[In likening Slow Medicine to Slow Food:] Slow Food was not really about fast or slow in time. Rather it was about privileging the basics-- the ingre… - Victoria Sweet

...I learned a Slow Medicine lesson: how individual medicine was. It wasn't true that one size fits all, that everyone or no one should have that treatment or this pill. Rather, the right answer had to do with style, with who you were, who the patient was.

...when you're on your pilgrimage, you don't even need to know where you're going. You just have to know when you're off your path.

What I discovered was that the two ways of looking at the body—the modern and the premodern, the Fast and the Slow, as a machine to be repaired and as a plant to be tended—are both effective when they are applied to the right patient at the right time. For illnesses that come on suddenly—an inflamed appendix, a rip-roaring infection, a car accident, a heart attack—it is best to think like a mechanic—boldly, reductively. What is broken? What should I do to fix it? Desperate illnesses require desperate remedies. But not-desperate illnesses do better with not-desperate remedies. Diseases that come on slowly—chronic infections, complex medical conditions, the aftermath of the appendectomy, the heart attack, the chemotherapy—are best approached like a gardener, asking myself as Hildegard would have done, not what is broken but what is working? What are my patient's strengths and how can I support them? What can I do to nurture viriditas, the natural power of healing?