Email David: humanhealing@mac.com
Dr David Reilly MBChB, FRCP, MRCGP, Honorary DSc (University of Westminster). He is currently Director of TheWEL Programmes, and The Healing Shift Enquiry, Founder and Director of TheWEL Charity. Until 2016 he was a Consultant Physician in The NHS for Centre for Integrative Care in Glasgow; and Greater Glasgow & Clyde Health Board’s Lead Clinician for people with CFS/ME. He is still an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Medicine, Glasgow University, and Visiting Professor of Medicine, University of Maryland, and visiting faculty for the Weill Cornel Univeristy in Doha, Qatar. He is a former visiting faculty member at Harvard Medical School, USA; he was The Scottish Government’s first National Clinical Lead for Integrative Care.
I became a doctor to combine my head and my heart in helping people. Training as a Consultant Physician and GP, on route I widened my learning and enquiry to look at other healing systems and holistic approaches, and RCTs in complementary medicine. I blended my work as a clinician, teacher and researcher to then focus on exploring better ways of approaching medicine and human caring that emphasise the innate healing capacity in people, the factors that modify the healing response and their interaction in the therapeutic encounter and relationship – ideas later adopted as the core of The Fifth Wave report and used in the www.AfterNow.co.uk project exploring the needed change in Public Health to tackle the long term conditions epidemics.
I then re-focused the Healing Shift Enquiry to explore how knowledge from our direct study of healing process and wellness enhancement might be scaled up beyond one-to-one relationships eg: in designing integrative models of care; in creating healing environments (www.ghh.info); and in cultural and national developments. I also explored the application of the principles and practices in group-based work - like The WEL programmes (including PrimaryWEL and StaffWEL versions) - www.thewel.org . Linked extensive evaluation showed the transformative potential of these ideas in practice. I am grateful here for the teaching so many patients have offered me; and I would like to thank colleagues in the Scottish Government for their support in evaluation and dissemination. Recently, I have been focusing on staff welfare and support for their person-centred work, and on developing means to share a wellness enhancement approach more widely – www.thewelworld.org .
In the 2005 version of this bio I wrote: I am now old enough to have made major mistakes and young enough to learn from them. Fortunately, I am not as old as used to be, and I am even younger since my daughter Karina Maia was born in 2005. Since leaving the NHS in 2016 I feel even younger!
Profile & Reading & References on www.davidreilly.net
Editorial: Enhancing Human Healing. BMJ 2001;322:120-121
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/322/7279/120
Personal Profile BMJ 2001;322:178 : http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/322/7279/178
