Have we lost our soul to data? Professor of Cardiology Kavitha Chinnaiyan explores the art and science of deep human connection in medicine and how it contributes to wellness.
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Transcript
Speaker 1:
Welcome to Heart Based Medicine's Heart of Healthcare podcast featuring Dr. Kavitha Chinnaiyan, Understanding the Heart of Wellness.
Jan:
Hey, everyone, welcome to this session of Heart of Healthcare live. Today this is a very beautiful possibility. We have a fantastic guest with us that I'm really proud to announce. It's like meeting friends and I'd really like to introduce you to Kavitha Chinnaiyan, and she is a professor. She is a professor of cardiology and a professor of medicine. She is not only working as a cardiologist in a hospital, as we all know it with all the environment that we all know in a classic healthcare setting. But she is also the author of several books and I would like to mention here, The Heart of Wellness in particular. Today's conversation to me is particularly precious because there are only very few people that I'm blessed to meet, who can bring together ciencia and conciencia, so science and consciousness. Those of you who have the luxury of already knowing Kavitha or having heard about Kavitha, you will already appreciate the depth of her sharing.
Jan:
We would like to explore today with you what it means to actually live in a world that provides healthcare in the allopathic classic training, as it is taught in universities, and what it means to align this with our purpose, and what it means to live and thrive in such a system so that we can show up as the best version of ourselves. So welcome Kavitha to this [inaudible 00:02:15].
Kavitha:
Thank you. Thank you so much, Jan. You are absolutely amazing, and it's an honor for me to know you, and to be here with you.
Jan:
Thank you. So Kavitha, we've already talked about this many times in different and we've taken different angles. Today we're looking at training and we wanted to explore what is it that it would take if we had the opportunity to change the way that we train medical students? Also, what would it take for us who have been to medical school quite some time ago and have been on the road for a while, but we're still in a process of learning in many ways? So what might it take to change our training, whether as a student or as a senior physician? What would it take so that we are supported to bring consciousness into our practice?
Kavitha:
Yeah, that's such a great question. I think, the problem here is of fissuring. It's a splitting off of really why we come into medicine in the first place. Most of us who come into medicine and to become doctors or healthcare providers, it's because we are moved by this consciousness, so to speak. We are moved to explore this very deep human connection in a very particular way. I mean, that is the purpose of all of us, no matter which field we choose. But in medicine, what happens is we come to it because we want to connect with other human beings at this very deep level. Which is through their illness, and through their wellness, and through the phases of their life that our patients go through.
Kavitha:
But then when we come into medical training, what happens is in Western medicine, we have really sold our soul, so to speak, to evidence-based medicine, where everything is about data. It is really about what works for this disease. It becomes really disease specific, which means it is body specific. When we are talking about you or me in medicine, we are essentially talking about either your disease, or your body parts, your organ systems, or particular systems within that. If we were to talk about your mind, it would be only in relation to how you are perceiving your ...
