Daniel P. Sulmasy > Quotes

“In a strange way, death is actually one of the steps of the code. It isn't listed in the algorithm, of course, but it's there. The first step. Everyone knows it, but no one will say it. Even though the patient has already died from the devastation of disease, the code presses on until someone "calls it." Then, and only then, can death be acknowledged. It is a wrenching combination of human grief and quotidian bureaucracy.”
― Danielle Ofri MD PhD, When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error

“In all cases, life had already ceased for the patient. In fact, life had ceased before the code started. That was the time when the patient had stopped breathing or the heart had stopped beating. That was when the patient had really died. Yet we officially record the time of death as the moment when we adjourn our battle, not the moment the cells have adjourned theirs.”
― Danielle Ofri MD PhD, When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error

“That Holy Other with which all spiritual persons are in relationship (that which I call God), is nothing other than that which satisfies the deepest longings of the human race. The spiritual relationship is a relationship of love-love beyond all telling. Spiritual experience is the experience of God's transcendent love, God's overwhelming and universal concern for every single human being.”
― Daniel P. Sulmasy, The Healer's Calling: A Spirituality for Physicians and Other Health Care Professionals

“Scientific reductionism has threatened the spiritual aspects of medical practice from within, by denying the existence of the transcendent. The industrialization of health care now threatens the spiritual aspects of medical practice from without, denying the importance of the spiritual.
Yet”
― Daniel P. Sulmasy, The Rebirth of the Clinic: An Introduction to Spirituality in Health Care

“Illness is a spiritual event. Illness grasps persons by the soul as well as by the body and disturbs both. Illness ineluctably raises troubling questions of a transcendent nature-questions about meaning, value, and relationship. These questions are spiritual. How health care professionals answer these questions for themselves will affect the way they help their patients struggle with these questions.
We”
― Daniel P. Sulmasy, The Rebirth of the Clinic: An Introduction to Spirituality in Health Care

“Working in a system in which financial incentives have been reconfigured to make physician and patient economic rivals, it is hard for either patients or physicians to feel that their value constitutes true dignity-the value that has no price and belongs only to persons.' This is the value of those created in the image and likeness of God.
Working”
― Daniel P. Sulmasy, The Rebirth of the Clinic: An Introduction to Spirituality in Health Care

“To heal a person, one must first be a person. We are all spiritual beings. Health care is a spiritual discipline.
Notes”
― Daniel P. Sulmasy, The Rebirth of the Clinic: An Introduction to Spirituality in Health Care

“Money can't buy spirituality-and money can't make it go away.
Cultivating”
― Daniel P. Sulmasy, The Rebirth of the Clinic: An Introduction to Spirituality in Health Care