Paul Dieppe - Healing and Medicine

Join Professor Paul Dieppe for a fascinating talk on his new book HEALING & MEDICINE: A Doctor's Journey Toward Their Integration (Routledge), which deals with the relationship between spiritual healing practice and contemporary Western medicine.

Healing is on many people’s minds today. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and a host of other disruptions and disasters, many of us feel that we need healing – in our personal lives, for the environment and for our planet. But healing is rarely defined and is not an accepted part of medicine in the West. This book examines the relationship between healing and medicine through the eyes of an academic physician who changed his interests from biomedical research to healing late in his career in medicine. It is based on his experiences and stories of his encounters with patients, practitioners and others for whom healing has had a particular significance, as well as his rigorous research into the subject. A central theme of the book is that modern medicine needs to be more pluralistic in its approach to health and accept that spirituality and healing techniques have roles to play alongside scientific medicine, which currently has its base in materialism alone.

Professor Paul Dieppe BSc, MD, FRCP, FFPH is an Emeritus professor at the Universities of both Exeter and Bristol in the UK. He qualified as a doctor in 1970 and his past jobs have included Professor of Rheumatology and subsequently Director of Research and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in Bristol; Director of the MRC Health Services Research Collaboration, and then Professor of Health and Wellbeing in Exeter. He has published more than 500 articles in peer review journals and authored or co-authored several medical books.