Elizabeth- I loved reading your email exchanges with your patient. What a rich relationship you have developed with her over the years. She trusts you as someone who understands her heart, her soul and her physical ailments too. I imagine that this is one of the visions you had when you went into medicine to be in a position to care for people in such a holistic way.
I wanted to share this with you as it came to mind as I was reading your response to her. This is an advertisement from Dove about beauty and it is profound.
Do women see themselves less accurately than strangers do? Dove's Real Beauty campaign says yes — and offers proof, in the form of forensic sketches.
Dove recruited seven women of different ages and backgrounds and had FBI-trained forensic artist Gil Zamora create composite sketches of them based on descriptions of their own descriptions of their facial features.
Earlier in the day, the women had been asked to spend time with strangers, though neither party was told why. These strangers were later brought one by one into a room with Zamora and asked to describe the women who had been sketched earlier. The two resulting drawings of each woman were then hung side-by-side — and the contrast is pretty stark.
The takeaway from this campaign: “You are more beautiful than you think.”
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ReplyDeletenote from Elizabeth:
ReplyDeleteYes, this is an interesting video and I have seen it before. There was an interesting back lash in the eating disorder community about this, partly I think because of th focus on worth/value = physical image and the ED community tries to get away from the focus on physical beauty and focus more on the inner beauty.
Interesting how people have different interpretations of the same things.
my response: That is such an interesting and important perspective… I had not thought about that. I was simply noticing how critical we can be ourselves and how beautiful it is that other people can help us see things that we cannot. That is what I think you are able to do for your patients inside and out…