During my days as a housesurgeon, I was drawn to the fact that good words and something as simple as a smile or a reassuring touch can do wonders to the prognosis of the patient. That healing does not come from interventions alone, but also from something as simple as a good word.
The aim of medical care, on the broader perspective, is not just to ensure health and survival - it is to ensure wellbeing. It surely is a cumbersome task - one can easily look at lab reports and reach a working diagnosis and formulate a management plan, but it requires a lion's heart to break bad news to the patient relatives, and to guide them, if not walk with them, through the worsening outcomes of the patient.
As the eminent doctor-author Atul Gawande writes,
"Medicine’s focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days."
Aggressive medical care taxes the minds and the bodies of the patient and his family alike. I remember reading the words of a famous person, it went something like this - "I hope to leave this world free and unencumbered, without the weight of tubes and devices attached to me." As I pondered over the substance and meaning of this statement, I understood that dying with dignity is an entity of paramount importance. This is exactly where we, as clinicians and care providers, fail.
That is where acute medical care gives way to comfort care, or the realm of assisted living. It is when you recognize that the physical health cannot be redeemed, but the patient can embrace comfort in the twilight days of his life and that medicine can take a friendly turn, to be in tandem with the patient as he fades out.
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