Friday, November 22, 2019

We're all struggling


Adding this book to my must read list - I learned about it from the BMJ article I posted a few days ago. It is called The Way We Die Now, by Seamus O'Mahony.

In reading Amazon reviews, I came across the following excerpt:

"Doctors, by the nature of their selection and training, are conformist... a good doctor sometimes has to tell a patient things they do not want to hear. ... it is much easier ... to order another scan than to have the Difficult Conversation."

Wow. I work with health professionals every day and I too have long-held the likely VERY wrong impression that physicians are at least a bit more equipped that the rest of us to encounter and be upfront about death. But it makes sense right? Why talk about it when we can seemingly keep doing 'everything we can'? 

I guess it comes down to the fact that we are all on this journey... and all of us struggling along clumsily on our own path.  

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