• Focusing on their abilities, not just their disabilities.

• Taking an interest in their lives, not just their bodies.

• Learning from patients, rather than only doing things to them or for them.

• Including the sick and injured, rather than isolating them.

• Delivering assistance as equal partners in the healing process, not as superiors helping those less fortunate.

• Learning from difficult situations, rather than avoiding or attacking them.

Instead of only seeing their pathology and disabilities we call patients to life and health by also appreciating their abilities, strengths and resources. We overcome the impersonal, mechanistic, degrading interactions that demean the human spirit and inhibit healing. We do this by treating people with dignity and compassion, and becoming partners in the cause of healing.

We recognize that the human side of healing is often missing, to the detriment of the patients and the caregivers. This personal, subjective side of health care is the counterbalance to the impersonal, scientific, objective side of health care. Both are essential. But in today's health care, the subjective side - the emotions and relationships - are increasingly eclipsed.

Technological, economic, regulatory, litigious and demographic trends are all tending to push compassion to the fringes of medicine. Unless we give people the tools and encouragement they need to take a stand for a more humane way of delivering health care will descend into an assembly-line approach that treats people like so many units of consumption.

The industrial, provider-consumer model of health care expects providers to endlessly provide and consumers to endlessly consume. This expectation is a one-way ticket to burnout for the providers and helplessness for the consumers. The system is clearly not sustainable.

However, with balance, partnerships, give and take, two-way conversations (the dialogue that leads to good diagnosis), and the kind of being with one another which is the essence of compassion, hospitals and health care centers can truly become places of healing.