Compassion Training Session

Robin Williams with the real Patch Adams

Patch Adams is one of my absolute favorite movies and that is what introduced me to compassion in medicine. Patch Adams is a doctor in US who rightly saw a need for doctors to be more compassionate and wanted to treat the patient as a whole instead of just the disease. Based on his ideals we started a small society in medical school encouraging medical students to be more compassionate to other doctors and to their patients. In my search to gather more data on this I stumbled upon CompassionIt.com It is a brilliant initiative by Sara Schairer who is a Stanford certified instructor of Compassion Cultivation Training. She introduced these wrist bands which have different colors on each side and they remind you to do an act of compassion each time you look at them, once you are done, you flip it to a different color.

I contacted her when I was in US the last time. This time I finally ordered the wrist bands and got so much more from the package. Fortunateley I got to meet the amazing director of Compassion It Chicago, Burrell Poe, and we discussed a couple of ideas for a hospital in Chicago. That work is still to happen but I decided to introduce our ideas in Sikanderabad.  

A lot of the women here suffer from nonspecific chronic headache, backache and indigestion. They have tried multiple medicines for a while now but they feel like they are in a trapped in their thoughts and sick bodies. Long term depression and anxiety go undiagnosed here and they cannot talk about it easily in this area so most of these problems then manifest in physical forms.

I read this amazing article by Sara on Chopra.com (https://www.chopra.com/articles/25-simple-ways-to-practice-gratitude) and I decided to start off with gratitude as their first step. The session took place on the 16th of November at PHC. It was weird for me to be asking them to be grateful when they are poorer than most of the city and are  surrounded by so many problems but the response I received was amazing! It was probably the first time someone from the health field was talking about being grateful daily and they listened with the biggest smiles. Sara's concepts were super simple but impactful and I discussed each of them with these women. I asked them to give me examples to make sure they understood and they were always spot on. They listened eagerly and by the end I could feel they were a bit more relaxed just after listening about this amazing practice.

The next half of the session was dedicated to breast cancer. Again it was such a taboo topic for this population although according to the most recent research, every 8th woman in Pakistan will have breast cancer at some point in her life. We discussed the increasing incidence in our population and how they can detect it early. I taught them the breast exam and how they should perform it often to look for lumps Although it was an only-women gathering most of the women were still so shy just to hear me talk about it. In the following sessions I would ask them if  they tried it themselves and if they passed the message forward to others.

I'll soon be posting about our next session on compassion.

By Zainab Faiza