We're losing a ritual. We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of the doctor-patient relationship and the transformative power of rituals in healthcare.
Abraham Verghese highlights the significance of rituals in the doctor-patient relationship, suggesting that these practices are not merely routine but hold the potential to transform and elevate the interaction between healthcare providers and patients. He argues that as we lose these rituals, we risk diminishing the depth and quality of these essential human connections in medicine, which are fundamental to healing.
In practice
During a medical conference, discussing the importance of maintaining rituals in patient care.
The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?
I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient whose care I am taking over is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.
It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.
You are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can can play the 'Gloria'? No, not Bach's 'Gloria.' Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.
Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
Well, I think when we can turn to the person sitting next to us and really see them with kindness and see ourselves reflected back - when there's some dignity and compassion traveling back and forth.
If you aren't gonna say exactly how and what you feel, you might as well not say anything at all.
'This thing I feel, I can't name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?' β this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it's perilously close to 'Do you like me? Please like me,' which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene.
...Singles, too, must see the penultimate status of marriage. If single Christians don't develop a deeply fulfilling love relationship with Jesus, they will put too much pressure on their DREAM of marriage, and that will create pathology in their lives as well.
Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaaβs world that she could no more describe him than she could the air.
...people liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you. That goes for love too, only more so.
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