First, Do No Harm

“If you restore balance in your own self, you will be contributing immensely to the healing of the world.”

-Deepak Chopra

The Hippocratic oath that states “First, do no harm,” can seem an unnecessary statement to an old soul who is naturally compassionate and intentional in the care they provide others. Yet, if love for ourselves is deficient, there is harm we could inadvertently do to others. 

From a simple self-care perspective, if we are tired, overwhelmed, or impatient, we could do harm. From an emotional well-being perspective, if we are insecure about our abilities and afraid to admit our shortcomings, or caught up in people-pleasing in a manner that obscures our rational thinking, we could do harm. We could miss something, we could say something insensitive that could induce a cascade of harmful thinking in our patient or client. We could go too quickly and not give the space for questions to be asked, or even disallow our charge to feel safe enough to ask questions. 

As a health care provider or healer of any sort, our first responsibility is to ourselves so that we may be the most open to hear the needs of the one who has put their faith in us to care for and heal. Our first responsibility to others is to dispel the fear when we can, have compassion and provide a safe space when we have fearful news to impart, and do what we can to respect and manage the emotions of those for whom we are tasked to heal. 

Simply put, our responsibility is to love. 

When we can embody love for ourselves, we can spread that love to those we serve. Simple, yet complicated. Complicated by the many fear-filled requirements of our health care system that puts patient care at the very bottom of our priorities. This is done in such a way that those of us in the trenches providing care don’t even realize how we’ve lost our connection to our patients. We are overwhelmed by the insurance companies as they dictate how we can provide care in a manner that is designed only to pad their bottom line, and we forget that simple oath to “First, do no harm” as we lose site of the humans we are licensed to heal. 

When you are a healer of any sort, even if you don’t have to deal with the disastrous American Health Care system, (or you’re looking to pivot out of it) self-love is the most important asset you can bring to those you serve.

When we love more, we can heal more. The more we love ourselves, the more we can heal ourselves, and the more healed we are the more we can heal others.

When you consider that each of us is a spiritual being having a physical experience, then the spiritual/emotional well-being of those for whom we care needs to be considered in our treatment plan. Books like You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise Hay as well as Karol Truman’s book, Feelings Buried Alive Never Die, show us how our negative emotions manifest in our bodies as specific physical ailments. We can consult these books to understand what our patients might be dealing with underneath the ailment itself, which may not dictate how you will treat, but it can dictate how you will care, and that can make all the difference in the world for the healing process.  

In the care of my patients over the last 30 years of my optometric career, my interpretation of “first, do no harm,” is that I don’t judge, I do what I can to guide patients away from self-shame and blame, and especially, I gently coach them away from fear.

Because fear is love’s mortal enemy and it blocks our healing.

How this looks in the care of my patients:

Most people would agree that the one sense they most fear to loose is their vision. Yet, many people will deny that fear until they get to the optometrist’s office. Once they are in my exam chair, I see it play out in fascinating ways.  

• They ask questions to which they nervously try to answer themselves before I can.
• They repeat the question they have in a variety of ways before I can answer them.
• They cut me off as I’m attempting to answer their question to re-ask their question or answer it themselves.
• They don’t ask anything. When I ask if they do have any questions, they say “no,” and immediately launch into a question. 
• They hold their breath as I go over the anatomy and health of their eyes, visibly exhaling with relief when I tell them their eyes are healthy.
• They faint when I tell them there is a concern.
• They say nothing when I tell them there is a concern while submerging a myriad of emotions that could create more harmful conditions.
• They tell me they are fine and no one ever told them they had an issue so I must be wrong.

I have found over the years to err on the side of caution whenever talking to patients about their vision, and always expect that they are nervous or even frightened about what I have to say. The power of the mind is very real, and I feel it’s actually irresponsible to tell a patient they are developing or actually have a condition without keeping things in perspective. 

Too often I’ve come across older patients who were told they had macular degeneration and they heard that there was nothing they could do about it. They will then avoid the eye doctor until something more pressing comes up like a piece of metal in their. It’s heartbreaking to find the vision they’ve lost simply because their emotional well-being was not properly managed with the initial diagnosis. Something can be done about macular degeneration, but not if you don’t come to the eye doctor. 

Even with something simple like the need for glasses, patient’s need emotional support. Patients often ask, “Did my vision get worse?” to which I always respond, “Let’s think of it another way: Just because a camera is out of focus, doesn’t mean it’s broken. Your eyes are very healthy, you just need glasses to focus the light onto your retinas.” 

Many will thank me for that analogy and I can feel their energy shift to a lighter, happier place. Even though I’ve just given them a simple prescription for glasses, I’ve empowered them in the way in which they think of themselves. This effect on their lives can be very subtle, but so can the opposite be true. If I were to give them reason to feel fearful of their vision, of their bodies, of aging, then I have not followed the #1 rule of “do no harm.” I’ll have planted a seed of doubt that, given all the fear that we are each bombarded with on a daily basis, could easily fester into greater vision issues that morph into more permanent eye diseases.   

According to the two books I referenced above: Louise Hay in her book, You Can Heal Your Life, as well as Karol Truman’s book, Feelings Buried Alive Never Die, our refractive errors (or prescription in our glasses) reveal the fears we have toward life. Hyperopes or those who are far-sighted (difficulty seeing near) have a fear of the present while those with Myopia, or nearsightedness (difficulty seeing far) betrays a fear of the future. Astigmatism indicates a confusion of and difficulty in clearly seeing one’s self. And a refractive error in a child is the result of them not wanting to see what’s going on in the family.  

Perhaps you can see how encouraging my patients to fear their refractive error and dismiss the very real fear of losing one’s vision, could begin their decline toward developing conditions such as cataracts, glaucoma or macular degeneration. Cataracts are a manifestation of an inability to see one’s future with joy. Glaucoma is heavily tied to unforgiveness and protracted hostility, while macular degeneration represents one’s fearful thinking about our truth and our future.

We can all see fearful thinking in others, and we can’t necessarily change it for them. However, for any respected healer, it is our responsibility to handle our charges and their psyche with just as much compassion as we would their physical bodies. 

Yet, this can be especially difficult if we haven’t done our own self-love work. If we dismiss our own toxic thinking, or don’t attend to our feelings of inferiority that drive the ideas we may have about what we deserve in life, how can we avoid comments that would do harm to those for whom we care?

We can’t if we aren’t aware. 

If we don’t actively cultivate a practice of love and compassion for when things aren’t going the way we wish they would in our lives, and instead succumb to the notion that “life sucks and then you die,” we operate from a very low level of energy that defines all we do. 

Loving yourself whole, not only can deeply change your life path, it can have a profound impact on everyone around you without you even being aware. 

The problem is that the swirling cloud of should’s and have-to’s and “you’re not good enough,” in which we breathe every single day, has become the driving force of how we do everything, even when we want to help others.     

The process of loving yourself whole starts with knowing who you are at your core, awareness around how and why you’re thinking what you’re thinking, and what your particular soul has planned for this lifetime. Loving yourself whole will inevitably uplevel your own ability to love, your ability to care, and maximize your ability to heal in all directions.

As I’ve studied fear, it has directed my burgeoning awareness that a lack of self-love is the only source of pain in this world. Pain in ourselves and the pain we inspire in others.

We are at a unique time in history where sensitive, older-souled healers of all sorts are being called to do the deeper work. Effectively healing others comes from our hearts, but if fear blocks that love for ourselves: we will stay small, we will hold back, we may even quit doing the work we are here to do, and we will not be as effective healers. 

Let’s change that.

Let’s maximize our love for ourselves because it’s the very gift we’ve been given by our creator to have any kind of success at a joy-filled life of healing the world. 

Much Love,

Dr. Carin