It was stunning news. I listened with disbelief as my colleague described how a patient of ours, in whom we had uncovered a host of serious diseases over a few years, was now newly diagnosed with cancer after an incidental scan. In addition, his social supports had been eroded and I thought about what it would be like for him to die from a vicious terminal disease while alone and homeless. He would not be the first patient for me to watch die in such a way.
To be a physician is, in many ways, an exercise in futility. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. describes it as a “duty dance with death,†and how can one argue otherwise? It is not as if we fail some of the time or even most of the time. Every human suffers. Every human dies. If we define the success of a physician as the alleviation of suffering and the postponement of death, then every physician, though occasionally and transiently triumphant, is ultimately a failure. [Read more…] about Failing Faithfully: The Futility of Medicine (Scholar’s Compass)