The title comes out of human experience: If any one of us wants to heal any other, we need to bring health with us rather than more dis-ease. "Physician, heal thyself!" comes before "First, do no harm!" So it appears that recent attention to the human condition of the health professional really returns to ancient understandings of healing.Scott and Hawk have given us a practical compendium, a handbook guided by their own experiences as faculty members in family-practice education (especially in graduate residency programs). Contributors are people actively working in the education of doctors, nurses, dentists, and behavioral scientists, so the book will be especially useful for those of us who are teaching health-care professionals. Many of the contributors have identified themselves already by their work in studying and treating stress, impairment, and burnout, and are well-known to the networks that are growing across the country by a common need to address these issues.This book is neatly organized. Part I: Understanding Impairment, applies general concepts to the training and practice of physicians. From Pfifferling's chapter on impairment and Pines's review of her extensive work on burnout there is a strong theme of trying to understand causes and to recognize the earliest signals in individuals for early intervention. The next chapters pick up developmental and environment issues, with especially strong chapters from the editors themselves, as well as Kosch's systemic examination of the physician in his or her own family relationships and the fascinating report by Jaffe, Goldstein, and Wilson of their interviews with 40 physicians who saw themselves as being "in transition." The special problems that contribute to stress for women physicians are carefully described by Drucker. The whole section weaves a clear picture of people who only want to "help others" but who are caught up in cultural and programmed expectations that tend to suppress their own needs.The second section, Interventions for Prevention, is a practical look at what is being done, and at some of the difficulties and challenges that are met by anyone who intends to contribute to change, either in program design, or in the nature or accessibility of interventions. The section is understandably slim: most of the references are dated in the 1980s, emphasizing 512
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