"Heal" is a Beautiful Word

Dr. Alex Jadad is full of questions: “What makes you happiest? What do you regret most? How do you want to die? What is ‘your verb’?” He admits such queries can be unnerving, but only if we expect definitive answers.

“Not knowing is what makes me happiest. “ Jadad has arrived at this understanding after years of experience as a palliative care physician. He has seen people face death. Often, he is the first person they talk to about dying. At this delicate moment of life, so many questions go unanswered.

Aside from physical pain or fatigue, Jadad says the main source of human suffering at the end of life is the accumulation of regret. Things we should have done that we didn’t do. Goals we have reached that turned out not to be worth it. “I have become a regret manager,” he explains.

As chief innovator and founder of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, Jadad says he has devoted his life to “bridging the gap between what people need to live a long and happy life, and what they get.” As Canada Research Chair in eHealth Innovation at the University of Toronto, he is trying to start a global conversation about wellness, one that looks beyond medical research and healthcare institutions and toward a holistic approach to healing.

He has studied and followed native communities around the world that have not adopted Western medicine, yet have demonstrated a capacity for healing that often exceeds our own. “They are much more grounded to the earth than we are,” he says, because they acknowledge all the intangible things that make a patient a person. There are tremendous opportunities to embrace this “conceptual framework for the pursuit of meaning and joy” that he believes is essential to a full life.

Jadad’s aim is to promote healing as a way of life.

He wants to get us thinking about our regrets, our guilt, our joys, and our desires earlier, rather than later. But he points out that the health system is reactive and heavily medicalized, offering no support to proactive efforts to pursue human happiness.

Most biomedical research funds go toward putting more years into our lives. “A tiny fraction is spent on keeping us well,” Jadad says, adding that “the emphasis is on diagnosis and ‘fixes’” and that “in most countries where we have data, veterinarians receive more training on how to manage pain than medical students.” He adds, “It is time to start putting more life into our years.”

Changing the system will not be easy. “When we’re healthy, we don’t care about the healthcare system that we hope will be there for us,” he says. “But the system for which we pay over $5 trillion a year worldwide, will just be offering us chemotherapy, radiation and surgery if we get cancer. Our wellbeing beyond institutional boundaries is nobody’s formal responsibility.”

Programs and services that offer workshops, exercise and dietary plans to help people thrive even as they confront serious diseases such as cancer, tend to create the impression that an irreverent, warrior-like mindset and a green smoothie will wash away the ugliness of a terminal illness.

“I wish everybody could turn a diagnosis of cancer or another life-threatening disease into a meaningful and deeply transformative experience,” Jadad says, referring to the sometimes exceptional successes of such programs. “But people feel guilty if they don’t have a positive experience. They end up blaming and punishing themselves: Why am I not feeling well? I should be stronger, I should be more energetic, more proactive, more assertive. But I’m scared, I’m weak, I’m vulnerable, I’m crying all the time.” Finding innovative ways to mitigate, or even eliminate all of these sources of suffering drives his work as a core scientist in the Centre for Health, Wellness and Cancer Survivorship at the University Health Network in Toronto.

Our healthcare system and our needs are woefully misaligned, according to Jadad. “We are all facing a terminal illness. It’s called life.”

And that, explains Jadad, is why healing is the most important thing. “I’m trying to be a healer. That’s what we’re missing. We’re trying to fix, conquer, beat. But heal is a beautiful word.”