Sublime

As my parents aged, I found myself torn between being their child and being their caregiver, as so many people do when their parents decline.

Narrative medicine, the term coined in 2000 by Rita Charon at Columbia, is based on the idea that by studying literature closely, improving our skills

I find the photographs cheering, reminders of my patients not as patients, but as people, of their lives beyond what I recorded in their medical charts.

When healthy, they still bring in printouts and lists, but these no longer bother me. I now recognize them as expressions of anxiety about mortality—also serious stuff.

Contemporary medicine prides itself on patient-centered care, but it is startlingly inattentive—even actively indifferent—to patients’ emotional needs. For patients with chronic illness, with its upheaval of life, this indifference poses a particular challenge. In chronic illness, the patient does not have a problem that can be solved quickly but a

Why would a man selling his ability to deal with disease pretend that your affliction is a whim? After all, the symptoms one generation swears are “in your head” are often shown by research to be real a few decades later. But a doctor does not generally confess ignorance. He is selling the illusion of omnipotence: the illusion that through consulti

We suspected that the main plan should just be to treat me with fluids until the effects of the chemotherapy wore off. But each group of specialists had to allow for more esoteric possibilities and advocate tests and treatments for them, some of which seemed unnecessary and ill-advised. Samples were taken, scans were ordered, medications were given