As one of the designers and passionate proponents of the Oregon Health Plan, Ralph Crawshaw traveled the United States and abroad to proclaim its merits. His travels in the quest for compassionate health care combined with his witty writing garnered from years of being a contributor to JAMA and The Pharos has resulted in Compassion’s Way, A Doctor’s Quest into the Soul of Medicine.
Crawshaw examines compassion in the practice of medicine and our everyday world against the backdrop of suffering as an inescapable element of human experience. Calling upon a breadth of disciplines and intersections with leaders in his field, his insightful journey will delight the reader whether he takes on the neglected sense of smell or lights into the greed of the pharmaceutical companies. In the chapter "Oh, Where is the Balm of Gilead?" Crawshaw writes: "I expect to enter my dotage with a vengeance, devoting my final years and energies to a lost scientific cause. What Linus Pauling did for Vitamin C, I plan to do for the therapeutic effects of odors. Yes, I believe the right smell heals. Although odor therapy is perhaps a lost cause, as neglected as the rhinencephalon itself, I plan to raise a cry among the brethren and, if nothing more, a stink upon the wards."
A sampling of chapter headings illustrate the breadth of Crawshaw’s uncommon expression: "A Lesson from Chinese Medicine," "Fee for Service from the Poor," "An Epidemic of Suicide among Physicians on Probation," "The National Health Selective Disservice," "The Better Health Business Bureau," "They all Laughed When I Spoke of Greedy Doctors," "African Slavery and Western Medicine," "Nurturing Hate in Psychotherapy," and more.
His amazing story-telling ability takes the reader from bedpans, lepers, and Chinese medicine to doctor suicides, airborne waifs, and threatening KGB agents. While some essays clearly address physicians, none is laden with medical jargon. Crawshaw writes of his concern for ensuring the inclusion of compassion in medical education, health care decisions, and social policymaking, as he cautions, "Beware of social efficiency bereft of reflection that treats compassion as an optional benefit rather than an essential need."
Now retired, Crawshaw is a psychiatrist and taught at the University of Oregon Medical School in addition to writing regular columns for The Pharos of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, and Portland Physician, and Journal of the American Medical Association. He has served on dozens of state and national committees serving the cause of improved health care, and was twice selected to be an exchange scholar in the USSR.
Coming of age during the World War II years, Ralph Crawshaw volunteered and served with the U.S. Army Mountain Troops, transferred to Bellevue Medical School, and returned to service as a Navy medical officer. He later trained at the Menninger Foundation for Psychiatry and shared in scholarly exchanges as a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, most notably with the former Soviet Union. During fifty years in psychiatric practice, Dr. Crawshaw founded mental health clinics and programs of professional care and served as Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Public Health at Oregon Health Sciences University. His work led to a national program to reverse the toll of physician suicide as well as the Northwest Foundation for Medical Excellence. He was instrumental in founding American Health Decisions, a national grass roots organization bringing the challenge of ethical, technological, and humanitarian issues to the public, and in designing the Oregon Health Plan, the first instance of health care rationing of limited resources by civic consensus in the Western world.
He writes extensively for medical journals on his medical experience and on his travels. His personal search for compassion in medicine is recognized by numerous awards, including the AMA’s 1990 Benjamin Rush Award as the nation’s outstanding citizen/physician of the year.
