Quotes About Compassion

Discussion had brought La Crosse's end-of-life costs down to half the national average. It was that simple—and that complicated.

And partly, whether we admit it or not, a lot of doctors don't like taking care of the elderly.

No one would have faulted him for doing either.

The Emanuels described a third type of doctor-patient relationship, which they called "interpretive." Here the doctor's role is to help patients determine what they want. Interpretive doctors ask, "What is most important to you? What are your worries?" Then, when they know your answers, they tell you about the red pill and the blue pill and which one would most help you achieve your priorities.

It may seem harsh to say, but if it was a sixty-year-old man I would've taken the leg without question." This was partly, I think, a purely emotional unwillingness to cut off the limb of a pretty twenty-three-year-old—the kind of sentimentalism that can get you in trouble.

her arm. Her face sagged. Her speech slurred. Although

People who we had believed weren't able to speak started speaking," Thomas said. "People who had been completely withdrawn and nonambulatory started coming to the nurses' station and saying, 'I'll take the dog for a walk.

After a while, though, it seemed that the only thing he thought about was getting through all his patients as quickly as possible.

The question therefore is... how can we build a health care system that will actually help people achieve what's most important to them at the end of their lives

But, she said, "It's the rare child who is able to think, 'Is this place what Mom would want or like or need?' It's more like they're seeing it through their own lens." The child asks, "Is this a place I would be comfortable leaving Mom?

But Arnold had also recommended a strategy palliative care physicians use when they have to talk about bad news with people—they "ask, tell, ask." They ask what you want to hear, then they tell you, and then they ask what you understood. So I asked.

Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.

Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come--and escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.

At most, a doctor might say, "I'm sorry that things didn't go as well as we had hoped.

AT THE CENTER of Wilson's work was an attempt to solve a deceptively simple puzzle: what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves?

LOU SANDERS WAS on his way to joining the infantilized and catatonic denizens belted into the wheelchairs of a North Andover nursing home

The answer, he believed, is that we all seek a cause beyond ourselves.

The professionals and institutions we turn to should...not confine people's choices, in the name of safety, but to expand them, in the name of living a worthwhile life.

help people in a state of dependence sustain the value of existence.

His thirty-something son moved in to care for him.

what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves?

The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.

I tried to sound firm without being harsh. "You

But now he was adamant about doing "everything." David did not dare argue with him.