What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide, but existential authenticity each person must find on her own... the angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Illness and death are not optional. Patients have a right to determine how they approach them.
When death is imminent and dying patients find their suffering unbearable, then the physician's role should shift from healing to relieving suffering in accord with the patient's wishes.
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.
I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.
The fact that doctors tend to treat people as individuals, guided by the need to ensure patient confidentiality, can reinforce this pattern of seeing the changes and challenges aging brings on through our heads and our bodies, rather than as a shared experience.
I always think, medically... you really have to be your advocate. You have to be able to back up everything that you're feeling with some information and protect yourself through the world of hospitals and doctors' offices, so the more information the better.
It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.
Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.
The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.