Living with Long-Term Conditions.

Abstract

I always advise my students to stay on the blunt end of the needle. Of course, this is advice that we cannot always follow, and few of us will achieve such easy irony in the days leading up to our own deaths. We know ourselves to be mortal, but a common feature of the medical tribe is our denial of this obvious fact. Denial is a common enough defence mechanism, and sometimes it works. If we considered our own likely eventual morbidities every time we treated a patient we would be care-worn indeed. But the unintended consequence of our ego boundaries, our semi-detached relationship to the suffering of others, is that we may fail to truly see the burdens imposed on our patients, both by …