Status Updates From Being Mortal: Medicine And ...

If to be human is to be limited, then the role of caring professions…ought to be aiding people in their struggle with those limits. Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only as salve…But whatever we can offer, our interventions… are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person‘s life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember, the good can be breathtaking.

“We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but along the way.”

“when a country’s economy develops…the greater resources make medical capabilities more wildly available. People turn to healthcare systems when they are ill at the end of life, they often die in the hospital instead of the home… as a country’s income climbs to the highest levels, people have the means to be concerned about the quality of their lives… and death at home actually rise again”