You Want To Ensure People Can Do

This Is The Reality Of Intensive Care: At Any Point, We Are As Apt To Harm As We Are To Heal.

Go Back To The '30s, '40s, '50s, And It Was The Discovery Of Heroic Interventions, The Ability To Cure People With Penicillin Or Do An Operation To Stop Disease That Was What Saved The Day. Primary Care Physicians Couldn't Do All That Much That Really Demonstrated A Difference. The People Who Control And Work With You To Control Your Blood Pressure, They're Not Rewarded For Doing That Or To Be Innovative About Doing That. So, The Result Is Half Of Americans Have Uncontrolled High Blood Pressure, Despite Seeing Clinicians.

The Definition Of What It Means To Be Dying Has Changed Radically. We Are Able To Extend People's Lives Considerably, Including Sometimes, Good Days.

In Many Ways, The Effort To Study Philosophy Was My Rebellion Away From Medicine. I'm The Son Of Two Indian Immigrant Physicians, So The Natural Path For Me Would Have Been To Become A Doctor. I Ended Up Doing The Master's Degree At Oxford In Politics, Philosophy, And Economics While Already Having A Seat In Medical School. I Was Keeping That As My Escape Hatch. But My Hope Was That I Might Become A Philosopher Or Something Else Entirely.

Sometimes We Can Offer A Cure, Sometimes Only A Salve, Sometimes Not Even That. But Whatever We Can Offer, Our Interventions, And The Risks And Sacrifices They Entail, Are Justified Only If They Serve The Larger Aims Of A Person's Life. When We Forget That, The Suffering We Inflict Can Be Barbaric. When We Remember It The Good We Do Can Be Breathtaking.