George MacDonald challenged the idea that truth must justify itself through immediate or dramatic results. He taught that truth is known in the doing, through steady faithfulness. Healthcare often struggles with a similar expectation. We tend to equate healing with rapid improvement, clear lab changes, and visible progress. Yet for many people living with chronic illness, healing is not an event but a daily practice. It shows up in refilling medications, attending appointments, and continuing routines that sustain health even when change is gradual. These ordinary acts are forms of hope in motion.

Public health models now recognize this reality. Approaches that emphasize self-efficacy and continuity acknowledge that sustained engagement shapes outcomes as much as clinical intervention. Precision public health directs attention and resources toward those who most need them, allowing care to adapt to real lives rather than asking people to fit rigid systems.

This is true for clinicians as well. Burnout often arises when effort feels disconnected from meaning. When care is reduced to throughput, the deeper purpose of the work becomes obscured. MacDonald reminds us that presence, patience, and integrity are not peripheral to healing. They are part of the healing itself.

“She seemed to shine with an inward light, but the marble gleamed through it like the white tone through the flush of the rose.”
—George MacDonald, Phantastes

There is a moment in Phantastes when Anodos encounters a marble woman in a quiet glade. The figure appears still, yet undeniably alive; carved form and living presence intertwined. He senses that there is more before him than he can understand, but his sight is not yet prepared for such recognition. MacDonald is not illustrating ignorance. He is illuminating development. Perception, in his world, is something the self must grow into. Modern healthcare lives within the same tension. Clinicians and patients sit together every day, exchanging symptoms, explanations, and plans. Yet both can walk away unseen and unseeing. The chart may be complete, and still the story misunderstood. A diagnosis may be accurate, yet the meaning of illness remain unspoken. To care well is not only to know, but to learn to see… to cultivate the ability to notice what is quiet, interior, or unfolding. This requires attention. It requires time. It requires companionship. The work of healing begins not with expertise alone, but with perception that is continually being formed.

“We shall not cease from exploration…” Healthcare is not a single encounter; it is a journey through a system that can feel diffuse, overwhelming, and disjointed. Most patients move between specialists, clinics, and tests without a clear map. When care plans are unclear or communication breaks down, patients are left to navigate alone. The research is clear: poor communication contributes to preventable harm, and only a small fraction of adults have the health literacy needed to interpret complex medical instructions. Without intentional orientation, uncertainty grows, confidence erodes, and outcomes suffer. Clarity is not extra; it is essential to safe and meaningful care.

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
— T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding (in Four Quartets)

In modern healthcare, every “ending” is meant to signal the start of the next stage of care: the end of a clinic visit should begin a clear follow-up plan; the end of a hospitalization should begin safe recovery at home. Yet this is where breakdowns most often occur. Communication failures are among the leading causes of preventable harm in U.S. healthcare. One analysis found that breakdowns in communication contributed to 30% of malpractice claims and were linked to more than 1,700 patient deaths over five years (CRICO Strategies, 2015). When patients leave an appointment uncertain about what was said, who is responsible for the next step, or what symptoms to monitor, the consequences are rarely theoretical. They are clinical.

Healthcare fragmentation amplifies this risk. Patients often see multiple clinicians across multiple settings, and without someone who “holds the story,” key information is easily lost. A large nationwide cohort study showed that higher fragmentation of care was associated with more inappropriate medication use and significantly increased mortality (Prior et al., 2023). In practical terms: when no one owns the narrative, patients pay the price.

Clarity, therefore, is not a courtesy. It is a form of safety. The end of one encounter must become the true beginning of the next. When we fail to orient patients, and to ensure we ourselves understand the plan, care does not simply pause. It unravels.

The forest of healthcare hasn’t disappeared. It still stretches all around us, but we’ve learned to navigate it with lamps instead of wandering by instinct. Part II of The Healing That Hides in Delay turns from the inner life to the system itself: how waiting, when reclaimed, can become a form of design. Built for speed, our current structures confuse efficiency with excellence. Yet, when we slow down, tracking referrals, translating discharges, holding presence in the in-between become mechanisms for care to deepen.

Delays stop being failures of capacity and start becoming signals of what matters most: communication, continuity, and compassion. The goal isn’t to eliminate every shadow, but to walk through them together. Each of us carrying a lamp.

“You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.”
— George MacDonald, The Golden Key

In modern healthcare, waiting is rarely framed as part of healing. Yet in George MacDonald’s enchanted forest, Mossy and Tangle discover that time, delay, and uncertainty shape them as much as any destination. This essay walks alongside them. Through long referrals, missed calls, late diagnoses, why don’t we ask: What if the waiting itself holds wisdom?

Grounded in real clinical research and lit by human connection, Part I explores how delays in care can stretch us, deepen us, and (if we’re not alone) even offer quiet kinds of healing.

The scariest thing in healthcare isn’t disease… It’s the silence that follows. Behind every missed result or unreturned call lies a system built to protect itself rather than the people inside it. Drawing from Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil, this reflection explores how transparency, truth-telling, and narrative can help lift the veil between patients and providers.

Goodman Brown lost his faith when he saw the flaws in the people he once trusted. In healthcare, disillusionment can lead to something similar; moral injury, detachment, even cynicism. But the challenge isn’t to stay innocent. It’s to stay human, even after we’ve seen too much.

Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables reminds us that injustice doesn’t disappear. It settles into the walls. Our healthcare system, too, is an inherited house: intricate, costly, and haunted by the wrongs that shaped it. From racial inequities to misaligned incentives, today’s fractures trace back through generations of policy and power. But as Hawthorne suggests, curses aren’t lifted through destruction; they’re healed through humility, compassion, and connection.

The Scarlet Letter might not feel like a Halloween story. There are no ghosts, no Gothic mansions. Sometimes, though, the banality of a hell is still a hell. Hawthorne’s world is one of polite systems that confuse shame for morality and call it order. Modern healthcare has its own versions of that. Providers get branded “difficult,” “too idealistic,” or “not a team player.” And yet, like Hester Prynne, many stay. Not to defend the system, but to redeem what’s still good inside it… the quiet, stubborn act of care that changes what the letter means.

In Dracula, infection travels through letters and whispers. Today, it moves through data.

Our health records replicate across portals, insurers, and algorithms. Sometimes accurate, sometimes corrupted, always multiplying. In this modern network, the danger isn’t only lost privacy but bad data: errors, duplications, and misinformation that blur the line between fact and fiction.

We are haunted by a system that feeds on confusion… a revenge just begun. But, like Stoker’s hunters, we still have weapons: clarity, curiosity, and the courage to carry our own map.

Our healthcare system didn’t break overnight. Like Poe’s haunted mansion, it’s collapsing from within; not from one catastrophe, but from years of hidden cracks: generational policy failures, burned-out providers, fragmented care, and the silence that grows between patient and clinician. When the people inside the house are suffering, and the walls are groaning, we have a choice: look away, or start the repair.

The EMR was meant to be our masterpiece, a portrait of precision. But like Dorian Gray’s painting, its perfection hides decay: the hours, the clicks, the quiet erosion of connection. What we call “complete documentation” may be the most exquisite tragedy in modern care.

Technology has brought incredible advancements to modern medicine, but in the rush for efficiency, something deeply human is getting lost. Patients feel it when their doctor spends more time with a screen than with them. Providers feel it in their inboxes and their bones. The shift from face-to-face care to portal messages and performance metrics has created a new kind of gap: one where the human voice, the story, the connection, the trust are all fading.

What happens when we trade presence for productivity? And how do we bring back the “radio star” in the video age of healthcare?

In medicine, we’re trained to believe that composure equals competence; that, if we keep our heads down and our hearts guarded, we’ll stay strong. But the truth is, pretending we don’t feel doesn’t make us better healers. It makes us brittle.

The real work isn’t about suppressing our humanity; it’s about integrating it. Caring and not caring, presence and detachment; both have their place. What matters is that we hold them in tension, rather than letting one erase the other.

Wholeness in medicine isn’t moral compromise. It’s moral clarity and the courage to tell the truth about what this work costs and still choose to care within it.

When illness or grief takes hold, it doesn’t just affect the body. It can start to rewrite identity. What begins as a diagnosis can, over time, become a defining role. This piece explores how patients often find themselves engulfed by medical labels, why that matters psychologically, and how reclaiming narrative (through tools like narrative medicine and identity reconstruction) can support real healing. With insights from recent research and echoes from Wuthering Heights, it’s about learning to say: this is part of my story, but it is not all of me.

We’re drowning in data. AI predictions, biohacking labs, “healthspan” programs that promise to optimize every cell. It’s fascinating…and exhausting.

Mary Shelley warned us 200 years ago: chasing knowledge without wisdom can backfire. Longevity medicine often walks that line. More tests don’t always mean more health. Sometimes, they just mean more anxiety.

True care isn’t about quantifying every heartbeat. It’s about understanding the story behind it.

At my son’s homework table, dyslexia became the word that defined him. What began as common ground soon felt like erasure—a title overshadowing the boy himself. In medicine and in life, we often mistake titles for identity. True recognition means seeing beyond the label to the whole person.

This blog explores why health insurance and open enrollment aren’t just HR headaches but integral to patient care. It examines patient and provider perspectives on cost conversations, the ethical “art” of medicine, and how evidence, autonomy, and affordability intersect. The piece also outlines key enrollment timelines and highlights the value of health advisors in helping patients and practices navigate coverage choices.

We live in an age obsessed with preservation. We count our steps, monitor our sleep, and stretch our lives longer than any generation before us. And yet, paradoxically, cancer is rising in the young, anxiety is everywhere, and many of us are living longer without feeling more whole.

Perhaps the goal was never just longevity. Perhaps healing was always meant to include peace.

“To die will be an awfully big adventure,” Peter Pan says — but maybe the real adventure is learning how to live and die well at the same time. Because death isn’t the opposite of life; it’s the frame that gives life its meaning. And when we learn to face it with curiosity and presence, even the end becomes part of the story worth telling.