Stephanie Nwagwu’s Reviews > Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End > Status Update
Stephanie Nwagwu
is on page 259 of 282
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.
— 18 hours, 8 min ago
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Stephanie’s Previous Updates
Stephanie Nwagwu
is on page 259 of 282
“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.”
— 18 hours, 16 min ago
Stephanie Nwagwu
is on page 192 of 282
“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”
— Aug 23, 2026 09:02AM
Stephanie Nwagwu
is on page 171 of 282
“We’ve created a multi trillion dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets— and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.”
— Aug 22, 2026 07:07PM
Stephanie Nwagwu
is on page 141 of 282
“The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life - to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.”
— Aug 21, 2026 07:40AM