Treating the Corona Virus in Arlesheim

John Scott Legg of SteinerBooks brought to our attention a lecture on YouTube [ youtu.be/yJy3BE9eWSI ], part of the Wednesday evenings at the Rudolf Steiner Haus Stuttgart. It was held on April 21, 2021 and featured Philipp Busche, a specialist in internal medicine and gastroenterology, Managing Director of the Society for Anthroposophic Medicine and head of the internal medicine and medical training of the Arlesheim Clinic.

The transcript is much too long to offer here, and the language of the video is German, but Jeff Martin’s translation is at anthroposophy.org/covid-lecture-arlesheim

Here is the beginning of Dr. Busche’s remarks:

A concern for the human being is something that one can say should actually be the motive for our time, even if it is sometimes so difficult to keep in mind, with all the things that occupy us at the moment and that perhaps also affect us habitually. This is actually about concern for our neighbor, about concern for other human beings. I have been asked to tell you something about my experiences and perhaps about the questions, but also the insights, that motivate us when we care for and accompany patients in Arlesheim with Corona, with COVID-19. That is what I would like to do, and we are already looking back on a period of more than a year. I thought I would take you along a bit on our development path at the Department of Internal Medicine in Arlesheim over the last 12 or 13 months. I will use three patient cases as examples so that you can experience what such a pandemic actually means for the individual, for a team, for a clinic, for a society.

I will start with the first patient who came to us and was diagnosed with Corona. If you think back to the spring of 2020, suddenly Corona was in the media. They hadn't even agreed on a word yet, they hadn't even really agreed on a name yet, but everywhere there were reports of a new viral disease SARS-CoV-2. I have to be honest: Before this first patient came to us, it was just something completely abstract, something intellectual for me...