Overview

What do physicians owe to the suffering person in front of them - beyond diagnosis and treatment? After more than thirty-five years as a medical oncologist, Auro Del Giglio, MD, PhD, FACP, has sat with thousands of patients facing the most devastating diagnoses medicine knows. What he witnessed in those consultation rooms convinced him of something that medical education rarely teaches: scientific medicine, as powerful as it is, does not exhaust what it means to heal. The Art of Healing: Science, Suffering, and Humanism in Medicine is his answer to that conviction - a rigorous, philosophically grounded, and deeply personal argument for a medicine that attends not only to the diseased organ but to the whole suffering person. At the heart of the book is Suffering-Based Medicine (SBM), a framework Del Giglio has developed and published in peer-reviewed journals over two decades. SBM is not a critique of scientific medicine. It is its necessary complement - a structured method for eliciting the patient's suffering construct through anamnesis, interpreting it hermeneutically, and responding with therapeutic adjuncts that address the existential, spiritual, and psychological dimensions of illness that no prescription can reach. Across thirteen chapters and a concluding synthesis, the book covers: - The history of scientific medicine, from Hippocrates to genomic oncology, and why its power does not make it complete - The commercialization of healthcare and the structural conflict of interest that pulls physicians away from their patients - The SBM framework in full: phenomenology, the anamnesis of suffering, Buber's I-Thou relationship, and patient counseling as existential practice - Clinical tools for the humanistic physician: the placebo effect, faith and spirituality, and the cognitive foundations of clinical reasoning - Artificial intelligence and its potential role in supporting - not replacing - the hermeneutical encounter between physician and patient - The inner life of the humanistic physician: vocation, burnout, the power of reading, and thirteen pieces of hard-earned advice for young doctors Drawing on phenomenological philosophy (Husserl, Heidegger, Toombs), narrative medicine (Frank, Kleinman), existential psychology (Yalom, Frankl), and the author's own published research on fatigue, placebo, and complementary medicine in oncology, The Art of Healing offers both a theoretical framework and a practical guide for physicians who still hear, beneath the noise of modern practice, the voice of those who call upon them for help. For physicians, medical students, residents, and all healthcare professionals who believe that the practice of medicine is, as William Osler said, an art based on science - and who want both halves of that formulation to mean something in their daily work.

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