by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
Nothing comes for free, especially in healthcare. Or does it? Doctors, non-medical practitioners, psychotherapists, healers, pedagogues, and other specialists help the chronically ill on a voluntary basis in the therapy camps of my Auswege Foundation. What they achieve provides the best reasons for charitable medicine.
Giving is fun – not just for the recipient. Can it do more? Suppose the gift consists of a health service: a doctor’s consultation, a psychological consultation, a psychotherapeutic session, or a medical treatment: does this accrue something that it would lack if it were billed?
Now 15 years of experience (1) with our therapy camps suggest: Charity is healing. It brings an additional therapeutic factor into play that enhances the treatment’s effect.
Why is that? Most patients see this as a generous, loving gesture that impresses them deeply. More than words, it convinces them that the therapist is not “about the money” but that unconditional attention, caring, compassion, and helpfulness are his top priority. Gratitude for this strengthens trust in the practitioner; she convinces that he himself is convinced of the meaning and usefulness of what he offers; it makes you particularly open to what he advises and does; it generates a kind of sympathy that can no longer arise in a thoroughly commercialized healthcare system characterized by fee schedules.
“We were surrounded by angels; everyone was warm and helpful,” enthused the mother of a 19-month-old boy with severe developmental delays at the end of a camp stay. The mother of an eight-year-old, mentally and physically severely disabled epileptic, finally said: “I wasn’t able to say thank you in the group; otherwise, I would have just cried. Your all selfless nature is almost incomprehensible. Thank you for being there and for what you are doing for all of us!” Anyone who says something like this has previously accepted helpers and offers of help in a way that is alien to a therapeutic relationship if it inevitably leads to a money transfer.
In this respect, our experience refutes the prejudice that the typical patient follows the motto “What costs nothing can’t be worth anything.” In large parts of the alternative health scene, the paraphysical assumption is circulating that “appropriate” payment represents an “energy balance” essential for the treatment’s success. And this has become a welcome ideology of healer practice as a business model, which conveniently relieves the guilty conscience of paying properly for fee rates.
If we proceed in the same way, we would have to charge around 20,000 to 30,000 euros for the average of 400 appointments per camp that we offer to those seeking help, assuming standard market prices. (On average, fifteen therapists work six times a day on six and a half treatment days per camp.) We don’t do that. Out of stupidity? “Love heals,” assure esotericists. But doesn’t love also show itself in the voluntary renunciation of financial advantages?
Fee waivers in healthcare: unworldly?
The world’s largest Internet search engine, Google, lists over 83 million hits for the keyword “medicine.” And for “charitable medicine”? A total of nine – four of which are attributable to the Foundation Ways Out. (1) This numerical ratio indicates the current status of unpaid service to the sick out of compassion and mercy. Our healthcare system has long since become a profit machine, ruled by economic market laws, to which goods and services without price tags are alien. Against this background, charitable medicine seems partly exotic, partly antiquated, and unworldly. One thinks of Jesus, who gave no accounts when he let the lame walk and the blind see, to Christian missionaries who, in the spirit of the charity he taught and exemplified, not only overwhelmed unbelievers in rain forests, steppes, and South Sea paradises with pious attempts at conversion but also provided them with medical care; one remembers military hospitals in ancient Greece, the first hospitals in the Byzantine Empire, medieval monasteries that refused anyone who could not pay for care and treatment.
The most impressive examples of charitable medical service come from pre-scientific times, in which illness was still considered divine, salvation as a condition of healing, and medicine as a practiced theology. When people talk about “humanitarian aid” in connection with medical work these days, we also think of those doctors and nurses who volunteer for organizations like “Doctors Without Borders” in the Third World in the event of epidemics, natural disasters, or wars; However, they receive a monthly expense allowance in the four-digit range for this. The most well-known medical facility from recent times, in which voluntary help on a donation basis was the priority, is 8000 kilometers away in West African Gabon: the legendary jungle hospital Lambaréné, founded in 1913 by the Alsatian theologian, doctor, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweizer (1875-1965).
But isn’t humanitas (Latin: humanity, charity) appropriate here as well? If we were to adjust our price list for camp offers to the health market: only a fraction of the participants could afford them out of their own pockets because no health insurance company would pay for them. If “AusWAYS” is not only to be an aid project for higher earners, it must take into account the plight of those seeking help – out of compassion.
We don’t make anyone rich – but we enrich everyone.
However, you have to be able to afford gifts. The catch with charitable medicine is that it can only be offered by those who are already financially secure. Is that correct? One looks in vain for millionaires among the more than fifty therapists who have worked at least once in “Auswege” camps; one, like the other, runs a practice at home, on the income on which he depends to ensure a reasonably carefree life for himself and those around him.
Nevertheless, at least once a year, our camp team members give up the recreational value of nine days of vacation or the income from a whole week of practice – without complaint and voluntarily, by no means feeling that they are “sacrificing” themselves and being exploited. Because the course of the camp makes up for it a lot: you belong to a team that demonstrates in an exemplary manner how a practical, ego-free, benevolent cooperation between helping and healing professions could work; they become part of an exemplary community of help-seekers and helpers; they experience first-hand how much can be achieved with unconventional healing methods if optimal conditions are created for them to develop their strengths.
Would a purely charitable healthcare system be possible? At least in parts – if several thousand therapists thought, felt, and acted like the few dozen in our camps. Nevertheless, although we are idealists, we are not dreamers. In the best of all possible worlds, those seeking help generously compensate for what is given to them free of charge by making voluntary donations. In the here and now, such a medical care system would collapse in no time because it would put the helpers in need, as our camps fear.
In the end, nine out of ten participants show their gratitude through donations; with these, however, each individual team member could be paid an average of just three to four euros per day – not because the patients are stingy and ungrateful, but because more is usually not possible on their part. People looking for help come to us, most of whom find it difficult to pay for their own accommodation and meals during the camp week; occasionally, they have to be subsidized by us to be able to participate.
Under such circumstances, charitable healing can never remain more than a niche offering – a shining exception to the sobering rule. To despise it for that reason would be foolish and unfair. “On its feet,” said Albert Schweitzer once, “our world will only come back when it can be taught that its salvation does not consist in measures but in new attitudes.” For the attitude, the helpers as well as the “Auswege” – Inspired by activists, he found wise words: “Those who are spared their own pain must feel called upon to relieve the pain of others.” Trying to do this gratuitously does not require a “higher” moral-philosophical or theological justification – helping is good, satisfying, and fulfilling, isn’t that enough?
Our camps don’t make anyone rich. But they enrich everyone.
When the obvious becomes a mystery
“Why are you doing that?” We ask, amazed, “Why are you asking that?” Isn’t it amazing that it causes astonishment when someone does well? That it causes bewilderment when someone acts selflessly? What kind of people are they who are capable of something like that, outsiders ask themselves – although they fail to ask what that says about themselves and a society in which the good is increasingly becoming a surprising particular case in need of justification. Has altruism – selfless thinking and acting that considers other people, puts one’s concerns aside and serves the interests and well-being of others (lat. alter) – become so improbable? Is self-interest now the only expected currency of togetherness?
Someone lies down in the Red Cross tent to donate blood – doesn’t he know the risks of circulatory problems, a wound infection, a bruise at the puncture site, or a nerve injury? Another jumps in to help a terrified foreigner who is being bullied by a group of teenagers – doesn’t he realize he could be beaten up? Another jumps unceremoniously into the freezing river to retrieve someone who is about to drown – although he could drown himself in the process, at least he risks catching pneumonia in his soaking wet clothes. In the forest at night, a passerby sees someone lying on the side of the road, stops, gets out, and rushes to him – is he too naïve to expect that a highwayman could set a sophisticated trap for him?
How could they do that? So reasons are demanded the good as if it were not enough, as if it weren’t self-explanatory, as if the selfish, the indifferent lay closer. Why, so “AusWAYs” activists wonder, does altruism seem strange to more and more people, even downright scary? Why are the motives of those who do good questioned? Why is it difficult for many people to imagine that someone would give up a personal advantage for the benefit of others – without being forced, without speculating on something in return, and possibly without any rational justification whatsoever? “But you must get something out of it,” the altruist is approached: Surely he only does that – “only”? – to prove to himself how seriously he takes his moral principles, how sensitively he listens to his conscience, how dutifully he submits to ethics; to gain recognition and admiration; to collect plus points from the Lord God for the Last Judgment; to flatter his ego, to boost his self-image.
Such quirky oddballs have recently been given the mocking, derogatory label of “do-gooders.” It is as if those who should be ashamed and question themselves who practice compassion – one that is not limited to verbal expressions of empathy without consequences – for a self-evident form of expression of humanity – and not those who do not even seem to notice that there are others; as if strange were those who engaged in what was morally imperative and not those who apparently considered moral illiteracy to be “in.” Secret motives are suspiciously examined: Where does his advantage lie? What hidden benefits outweigh its costs? The “do-gooder” should be “convicted”; his actions necrotized to the “helper syndrome.” With what purpose of proof? Isn’t something good that is not only good for others worth doing?
Where does an impression of the unusual come from? One has become accustomed to the opposite. In a world permeated by the importance of economics, selfless action must become a mystery. How could we assume that there would be no consequences if more and more services, like ordinary goods, fall under the spell of instrumental, utility-calculating thinking? The idea of the purposeless good remains intact when education and research, even existential areas of life such as health and care, are primarily geared towards efficiency and profit maximization.
Seeing one’s neighbor in the stranger and letting this lip service inspire everyday dealings with others seems to Otto Normalchrist, no less than Ottmar Glaubnix, to be more socially romantic and surreal from Monday to Saturday, even if he unhesitatingly follows sermons and liturgical readings on Sundays suggest that same mindset to him. His agape may materialize in collection bags and sometimes in the begging hat of a homeless person, at Christmas or in emergencies, fill the donation account of some charitable organization. Otherwise, in the age of the most advanced division of labor, he prefers to delegate charitable help to Caritas, Misereor, and other institutions that he sees as “responsible.”
Selflessness has a hard time against such a zeitgeist. That is why it is increasingly surprising and alienating when someone does not consider whether what they are doing is worthwhile and paying off; if he takes a risk that was not calculated in advance; if he accepts a loss because he cannot get any equivalent value; when he declares, “I’m well enough to be there for a while without pay for others who are worse off than me,” instead of saying, “I could be better off if I kept thinking of myself first.”. “
Cases of altruism now make headlines, attract TV reporters, become the talk of the town, and get on the agenda of medal-giving committees; in short: they are emphasized, exaggerated, and celebrated. It does not contradict the finding that the good has gone out of fashion but rather confirms it symptomatically. Selfless action has gotten so far into the sphere of the improbable that anyone who even wants to try it seems superhumanly heroic. Instead of being seen as the natural, standard case of living together, “the good deed” is outsourced to an elitist Olympics of morally doped high-performance ethicists. Doesn’t such glorification follow a convenient exoneration strategy? If the good is considered unattainable, it cannot be expected.
If a journalist asks me why I want to help the seriously ill, my most honest answer would be: “Just like that.” I do it almost reflexively: someone is suffering, and I want to help. Good things can be banal – sometimes, all you need is the knowledge of what you could do and an impulse to do it. Simply that way? Yes, just so. Not without reason, but no justification is needed. Trying to do this free of charge by no means requires a “higher” moral-philosophical or theological justification – helping is good, it satisfies and fulfills, isn’t that enough?
(Harald Wiesendanger)
Remarks
1 as of 2021.
This amount comes from the book by Harald Wiesendanger: Ways out – helping the sick differently (2015).
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