Quotes About Compassion

This simple but profound service—to grasp a fading man's need for everyday comforts, for companionship, for help achieving his modest aims—is the thing that is still so devastatingly lacking more than a century later.

they provided assisted living, but no one seemed to think it was their job to actually assist him with living

Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once.

The options overwhelmed her. They all sounded terrifying. She didn't know what to do. I realized, with shame, that I'd reverted to being Dr. Informative—here are the facts and figures; what do you want to do? So I stepped back and asked the questions I'd asked my father: What were her biggest fears and concerns? What goals were most important to her? What trade-offs was she willing to make, and what ones was she not? Not

Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.

According to Block, about two-thirds of patients are willing to undergo therapies they don't want if that is what their loved ones want. The

medically dominated culture of care for the elderly.

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.

Ariadne Labs

And the insight was that 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. It was not hard to see how important this idea could be for the patients I encountered in my daily practice—people facing mortal circumstances at every phase of life.

and I called him to see how he was doing.

He said he was well, and I did not press for details.

Dressing somebody is easier than letting them dress themselves. It takes less time. It's less aggravation. So unless supporting people's capabilities is made a priority, the staff ends up dressing people like they're rag dolls. Gradually, that's how everything begins to go. The tasks come to matter more than the people.

You have a cough that won't go away—and then? It's not science you call upon but a doctor. A doctor with good days and bad days. A doctor with a weird laugh and a bad haircut. A doctor with three other patients to see and, inevitably, gaps in what he knows and skills he's still trying to learn.

Here? I asked with my eyes, not wanting to undermine my patient's confidence any further.

He's too obese, I thought to myself.

Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person's life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it the good we do can be breathtaking.

Our most cruel failure is in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognise 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.

merely as struggling human beings.

Neff's philosophy is, as he put it, "hard on behavior but soft on the person.

We are all, whatever we do, in the hands of flawed human beings.

and led her out of the room.

called him at home to hear how he had weathered the aftermath.

I had given her the facts. But by including the fact that I was worried, I'd not only told her about the seriousness of the situation, I'd told her that I was on her side—I was pulling for her. The words also told her that, although I feared something serious, there remained uncertainties—possibilities for hope within the parameters nature had imposed.