Dr Deborah Cohan is a self-described “dancing doctor” and mistress of “embodied medicine,” the aim of which is to “bring compassionate presence to healing encounters” via “a collective experience of dance.” Being, as she is, so in touch with the rhythms of her innards, the doctor’s statements of hard-won profundity are varied and numerous, including:
I am inviting myself to live at the speed of one second per second.
And,
There’s something edible inside incredible.
And,
A tree is never alone in the forest.
And,
Imagine new-born babies teaching medical students how to dance and touch empathetically.
Given the above, these fruits of “shamanic healing,” readers may not be entirely surprised to hear that Dr Cohan is also entranced by the potential of woke theatre. And so we turn to the New England Journal of Medicine – specifically, an article titled Racist Like Me — A Call to Self-Reflection and Action for White Physicians – in which our dancing doctor tells us many things. We begin, as is the custom, with a lengthy, somewhat tedious, confession of pallor, and therefore inherent wrongness:
I am racist. I would love to believe otherwise and can find evidence that I am not — my career dedicated to caring for underserved women of colour, my support of colleagues and trainees who are people of colour, my score on the implicit-association test.
That would be this test. The one in which the random positioning of a chair can be construed as damning evidence of racial antipathy.
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