*I originally wrote this review for Disabled-World.com. I highly recommend visiting the site and reading the valuable and eclectic content published there!
When I was a little girl and my mom complained about the lack of kind care she or my brothers were offered, despite my mom's excitement at collaborating and sharing ideas with experts in the field of disability, I thoughtlessly assumed my mom was expecting too much from people. I also wondered if people like my brothers could even tell when they were being treated with kind care.
I, clearly, was not good at kind care.
Over time, with my mom's insistence and persistent modelling, I became better at it. I also began to see the lack of it offered elsewhere. And once I saw it, I couldn't stop seeing it.
For those without a mother or brothers like my own, Why We Revolt: A Patient Revolution for Careful and Kind Care by Victor Montori can play the role of insistent friend that persistently models what kind care is, how we can and why we should require it for ourselves and our society.
Why We Revolt is an urgent book with a relaxed and poetic pace. It think this sets the tone for how we must revolt; with urgency that understands kind care is often relaxed and poetic. It is collaborative and creative. It is challenging and exciting. It can save lives and it does create better living.
The author, Victor Montori, MD, Msc, is a professor of medicine and a diabetes doctor at Mayo Clinic. His desire for kind care in all fields of healthcare shines through in the stories and essays throughout the book. But because diabetes is so often a lifelong disease, necessitating that care, medicating, and maintaining health become a lifestyle for diabetics, it is often through these stories that we feel the full impact if how careful and kind care can deeply affect our world.
The book is a collection of moving essays, written from personal experience within the confines of industrialized healthcare. Regardless of where you live in the world, of where you deliver or receive your care, the corruption of contemporary healthcare is affecting you. With compassion and passion, Montori shares how working within the confines has made giving careful kind care a challenge for him, personally. He exposes ways our streamlined healthcare, meant for patients like you rather than you, is disconnecting us from caring. It is hurting our ability to become holistically healthy. However, one of the things I loved about reading Why We Revolt, is Montori builds every story around a vision of – and belief in – effective and kind care.
For a book that consistently reveals and reminds us of the harm being caused in healthcare systems around the world right this moment, it is surprisingly lovely to read. Rather than display anger and provoke readers to feel hate and blame, it excites us with possibilities and envisions a different system that is built of love for humanity and honest science. This book is careful and kind itself.
Why We Revolt explains with clarity so much of what is wrong with healthcare today, putting clear words to what most of us suspect even when we can't clearly state it. Through the stories and insights, it connects us; caregivers and care receivers – reminding us to fan the flame of noticing each other in order to know how to help each other.
This book reminded me of growing up with my mother. Of how over and over she hoped for creative care when reaching out to professionals, particularly in the case of my brothers who had autism and other various cognitive challenges. How she would attempt to shed skepticism from past professional encounters and meet each new caregiver with a fresh attitude. And how over and over they would be unable or unwilling to offer themselves in a human capacity. To notice my mom and my brothers as individuals and collaborate in order to create individual protocols and regimens.
One passage in particular stood out and reminded me of how my mom decided to run her own clinic. Dr. Montori writes: “There is no natural law that commands corporations of any kind to place the interests of their stockholders and administrators first. A more natural law would state that if you meet or exceed the needs of your customers, if you respect the people you serve, if you don't lie to them or shortchange them in the quality of your offerings, and if you don't extort them, their loyal business will follow.”
My mom is an international brain changeand behaviour expert so her clients, eventually, do not need her anymore. Their loyal business manifests as word-of-mouth recommendations and invitations for her to speak, but the point is the same. Give quality, kind, careful care and your healthcare business will thrive because a healthcare business is thriving when it is offering quality, kind, careful care.
“Time is not money. The depths of time are the currency for caring.” ~Victor Montori
Why We Revolt is a book that belongs in every personal library. It can be devoured in a sitting or two, and continually referred to when the reader wants a reminder of how and why we must revolt.
_______________________________
Why We Revolt: A Patient Revolution for Careful and Kind Care (2nd Edition) on Amazon.com: Why We Revolt
