Thursday, April 28, 2005
Life Wins!
I am a little teary as I write this post -- these are a couple of great stories. This one from Major K talks about a deeply wounded soldier surviving when all thought he would die. The Major asks for prayer for SGT F -- I certainly shall, and I'll pray fro the Major while I'm at it. This post from Scotwise is about a woman that fought for her unborn baby that doctors thought was dead, and wanted to abort. She was right and the doctors were wrong.
I have a number of very good friends that are physicians, so I hesitate to publicly criticize them, trust me - in private I can get ornery, but they have a difficult job and the good ones need support, not derision. I remained relatively mute on the role of physicians in the whole Terri Schiavo affair. But here is the problem -- doing what they do generally produces one of two reactions in the doctor.
The first, and preferable, reaction is humility. A good doctor knows how much he/she does NOT know, and is humbled by how much they cannot diagnose or cure. They are honest with their patients about their shortcomings, and work with the patient (as opposed to ON the patient) to try and help.
The other reaction is hubris. By definition, doctors are smart, and by virtue of the hazing they undergo to receive their MD, many come to believe they are some sort of "special." These types believe they are endowed with special authority to decide life and death. These doctors will tell you what you want, even if you don't. Any doctor of this type that accepts me as a patient does so at grave personal risk.
In the soldier case, I can't tell what was going on, but in the near abortion, I'll bet big money the doctor was in the second type. The system used to train doctors needs to be revised to help candidates achieve the appropriate level of humility, or else a lot of people that don't need to die are going to.
The bottom line on both these stories and this brief rant is that we are far from omniscient. What we don't know will constantly surprise us. Can we really go around killing the unborn and the disabled based on what we don't know?
I have a number of very good friends that are physicians, so I hesitate to publicly criticize them, trust me - in private I can get ornery, but they have a difficult job and the good ones need support, not derision. I remained relatively mute on the role of physicians in the whole Terri Schiavo affair. But here is the problem -- doing what they do generally produces one of two reactions in the doctor.
The first, and preferable, reaction is humility. A good doctor knows how much he/she does NOT know, and is humbled by how much they cannot diagnose or cure. They are honest with their patients about their shortcomings, and work with the patient (as opposed to ON the patient) to try and help.
The other reaction is hubris. By definition, doctors are smart, and by virtue of the hazing they undergo to receive their MD, many come to believe they are some sort of "special." These types believe they are endowed with special authority to decide life and death. These doctors will tell you what you want, even if you don't. Any doctor of this type that accepts me as a patient does so at grave personal risk.
In the soldier case, I can't tell what was going on, but in the near abortion, I'll bet big money the doctor was in the second type. The system used to train doctors needs to be revised to help candidates achieve the appropriate level of humility, or else a lot of people that don't need to die are going to.
The bottom line on both these stories and this brief rant is that we are far from omniscient. What we don't know will constantly surprise us. Can we really go around killing the unborn and the disabled based on what we don't know?
