Another sensitive medical piece in the newspaper, this one about grasping our patients’ goals for their treatment and their lives. Living your own life well can teach you that:
“I can’t imagine a better reason to be treated as an outpatient than a daddy-daughter dance,” I told them. “Whatever it takes, we’ll find a way to make it happen.”
As we get older and spend more years practicing medicine, doctors and nurses tend to get better at identifying the subtleties of illness, and our decisions and recommendations become more accurate. But more important than that, because we’ve lived more of our own lives, I hope we also recognize when what’s meaningful to our patients trumps anything medical that we can offer.
A Country Doctor Reads: 
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