Recently, a young woman with a terminal brain cancer moved to Oregon and ended her life utilizing Oregon’s “Death with Dignity” act. This goes against everything I witnessed in my recent Palliative care and Hospice fellowship where young adults, almost without exception, hold onto life despite all our attempts to push them onto another story. The Oregon Public Health Department reports that from the...
When I stop blaming, Tolstoy teaches, a burden lifts. It’s a curious, paradoxical idea, since blaming is generally an effort to relieve oneself of a burden of guilt. Tolstoy implies that blaming itself is a burdensome business—effortful and fraught and emotionally demanding. Blame has to be nurtured and sustained. A narrative has to be constructed to justify blame, a point of view crafted that...
I remember the first time someone pointed out that evidence-based empirical scientific double-blind tested AMA supervised Western medicine is a belief system. Like other belief systems. Its credibility depends on a consensual notion of how to establish credibility. It has its own historical narrative that goes from experiment to discovery to correction to experiment to discovery—a little the way...
I’m not a doctor. But even I know Hippocrates’ famous instruction, “First, do no harm.” It seems perfectly reasonable to regard this as a doctor’s first duty. At least don’t make it worse. Don’t experiment on your patient. Be conservative, in the best and deepest sense, when you decide on treatment options.
You could go a long way in exploring this implication of Hippocrates’ maxim. You could...
British doctors do less of everything, writes Lynn Payer, a medical journalist whose Medicine and Culture (1995), a lively comparison of medical practices in France, England, Germany and the U.S. offers compelling evidence of the surprising degree to which medicine is culturally imbedded. American doctors do more. If you’re practicing medicine in this...
She walked into our small conference room staying completely in character. We had earlier propped the door open because the room was stuffy, but we closed it now as a gesture of preserving privacy. She was an actress playing the role of a 60 year old woman seeing her “new” doctor to get her prescriptions refilled. She had no particular complaints. Her doctor was “new” in that this was the first...
The short essays that follow are informal reflections of Fellows of the UC Berkeley Program for the Medical Humanities. The Program is an interdisciplinary conversation among scholars and medical professionals about how and where medicine, medical education and the public may benefit from the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Some of those benefits are obvious: historical work such as that...
“I will dance until I die.” A series of interviews with older artists from around the world, on living lives full of passion and meaning “Grow Old Along with Me”. . .
Eighty-eight year old Tokiko Oyama is barely 5’ tall and appears frail. That is, until she moves, speaks and sings. She is an internationally renowned Butoh dancer who has been dancing for 85 years. She began dancing at age 3. “I could not stop dancing when I hear the music or Taiko. As a child I was thinking if I die as a dancer that would be fine. My mother and father were also Kabuki actors.” She went on to become...
