Tag: physician narrative

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.

A contemplation of the limits of medical care through many specific stories of decision points about when to stop treatment in favor of palliative care. Gawande has been a physician for a long time and an activist/ writer on the side of “know when to say when” – i.e. just because medical technology exists to prolong life doesn’t mean that’s the best thing to do – for almost as long. He makes convincing cases for stopping expensive treatment and “giving life to days” more often than Hail Mary passes that might bring on the 2% chance of a cure.

The book is a readily accessibe read for many audiences and could be assigned in full or excerpted. It was also the subject of a PBS documentory that could be used to supplement class use and bring the text to life.

As a physician, why write?

This is the first post in a new blog on U Mass Med School Medical Humanities Lab, 2019. It is an articulation of why all physicians are storytellers and why most would do well to write them down. This could be beneficial for medical students to reflect upon in order to show the importance of health narratives to new physicians.

The Hidden Dying of Doctors: What the Humanities Can Teach Medicine and Why We All Need Medicine to Learn It

This review of Kalanithi’s “When breath becomes air” focuses most on the opening story of a young colleague who took his own life, the problem of medical student and physician suicide/ depression/burnout, and how humanities education could alleviate the suffering of doctors by connecting them with the human side of medicine, their own and that of patients. This is very useful as a first-week reading in a Foundations of Health Humanities course or as a reference for a talk to aspiring med students