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.
...available people are the ones who are dangerous, because they confront us with the possibility of real intimacy.
Just because some people are fueled by drama doesn't mean you have to attend the performance.
If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury; but if you injure him you will always remember.
Test a servant while in the discharge of his duty, a relative in difficulty, a friend in adversity, and a wife in misfortune.
She had been wrong to think it wouldn't matter that much to him, yes,He took her for granted, of course he did , but he took her for granted - not like an old coat in the corner of a dark cupboard, as she'd put it to herself , but like the very air that he breathed .
We are not our brotherβs keeper we are our brother and we are our sister. We must look past complexion and see community.
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