There are a wealth of resources in the Clinician Wellbeing chapter in the ACP Covid Physician’s Guide. Of pertinence for many of us right now … as the pandemic continues with little short-term end in sight … are the sections on moral injury and communication. Resource shortages are frequently at the root of this moral […]
When we find ourselves doing things we don’t feel right about … Read More »
Berwick urges us to “embrace the moral determinants of health, including, most crucially, a strong sense of social solidarity in the US. ‘Solidarity’ would mean that individuals in the US legitimately and properly can depend on each other for helping to secure the basic circumstances of healthy lives …” Over 20 years ago Pellegrino argued
Solidarity & Common Good Read More »
… and suicide. On watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” last night, I was struck by many things. But maybe most of all by the accuracy of its portrayal of the suicide. As Paul McHugh says in The Mind Has Mountains … “Most suicidally depressed patients are not rational individuals who have weighed the balance sheet
it’s a wonderful life … Read More »
Following the Patient: The Key to Medical Care
2013 medconference … october 18-20 Read More »
“ … the point that obsessed Sophocles’ Antigone: that to not bury her brother, to not treat the war criminal like a human being, would ultimately have been to forfeit her own humanity.” Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker “Unburied: Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the lessons of Greed tragedy”
a modern day Polyneices … Read More »
… read about the witness of Canadian teenagers before the “Dying with Dignity” commission and learn why Canadian journalist Laureen Pindera said “these people speak not simply about what treatment to give their patients, but about how they accompany them in their journey of suffering. They speak about how to love them.”
the knowledge of faith becomes the knowledge of reality … Read More »
Farr Curlin discusses Jeffrey Bishop’s book The Anticipatory Corpse … In The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, physician-philosopher Jeffrey Bishop argues that modern medicine has adopted a “metaphysics of efficient causation”—a focus on the immediate cause of things that ignores their ultimate purpose. As a result, medicine now takes its
begin with the end in mind … Read More »
an article about Dr. Elvira Parravicini and her work in neo-natal hospice … “The only road is reality. Reality speaks. The baby gives us all the signs we need, because he is given, to the parents and to me, to us, who cannot define his destiny. Only the One who gave it knows where it
Victoria Kennedy in opposition to Massachusetts’s proposed assisted suicide law … also Ira Byock … Ezekiel Emmanuel … Ben Mattlin.
cruel, lonely and sad … Read More »
“ … I begin to look at reality as a friend, every circumstance as a friend, and whoever enters my horizon,regardless of the intentions with which she or he does it,right or wrong,sets me in motion.If each of us does not respond to this, life passes by for us without achieving the goal for which
