As a poet, Campo's concerns are unusual. He points out that those advances, in combination with an increasingly multilingual society, have put language to the test. Rather than rising to the challenge of finding new words, he finds medicine resorting to the reliable mechanics of procedure, diminishing the interchange between doctor and patient that relied so much on touch and communication. If we can learn to be better listeners, we can build the kind of trust with our patients that enables us to be better diagnosticians, better care providers. Still, he understands the resistance among both doctors and patients.
Cancer is a disease process.
And in a sense, poetry is a kind of rebellion against the high medicalese discourse that has a legitimate claim to dealing with patients, but does not honor their experience of the disease by appropriating their narratives, their bodies really. The role of poetry in healing, as Campo sees it, is not so much as placebo or analgesic, or as surrogate religion, but as a means for patients to regain some control of their bodies and their destinies by expressing their experiences or learning from those of others. Campo also offers a more utilitarian angle on his mission. Just a few weeks ago a patient revealed his abuse history to me in a poem he had written. I was a writer or a poet myself when he gave it to me.