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The Practice Of Medicine: When A Funeral Provides Perspective

Here’s my column in this month’s Emergency Medicine News:

I have practiced with the same group, in the same hospital, for 17 years. Because we have been together so long, our group is a family. So it was with enormous grief that we buried our founder, Dr. Jack Warren, 11 years ago after a tragic car crash. That wound is still open, but we still tell stories about his humor, his compassion, and his grace.

As I write this I am tending another wound, or I should say our group is tending another. A second partner passed away last week. Unlike the sudden horror of the first death, the second was progressive, as our friend and partner, Dr. Howard Leslie, left us by degrees, the victim of metastatic melanoma. Jack and Howard founded our group before any of the rest of us arrived. Both of them are buried in the same wooded, hillside nature preserve. Pieces of our group, pieces of ourselves, interred in the red-clay earth. Just as they practiced before the rest of us, so they went to sleep before the rest of us. I think they’ve gone ahead to show the way. So they can one day help us adapt to peace the way they helped us adapt to practice.

But both deaths remind me of partnership. Medicine today is chaotic and difficult for many reasons. Part of the problem is that government and regulatory bodies overwhelm us and litigation threatens us. Part of the problem is that we, and our patients alike, have untenable hopes and impossible standards for the practice of medicine. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at edwinleap.com*

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