Takeaway
Balance fast medicine with slow medicine—use the right clinical tool while taking time to nurture the patient’s innate capacity to heal.
Passion in the Medical Profession | December 12, 2025 | 4 min read
By David Kopacz, MD, Clinical Tele-Psychiatry Practice
Contemporary medicine is increasingly defined by productivity and efficiency—in other words, doing things and doing things quickly. Productivity and efficiency are principles of computer and machine function, but these principles can actively inhibit or prevent human functions like caring, compassion, and healing. In her book, “Slow Medicine,” Dr. Victoria Sweet described the difference between “fast medicine” and “slow medicine”:
“Everything looked so good in the computer, and yet what Father had gotten was not Medicine but Healthcare—Medicine without a soul. What do I mean by ‘soul’? I mean what Father did not get. Presence. Attention. Judgment. Kindness. Above all, responsibility . . . Healthcare . . . deconstructs story into thousands of tiny pieces—pages of boxes and check marks for which no one is responsible.”
Her book is a critique of what we call “healthcare” these days that ironically doesn’t include much caring. She implies that fast medicine is soulless medicine. The rates of burnout in healthcare show that fast medicine adversely impacts the patient as well as the doctor. To touch the soul of the patient requires us to slow down.
Dr. Sweet’s journey into Slow Medicine led her back in time to learn from the past and to provide a context for our modern paradigms and protocols—back to the time of Hildegard of Bingen’s (c. 1098 – 1179 BCE) writings and teachings about a medicine of the soul. She came across Hildegard’s concept of viriditas, from the Latin for “the state of being green.” This was a green medicine hundreds of years before the environmental movement of the Greens. Through Hildegard, Sweet learned another way of healing, one that was slow and patient and worked with supporting the environment of the patient to help reactivate inner and innate viriditas, a growing and healing force. In addition to the “Way of the Mechanic” of Fast Medicine, Sweet began to cultivate the “Way of the Gardener” of Slow Medicine:
“Thus arose Hildegard’s implicit idea, which for me was revolutionary, that as a doctor I should be not only a mechanic of the body, looking for what is broken and trying to fix it, but also a gardener of the body, nourishing viriditas, and removing what is in its way.”—Dr. Victoria Sweet
Dr. Sweet didn’t turn her back on Fast Medicine but simply realized its uses and limitations. Instead of saying “medicine has nothing more to offer you,” it provides another path or way of treatment that has its own strengths and limitations. Together these two ways of thinking, being, and doing can form a balanced whole that supports fixing and healing:
“It’s not a Way that excludes ‘Fast’ or the Way of Fast. It doesn’t reject seeing the body as a machine and being a good mechanic, who traces the source of his patient’s suffering to its origin, who might even take things apart, repair, and replace. Nor does it reject the tools of the fantastic medical progress I’ve witnessed in my life as a physician. Rather, it’s a Way that incorporates Slow and Fast, the Way of the Gardener and the Way of the Mechanic, that sees these two Ways as tools in its little black bag and uses the right tool for the job. It’s a solid Way built on excellence—of method, of knowledge and experience, of hard work. But also on the personal, the individual, and the face-to-face.”—Dr. Victoria Sweet
How might we incorporate the Way of the Gardener into medicine? Really by doing what gardeners do with plants—pause, observe, nurture, balance the plant’s needs for water, light, drainage, shade—by coming to know the plant. We can strive to become mechanics of the body and gardeners of the soul by integrating our medical knowledge of protocols with a slow medicine patience and attending to the soul of ourselves and our patients.
Becoming a gardener of the soul:
1. Find out what kind of environment your patient lives in. How does it support health or contribute to illness?
2. Spend time in nature yourself and observe the Ways of the Gardener, as you work with plants. Then bring this patience and sensitivity to your clinical encounters.
3. Encourage patients to spend time in nature, observing the natural patterns of growth.
4. Encourage patients to become gardeners or to bring a plant indoors and care for it.
5. Ask your patients what makes them feel alive (we could say to get in touch with their inner viriditas) and then encourage them to go do it. You can do this for yourself as well!
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This piece expresses the views solely of the author. It does not necessarily represent the views of any organization, including Johns Hopkins Medicine.