#1 New Release on Amazon and #1 bestseller in five BN.com categories
REDDING, Calif. — In his new book, Healing Together: Guidance from Patients, Families and Healthcare Providers Dealing with Illness, the Last of Life and Beyond, physician and ethicist Bruce G. Bartlow, MD, draws upon more than five decades of clinical experience to explore how patients, families, and healthcare professionals can help one another heal.
Through 54 true stories from his work in critical care, nephrology, dialysis, and internal medicine, Dr. Bartlow examines the deeply human experiences surrounding serious illness, grief, survival, and end-of-life care. The book speaks to patients struggling to reconcile illness with the lives they had planned, families uncertain how best to help, and healthcare professionals questioning whether they have provided what was truly needed.
Moving from the earliest fears surrounding life-threatening illness toward love, hope, spiritual awareness, and what may endure beyond death, Healing Together combines narrative medicine, ethical reflection, and spiritual insight. Its progression is influenced by the chakra system, beginning with fundamental matters of life and death and advancing toward higher awareness, healing, and transcendence.
Dr. Bartlow’s perspective was shaped by decades of bedside care, leadership on hospital ethics committees, military service, international work in Sudan, and medical practice in Chicago, San Francisco, and California. His experiences during the early HIV epidemic and the COVID-19 crisis further strengthened his conviction that illness is never solely a biological event.
While leading multidisciplinary rounds in intensive care units, Dr. Bartlow also witnessed how deeply healthcare professionals are affected by the patients they hope to heal. Professional symbols and institutional barriers—including white coats, scrubs, credentials, visiting restrictions, and increasingly impersonal technology—can impede the honest communication necessary for mutual understanding.
Healing Together challenges conventional distinctions between treatment and “comfort care.” Dr. Bartlow argues that comfort should be central to every patient’s care, whether accompanied by medical intervention or when further treatment becomes futile, prioritizing healing our spirits and writing the stories that will live on.
Written for patients, families, survivors, caregivers, healthcare professionals, support groups, and spiritual advisors, Healing Together offers a compassionate reminder: healing does not flow in only one direction. When people share their struggles and truly listen to one another, everyone involved can be changed.
Dr. Bartlow is also the author of Medical Care of the Soul and co-author of Healing through Times of Trouble.