Author: Victoria Sweet Victoria Sweet recounts the years she worked as a physician at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, California, a large hospital for the chronically ill, the last functioning almhouse in the United States. The tradition of the Almhouses was to give shelter to the poor, to the old, to people who had…
Category: Publications
The Bitter Taste of Raspberries
By Ana Coradazzi Originally published on April 2020: https://www.slowmedicine.com.br/o-gosto-amargo-das-framboesas/ “You know all about that possible bitter future. You also know that you could no longer turn back, that you are entirely subdued, and your words, whatever they may be, will never be wise enough to determine that this door to be opened now, right after…
Slow medicine: a philosophical conception for a humanized geriatric practice
By Patrick Alexander Wachholz and José Carlos Campos Velho Originally published on July 2021: Slow medicine: a philosophical conception for a humanized geriatric practice Abstract Expansion of the concept of health, care fragmentation, and technology overvaluation have fostered discussions about the limitations of the biomedical model. The post-COVID-19 era can be one of the largest…
The Art of Dying Well
Author: Katy Butler Dying. The verb itself is capable of causing fear and anxiety. To glimpse our termination (or that of someone we love), even if only at a glance, can be so distressing as to make us ignore the only certainty we all have in our lives: that it will end. We are not…
My Mother, Your Mother
Author: Dennis McCullough, MD This is a small piece of art, a book that every geriatrician should read. The book talks about the last years of life and how people can prepare for them to be lived peacefully and satisfyingly, both the elderly person and his or her family. Slow Medicine’s strategy of care is…
Avoiding Haste in Clinical Cardiology
By Marco Bobbio Originally published on August 2018: https://www.slowmedicine.com.br/avoiding-haste-in-clinical-cardiology/ The well-educated professor Alberto Dolara, the one who first wrote an article using the term Slow medicine, starts his new paper on haste in medicine quoting the Divine Comedy written by Dante Alighieri. The poet synthetically expresses the negative effect of haste on every human action; even…
Slow Medicine
By Ladd Bauer Originally published on November 2008: Ladd Bauer 2008 In 2002, a cardiologist in Italy, home of the slow food movement, published a paper in a cardiology journal advocating the idea of “slow medicine,” as a way of thinking about appropriately holding off the use of heart devices.(1) In the United States, the usual attitude propels advocacy of…
The health system becomes effective to produce profit, not health: an interview with Victoria Sweet
By Marco Bobbio Originally published on January 2018: https://www.slowmedicine.it/intervista-a-victoria-sweet/ Last October, the latest book by Victoria Sweet, author of God’s Hotel – a doctor, a hospital and a pilgrimage to the heart of medicine (2012), was published. In that book the author had foreseen the birth of a Slow Medicine, an unhurried medicine in which the doctor…
Slow Medicine & Fast Medicine: hand in hand
By Ana Coradazzi Originally published on January 13, 2019: https://www.slowmedicine.com.br/slow-medicine-fast-medicine-de-maos-dadas/ When JCV, 61 years old, poorly controlled hypertensive and obese, arrived at the emergency room complaining of intense “burning” pain in his chest about 50 minutes ago, irradiating to his left arm and associated with cold sweats, he barely had time to think. Within minutes, the…
Invitation to a “Slow Medicine”
By Alberto Dolara Originally published in Italian Heart Journal: Supplement. Official Journal of the Italian Federation of Cardiologists 3.1 (2002): 100-101 (Translated by Elizabeth Castelli) …the haste that mars the dignity of every act… Dante, Purgatorio, Canto III In current society the constant impulse, even if not always justified, toward the acceleration of all aspects of daily life…