Dr. Terry A. Gordon: The Wounded Healer

Dr. Terry A. Gordon: In science we don’t know squat. I’m still healing hearts but just in a different way. I’m trained at the world famous Cleveland Clinic, a top training program in cardiology and we came out of that place thinking we could cure anything. Literally – Angioplasty, heart transplants, defibrillators, all that stuff was brand new and it wasn’t until the tail end of my career that I realized: “We’re not doing any curing. We’re participating in the physical healing, but true healing doesn’t occur in the physical plane. True healing occurs in the spiritual plane”. While it gave me a springboard from which to jump, mainstream medicine I think is missing it big time, because most of us physicians are so busy and so busied by the paperwork and the time constraints that we don’t take the time to think about what we are really doing.

Dirk Terpstra: Why is that you think?

Dr. Terry A. Gordon: Being overburdened, time constraints, perhaps even being afraid or hesitant to contemplate something beyond what’s right in front of you. Inside each of us there are two selfs: The physical self – that’s mortal, it’s fractured, it’s an ego encapsulated in a skin house that we call a body, but it dies. It can be irreversibly altered by disease, injury and death. The other self that resides within us is the spiritual self – it’s the immortal self. If we can connect more with that spiritual self, that’s when the true healing occurs. It doesn’t occur in the heart catheterization or the open heart procedure. That’s not the healing! Close to the tail end of my career I started sharing that with patients, but only if I got the sense that they could benefit from it. There was this Harley Davidson biker dude and he came in the hospital with a heart attack and he was so pissed. He had piercings all over his body and he was a very angry dude. The day before my patients would go home I would always sit down and talk with them about behavior modification – How do we prevent this from happening again, cholesterol, blood pressure, all that stuff and… meditating.