sician as well as a wise manö (Plato 11). TodayÆs health care providers would be well advised to take a critical look at that view of ôdoctors as gods.ö
Many Americans, faced with a faceless corporate HMO rather than a human, caring doctor, have taken their health care into their own hands, often prompting disdain and skepticism from their doctors. Physicians are indeed wise, but they are not omniscient. If they do not know the answer, they should say so. Patients would rather hear ôI do not knowö than hear that they have some nebulous illness, or worse, that they have nothing wrong with them and it is all in their head.
In another dialogue, Socrates and Phaedrus discuss the views of Hippocrates. Phaedrus tells Socrates that ôHippocrates the Asclepiad says that the nature even of the body can only be understood as a wholeö (Plato 136). That summarizes the Greek view of the body, and even today, with all of the scientific advances in medicine, that point is worth remembering. Holistic healers have long argued that the body must be considered as a whole. In other words, physical pain in one place often has arisen elsewhere, resulting from physiological or psychological factors, or both. Docto
...