"Your doctor came over for dinner?" I asked, truly surprised.
"Yeah, he always did. He was like part of our family," she sat back with her memory like she was reading a favorite old book.
"He was your doctor and your parents' doctor?" I wondered stupidly.
"Yeah, why?"
The last time I heard about a doctor visiting a patient's house to celebrate a social occasion was the last time I watched Little House on the Prairie.
In professional practice those boundary crossings are utterly verboten. I know of one social worker (who's really an administrator, not a therapist) who won't even acknowledge a patient in public unless the patient comes up to him first. And even then he's as circumspect as a mouse in a cat house. And I can't remember the last time I was alone with a doctor. In both exams and consultations, there is always a nurse or assistant present as a live witness to ward off the evil spirits of the legal system.
There are rules and regulations about these things now, privacy laws and confidentiality acts that can put a therapist or doctor in jail for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
So, the caution is understandable. But it's also lamentable.
Because this past week I left the cloister and went to see a client walk to receive her master's degree. She invited me to do so and there was no doubt it meant the world to her. In my mind and heart it was the healing and loving thing to do. I could have said no, that the regulations strictly interpreted limited our interaction to the office and that leaving those four walls could pollute the therapeutic relationship. But I didn't. I went. And we both wept as she got her degree.
To be fair, there are some good reasons for people being careful about leaving a traditional and "safe" setting. Many "healers" have taken terrible advantage of people by forcing unprofessional relationships on them with highly improper dynamics. And I don't just mean sexual ones. I mean ones in which the therapist is the needy one. And people like that sincerely do need lines drawn around them that read: "so far and no farther." But I suspect that we may have gone too far in our carefulness and become fearful. In so doing we may be losing something truly precious--the healing relationship
When I think of doctors as part of a community, I once again think of my father and what being a healer means.
It was winter when I was an infant and one of his patients had contracted a bad flu which took a turn for the worse one night. As the story goes, they called in the wee hours of the morning. Without hesitating, my father went to their apartment on Decatur Avenue in the Bronx, where he sat with Harry as his wife, Irene, paced until the fever broke. He sat there all night. Harry lived. Irene never stopped pacing, but she was eternally grateful and thought my father walked on water.
First they came to major family events--birthdays, funerals, the like. But then they started coming over just to come over. He still took care of them medically. And they lived into their 90's, hale and happy.
It never occurred to anyone in my familyimmediate or extendedthat there was anything untoward or unethical about it. In fact, if that question had even been raised, they would have heard a resounding "Are you CRAZY?" from all of us.
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