S4 E4 – The Unnatural Costs of Healthcare

From skyrocketing medical bills to medical error and nursing/physician burnout, the US healthcare system incurs great costs to our health and well-being. While we might be healed from illness, our experiences with the healthcare system routinely leave us with mounting medical bills and emotional trauma. One recent study estimates that healthcare spending per person will surpass $15,000 annually by 2023. What exactly is the root cause of these growing costs? Governments, institutions, and corporations are investing more energy and resources than ever before into understanding and redressing these increasing costs, yet they only continue to accumulate and grow. In fact, venture capitalists are reportedly investing more money than ever before into new technologies to decrease the costs of care while these technologies simultaneously and paradoxically only increase the costs of care. Is it possible that we are fundamentally misunderstanding the root cause of healthcare’s unnatural costs? Join us for episode 4 of season 4's Assembly Podcast, “The Unnatural Costs of Healthcare” as we debate and explore how the healthcare system's historical denigration of spirituality and religion incurs an unnatural cost and one which reveals the root problem with the US healthcare system. We are joined today in our discussion by Dr. Janet Roseman, The Sidney Project in Spirituality and Medicine and Compassionate Care™ Course Director: Janet Lynn Roseman, Phd, Associate Professor, Integrative Medicine. She is the author of numerous works, including If Joan of Arc Had Cancer: Finding Courage, Faith, and Healing from History's Most Inspirational Woman Warrior. Dr. Roseman joins us on today's show to discuss her pioneering work on The Sidney Project in Spirituality and Medicine and Compassionate Care™, why the figure of Joan of Arc is a model for cultivating a humanistic approach to medicine, and how her work with traditional medicine healers informs her understanding of the relationship between religion, spirituality, and medicine. Dr. Roseman also discusses the recent completion and publication of her curated collection of interviews with traditional medicine healers, LISTENING TO TRADITIONAL MEDICINE HEALERS: WHAT CAN WE LEARN ABOUT WELLNESS? Dr. Roseman can be contacted at jroseman@nova.edu. The transcript for today's episode is available via the following link.