
01/12/2024
SIR ELTON JOHN: “COMPASSION SAVED MY LIFE - AND IT COULD SAVE MILLIONS MORE”
In the late 90s Sir Elton and I met on several occasions. He was interested in reincarnation and healing in its broadest forms. He felt, rightly, that it was not necessarily dependent on ‘healing hands’ - (also the title of one of his songs) - but was also about living with empathy, compassion, and love.
Last week he shared his thoughts on the subject in an excellent article he wrote for the magazine Newsweek.
“I have some good news. The single biggest change that could most radically improve our health care systems is free. It can’t be patented by any corporation. It doesn’t eat into anybody’s budget.
“What we need is compassion. I know that might sound, at first, airy-fairy, but I mean it quite literally. I know it’s true because compassion saved my life, and there is now significant scientific evidence that it can save millions more.
“When I was in rehab, after hitting the rock bottom of my drug addiction, they taught me that ‘your secrets make you sick’. All the years of shame - for being gay - had caught up with me. By showing me love and compassion, they taught me - slowly, carefully - how to show it to myself.
“Dr Tom Shakespeare, a British sociologist who has studied this topic, highlights hospitals in the NHS that showed lower levels of compassion to patients led to higher death rates. Yet he explains that one medical consultant had shrugged, ‘I find the ward round goes much faster if you don’t talk to the patients’.
“I have seen compassionate doctors and nurses saving thousands of people across the world. They know medicine is not offered to machines. It is not like the petrol we pump into our cars. It is offered to human beings - with dreams, despairs, and desires.
“Embracing people for their differences, recognising that we all have a unique contribution to make and are worth loving and saving, is more challenging in today’s world, but ultimately more enriching and more noble. Surely we are up for that challenge?
“Compassion costs nothing, but it means everything.”