Welcome to Healers Who Listen! My name is Jonathan Weinkle, and my goal in life is to be a nice Jewish doctor. I’ve been practicing primary care medicine for adults and kids for ten years, and I’ve decided that the key to realizing that goal is this: we are all human beings – created in the image of God, infinitely valuable, having a spark of the Divine in us, however your philosophy or faith tradition phrases that idea. When two people meet to discuss how one of them can help the other to heal or to stay well, it needs to be a meeting of two human beings forming a covenant to achieve that goal, nothing less.
Whether you are a consumer or a provider of healthcare, or both, you may have noticed that many of our encounters, and sometimes our whole system, falls short of that goal, or even actively frustrates it. I think we ought to try to fix that – whether we are Jews, Christians, Muslims, secular humanists, Hindus or Buddhists. Whatever our beliefs, we are all human beings, and as the song goes, “Everybody hurts sometimes.” Wouldn’t it be great if, when it was our turn to hurt, there was someone there who would treat us as a fellow human being in pain?
My new book, Healing People, Not Patients: Creating Authentic Relationships in Modern Healthcare, published by Healthy Learning Publishers, is now available. The book takes the core idea above and imagines what a medical encounter, and indeed a whole system, would look like if it was built around that core. At the same time, this website will continue exploring the nuts and bolts of how to build that relationship, bringing in voices from the medical community, the patient community, and the well of Jewish tradition that I go to when I need to drink something to refresh my soul.
Disclaimer: This site does not constitute medical advice, nor imply a clinician-patient relationship between me and anyone reading the site. If you are a patient in my practice and would like my advice on a personal medical issue, please contact me through my clinical practice, not through this site, which is not HIPAA-compliant.