Review of Sick and Tired on Amazon
“A must for health professionals”
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Written by consultant physician and psychoanalytical psychotherapist, Dr. Nick Read, “Sick and Tired: Healing the Illnesses Doctor’s Can’t Cure”(2005) is an invaluable new book for all health professionals and the interested informed general reader. Simply written, but containing great expertise, it is packed full of case studies that demonstrate clearly how emotional trauma of any kind can become buried in the body and appear as the symptoms of chronic functional illness that fills doctor’s surgeries and hospitals day by day.
Dr Read gives numerous accounts of how psychotherapy and other “holistic” therapies can often relieve and sometimes cure the chronic illnesses that expensive medical intervention have failed to rectify. He asserts that long-term functional illness, in some cases, can be linked initially with a viral infection or the onset of gastrointestinal complaints. However, when these complaints continue over weeks and months it is vital to ascertain what was going on in the patient’s relational and emotional life at the time. He confirms that long-term use of medical drugs to treat functional illnesses create their own problems and that this needs to be urgently considered.
Dr Read makes a passionate plea for a Health Service that is based on a marriage between orthodox scientific medicine and a modern holistic approach (which contains a deep understanding of human emotions and the relational connections that are needed to enable emotional healing to occur). He stresses that the integration of these two very different modes of healing cannot be achieved by bolt-on sessions of psychotherapy or massage or acupuncture but would require turning our current health system on its head. This would revolutionise and enliven the role of the doctor and other health workers. Changes would include enabling patients with chronic illness to become decision-makers in the management of their condition.
Dr Read concludes that there needs to be liberation for both doctor and patient in order to meet the challenges to health of the fast and often impersonal world of the 21st century. An inspiring read.
