Let's adopt caring as our central value, our central organizing principal. The caring relationship requires nurturing the patient and caring about what happens to them. Let's not crusade against death. The best doctors feel as their own the suffering of their patients and the patients' loved ones. But in American Medicine, on the whole, we need a lot more compassion.
Compassion means empathy and kindness.
Sometimes the patient needs these much more than they need another test. Now we come to the really big deficit. We doctors have to have strong egos, strong self-confidence. But to truly understand a person requires a feeling of equality. Together we can discover our humanity.