![]() ![]() A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. “In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments-which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?”īeing Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End ![]() Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. ![]() ![]() But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. “Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. ![]()
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