Quotes About Compassion

The seemingly easiest and most sensible rule for a doctor to follow is: Always Fight. Always look for what more you could do. (...) But our fight is not always to do more. It is to do right by our patients, even though what is right is not always clear.

At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naïve.

Those of us in medicine don't help, for we often regard the patient on the downhill as uninteresting unless he or she has a discrete problem we can fix.

Assisted living is far harder than assisted death, but its possibilities are far greater, as well.

We've been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.

Tears wet my eyes. I'm a surgeon. I like solving things. But how do I solve this?

But we have at last entered an era in which an increasing number of them believe their job is not to confine people's choices, in the name of safety, but to expand them, in the name of living a worthwhile life.

as people's capacities wane, whether through age or ill health, making their lives better often requires curbing our purely medical imperatives—resisting the urge to fiddle and fix and control.

I do not come in saying, 'I'm so sorry.' Instead, it's: 'I'm the hospice nurse, and here's what I have to offer you to make your life better. And I know we don't have a lot of time to waste.

There was a succession of roommates, never chosen with her input and all with cognitive impairments. Some were quiet. One kept her up at night. She felt incarcerated, like she was in prison for being old. The

A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life;

That remains the main problem and paradox for the frail. "Many of the things that we want for those we care about are things that we would adamantly oppose for ourselves because they would infringe upon our sense of self.

I never expected that among the most meaningful experiences I'd have as a doctor—and, really, as a human being—would come from helping others deal with what medicine cannot do as well as what it can. But it's proved true, whether with a patient like Jewel Douglass, a friend like Peg Bachelder, or someone I loved as much as my father.

There is one difference in medicine, though: it is people we practice upon.

created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die. *

That's not my problem" is possibly the worst thing people can think

In the horrible places, the battle for control escalates until you get tied down or locked into your Geri-chair or chemically subdued with psychotropic medications. In the nice ones, a staff member cracks a joke, wags an affectionate finger, and takes your brownie stash away. In almost none does anyone sit down with you and try to figure out what living a life really means to you under the circumstances, let alone help you make a home where that life becomes possible

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What

and she asks if either might have anything to do with this.

We've been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way.

Feeling pity for him, I stopped to browse and was stunned to discover what he had on offer. He

But in the end, I came to think, there was also something more vital and, in a certain way, poignant drawing us in.

When I saw him three months later, he was still despondent. "I feel as if a part of my body is missing. I feel as if I have been dismembered," he told me. His voice cracked and his eyes were rimmed red. He had one great solace, however: that she hadn't suffered, that she'd got to spend her last few weeks in peace at home in the warmth of their long love, instead of up on a nursing floor, a lost and disoriented patient. *

Yet compassion and technology aren't necessarily incompatible; they can be mutually reinforcing.