Healing Runs in the Family
My father was a family practice physician.
Dinner table talk included stories about sick patients and gory details about what happened in surgery that day. He treated everyone from newborns to people in hospice and delivered his fair share of babies. My father was a devout believer in Western medicine, and that there was a pharmaceutical drug for every ailment. Growing up, any time one of us had so much as a sniffle we were given scores of over-the-counter and prescription medications. I can’t count how often we were given antibiotics. Had a rash? Here’s some steroid cream. Dad thought it was “like water,” completely harmless. Too many sore throats? Let’s take your tonsils out. Feeling depressed? Take these pills that will suppress your emotions.
As the child of a first-generation Italian immigrant, he lived with his mother and her parents growing up. My great grandmother Peluso didn’t trust doctors and made all her own medicine based on knowledge gained from generations of Italian mamas before her. She probably used herbs, but I like to imagine that she knew and loved homeopathy too. When my dad was little, she would treat all of his colds and tummy aches with her homemade potions. She had a keen sense of observation and deep intuition, as all good healers do. And she passed those talents on to my father, who became the first in his family to go to college.
Early in medical school, he used his intuition and natural healing abilities when working with patients. But eventually, most of that went to the wayside as tends to happen in modern medical schools. He did retain a bit of it though. I remember he would always smell our breath when we were sick to determine whether it was serious or not. He had an incredible bedside manner and he knew that people came to him as much for reassurance as for medical advice. He’d always say that just telling people they were going to get better was often all they needed. His patient would ask, “Doc, when will I feel better?” “Next Thursday,” he would reply, with a serious nod. And sure enough, next Thursday would roll around, and the patient would be better. Now I call that the power of positive intentions, but I’m sure he would roll his eyes if I put it that way!
Dad was loved far and wide. Every time we went out to dinner, at least one if not several people would come up to our table to say hello and thank him for something. He often didn’t even remember the patient, but he clearly made an impression on them. He was notorious for running late, sometimes by hours. I remember one story about a new patient who got angry at the receptionist because she had been waiting two hours to see the doctor and another patient in the waiting room said to her, “Don’t worry, he’s worth the wait.” He truly listened to his patients, he wanted to hear their stories, and he took detailed cases. I remember him sitting in his office speaking his notes into a Dictaphone late into the evening each day.
When my Dad passed away I was in the midst of our mold remediation and grasping for answers about how to best help my own family. He knew I was using alternative medicine to treat my son’s medical issues and he did not agree with it. “Why don’t you go howl at the moon while you’re at it?” he’d say. In other words, what you’re doing makes no logical sense. He sure did love his grandkids though and empathized with everything they were going through. I never thought of myself as a healer in any way. But a few months after he died, while asking the universe and angels for answers, I was led to take my first homeopathy class and started treating my own family. I quickly learned that all mothers are healers as we are intrinsically intertwined with our babies. When we connect to them with our hearts we will know what they need to heal. Now that I have embraced my own inner healer (which I believe all of us have and can tap into), I see and honor the talents of my great grandmother and my father, and I know that their wisdom guides me as I seek to help others.