About ten years ago, I was on the board of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, which was at that time having its annual meeting in Nashville, Kentucky. The them of the meeting was the Kentucky Derby.
It was a cute theme. Everyone was given replicas of those ridiculously ornate hats spectators wear. There were horse race themed cocktails, and talks. But a month or so prior to the meeting, a front page story in The New York Times detailed the cruelty of the sport—detailing the deaths of horses who were often worked to their death. Articles followed in other newspapers with horror stories about the treatment of equine athletes.
I brought up this issue to the Board. I was told that as an organization, our business was clinical hypnosis. We stayed out of politics.
I responded that the goals of our organization—to foster more compassionate and effective care by tapping into a patient’s or client’s inner strengths— meant that we needed to support compassion and stand against cruelty in all the activities of the organization. I received little support in this effort. In the end, at my insistence, the meeting program had a lukewarm paragraph towards the end of the brochure saying that ASCH supported the ethical and humane treatment of all animals— but nothing specifically about horse racing or the Derby.
Can we separate societal concerns from health care? Of course not. Some of the greatest advances in healthcare—the leading reasons for falls in maternal and infant mortality, for example, have not been due to new medicines or surgery, but in providing clean water, pasteurized milk, enough food for people to eat, better sanitation, less dangerous work places…. the list goes on and on. And the reason that the United States still lags behind other industrialized nations in maternal and infant mortality is because of our lack of national health insurance—with quality health care available to all—, the gap between rich and poor, and systemic racism.
When the number one cause of death in childhood is now gun violence, no one can say that Pediatrics can be separate from society. Legislation passed to ban the assault weapons now killing kids on a regular basis, and passage of other sane gun control laws would be worthy of a Nobel prize in medicine— so many lives would these laws save, and so many fewer children would be horribly maimed.
I am a guest columnist with the Daily Hampshire Gazette, an award winning newspaper in Northampton, MA. So when Roe vs. Wade was overturned, I could not remain silent. Many of the women (and trans men) who may get an abortion are in the pediatric age group—less than 21. The extremists who now control the Supreme Court and many state legislatures believe that life begins at conception, so that increasing numbers of the millions of women who suffer miscarriage each year are now subjects of criminal investigation. Many have been sent to prison for using substances thought, without any proof, to lead to fetal demise.
Most shockingly, girls as young as ten who have been made pregnant by rape have not been allowed to get abortions, in states like Ohio, because there are no exemptions for any pregnancy after six weeks gestation. In the case of the ten year old rape victim in Ohio, sent to Indiana for an abortion by a child abuse pediatric specialist, the reaction was astounding: Instead of bowing their heads in shame, the right wing media cooked up the theory that the story was made up (until the rapist was caught) and the attorney general of the state of Indiana threatened to prosecute the obstetrician who performed the abortion—though no laws were broken.
I am a specialist in mind body medicine. I’ve helped thousands of children with headaches, stomachaches, bedwetting, sleep problems, and anxiety. But how can I, and others who practice clinical hypnosis, or teach mindful meditation, tell young patients that they are the boss of their bodies when women in our country are no longer the boss of theirs?