Reviewed by Ciaran Farrell
The foreword to this book is by Dr. Michael Dixon, who is the chair of the College of Medicine, and Health Advisor to King Charles III. Dixon states:“Professor Paul Dieppe is a remarkable man and this is a remarkable book. I first met him when he was one of the nation’s most respected hospital doctors with an impressive research record behind him and at the very top of his game.” Dieppe’s book carries well deserved endorsements from a glittering assortment of prominent doctors and scientists. This alone would make a book written about the personal journey taken through most of Dieppe’s professional life remarkable in its own right, describing as it does, how he attained the dizzying medical and scientific heights that he rose to. What makes his book even more remarkable is his mid-career departure from the accepted biomedical traditions of Western medicine in order to integrate them with a far wider cross-cultural, holistic, and humanistic tradition of healing. His main contributor, Cinder Hypki is an artist, educator, writer and editor.
Paul Dieppe BSc, MD, FRCP, FFPH is also remarkable in that he holds Emeritus professorships at Exeter and Bristol Universities in the UK. He originally qualified as a doctor in 1970, and some of the positions he has held include Professor of Rheumatology and subsequently Director of Research and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in Bristol. He has also been Director of the UK’s Medical Research Council Health Services Research Collaboration, and then Professor of Health and Wellbeing at Exeter University. He has published more than 500 articles in peer reviewed journals and authored or co-authored several medical books. He is currently based in Bristol, UK.
Paul has divided his book into three major sections which define his life’s journey through his personal and professional life and his interest in the ineffable world beyond the material one. These are, Preparation, Investigation and Integration.
In this first section Paul describes his personal ‘knowing’ at a young age that he would become a doctor, and a good one. This experience was deepened during the time he was recovering from a bout of polio, and the impact it had on his school life, education and sporting activities. This was because he began to realise there was a gulf between the materialist biomedicine practised by his doctors, and his experience of a highly mechanistic approach to his healing, which left him feeling empty and hollow. He was able to distil from this some valuable positive lessons which would help him through medical school, and so as a young junior doctor he was very impressed by a senior colleague, Dr Balme and was destined to become his mentee. He was impressed by Balme’s open, easy and friendly bedside manner with his patients in which he took into consideration not only their clinical diagnoses, but also their characters, personalities and social circumstances. This more humane practice of medicine taught Paul a great deal and he was able to combine it with his formidable analytical and academic abilities, in order to climb the medical and scientific career ladder. This led him into senior medical, research and professional posts, and he was as he described it, “riding high” in his career.
Then disaster struck when he had the misfortune to take the wrong flight to Kuala Lumpur to carry out some teaching, and ended up on the ill-fated BA flight 149. As a result of this, he ended up being taken prisoner as one of Saddam Hussein’s “human shields”.
This was an extremely dark and distressing time for Paul and the others who were held captive with him, and he had to draw very deeply on his own physical, psychological and intellectual resources in order to be able to survive. He found that simple acts of human kindness between the prisoners, and also at times between the prisoners and their guards made a great deal of difference from which he took hope, and consequently never lost his faith in humanity.
In Paul’s second section, investigation, he describes how he returned to the UK as a man who had undergone a life changing experience, and suffering from PTSD as the result of being held captive. It was therefore difficult for him to fit back into his previous high-powered scientific and medical career, although his employers and colleagues were very sympathetic towards him.
This meant he could follow up on his desire to search beyond Western biomedicine for human and holistic healing of his own wounds in order to help others. This in turn provided the impetus for his career change so he could investigate alternative and complementary medicine, energy techniques, such as Reiki as well as the concept of healing in broad human terms. He had always been fascinated by the way in which the placebo effect might work on a human as well as a medical and scientific level, so he directed the medical and scientific research projects he was responsible for towards these ends.
Paul came to realise through this that he was on a personal journey of investigating all aspects of healing, so he used his medical contacts to become involved with all sorts of complementary and alternative medical practitioners, healers and organisations in a highly professional way. He did this in order to learn what healing was about, and to see if he could practice the healing arts himself. He found he was able to do so, and was able to learn and practice energy healing to the extent that he was able to heal a horse. This restored his personal confidence in his own abilities, as well as providing him with the insight that such abilities lie within most of us.
Paul has dedicated the third and final section of his book to the subject of integration of Western biomedicine, alternative and complementary medicine, healing and psychology by providing a critical appraisal of both sides of this divide, drawing them together to produce a positive integrated whole. He then goes on to provide a manifesto for how and why his integrated approach of both curing and healing people of their illnesses and life events is so valuable on a basic human level, which is so badly needed in advanced Western societies. He even tackles the difficult subject of palliative care, and death in the context of healing, being a means of a dying individual to come to terms with their fate, and therefore their own mortality, and death.
Paul’s book is written for both a lay medical and scientific audience as well as a professional one. His writing style is straightforward, open and direct, and his discussion of highly complex subjects which are often of a very personal nature is accomplished in depth with a clarity of focus and purpose. There are clear summaries and reflections upon the main points which Paul considers he learned from his experiences along his remarkable journey with further reading and references for those who wish to take them up. He also provides clear and concise explanations of the medical and scientific terms used for those who are less familiar with them.
The insights that Paul describes are both illuminating and thought provoking as he sets out to analyse the virtues and vices of science based Western biomedicine, and the more cultural, spiritually and psychology-based concepts of healing in human terms to see how they can be brought together to provide an integrated cure and healing based medicine. This might not appear to offer that much to the pure psychical researcher, but Paul’s consideration of mind, body, spirit and cosmic consciousness produces a unique blend of the psychical and human condition of medicine, healing and humanity, based on the power of empathic human interaction that I consider should not be underestimated.
It is also a positive and life affirming story of a life’s work and journey which brings out the human values of compassion and respect for our fellow human beings, and a desire to understand the world around us in our own human terms, and values using a scientific approach which I would warmly recommend. I would also like to add that Paul comes across to me from his book as being a very great although humble man, and a superb human being, whose basic core values are those of human love and compassion, and so I would also recommend his book on this basis as a good and positive read.