In this week's PBS documentary, The New Medicine, American doctors - from major institutions like Duke and Harvard - expressed the importance of a shift from impersonal technology-based care to a softer, mind-body approach. While the ideas related in the broadcast - the mind has the power to heal the body, patients have quicker recoveries when they are treated as an individuals with feelings and history - are illustrative of the country's increasing acceptance of integrative medicine, they are also far from revolutionary.

To me, there is nothing new about this medicine. Treatment was once given this way - think of the intimacy and familiarity of the family doctor - making conventional medicine's adoption of personalized, sensitive treatment more of an unlearning than anything else. Technological advancement has replaced the person-to-person dynamic that once defined a doctor-patient relationship. Today a growing group of medical professionals is attempting to disengage themselves from the trappings of modern science in hopes of gaining insight into patients' mental, emotional, and spiritual states. Suddenly we are more than the sum of our physical parts?

If there is anything new about this medical movement, it is the clear understanding of the power of hope to facilitate - or hinder - healing. Doctors, whether or not they believe in alternative healing techniques like guided imagery and mindfulness meditation, are beginning to accept that patients who are infused with hope have a greater motivation to survive and to recuperate. That alone is documentary-worthy.

Image: londonideas.org