emotional, and spiritual healing precisely because it is consonant with how life, the brain, and humanity have evolved. It is therefore not a luxury of modern medical care but an essential part of it. Fricchione advocates an attachment-based medical system, one in which physicians evaluate stress and resiliency and prescribe an integrative treatment plan for the whole person designed to accentuate the propensity to health. There is wisdom in a perennial philosophy based on compassionate love which, Fricchione stresses, the medical community must take advantage of in designing future health care -- and society must appreciate as it faces its separation challenges.
Preface Part I: Introduction: Knowledge, Meaning, and Healing, and the Consilience of Medicine 1. The Medical Mission and Evolution 2. Two Realms of KnowledgeOr One? 3. Knowledge, Meaning, and Healing Part II: The Biological Foundations of the Evolutionary Need for Attachment Solutions 4. Evolution of the Protocell 5. Cellular Evolution 6. Animal Evolution Part III: The Foundations in Brain Evolution of Knowledge, Meaning, and Healing 7. Evolution of the Brain 8. Structuring the Brain to Know and Act 9. Memory and Motivation 10. Meaning, Healing, and the Brain Part IV: The Neurobehavioral and Cultural Foundations of the Need for Attachment Solutions 11. Separation, Attachment, and Human Development 12. Separation, Attachment, and the Life Cycle 13. The Social Neuroscience of Separation and Attachment 14. Consciousness, Language, and Their Origins 15. Evolutionary Consciousness 16. Implications for Society, Culture, and Ethics Part V: The Theoretical Foundations of the Need for Attachment Solutions 17. An Evolutionary True Cause? 18. Investigating the Separation ChallengeAttachment Solution Hypothesis 19. A Testable Hypothesis 20. Analogies and Analysis Part VI: The Implications of the Separation Challenge-Attachment Solution Hypothesis 21. Implications for the Mission of Modern Medicine 22. Implications for Medicine at the End of Life Postscript: A Commentary on Human Evolution References Index
""It is not possible to give justice to such a large and complex project in a short review... enlightening and fascinating.""
