In his essay ‘The Decay of Lying – An Observation’, Oscar Wilde has one of his characters say, ‘If something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land.’ I think Wilde has something to say to our current situation for unless something is done to check our monstrous worship of modern medicine, a world in which a patients clinical parameters are all too often elevated above the individual to whom those clinical parameters apply, our working lives will also become sterile and devoid of beauty.
That is, of course, if they haven’t already.
Life is more than merely attending to one’s health and yet, as we plough on through our working days with our heads permanently down and without us ever having a chance to look up, this is something that we all too often fail to appreciate. Whilst, as their enter end of life care, we might be pretty good at rationalising the medications that we have previously urged our patients to take, I wonder if we sometimes have delayed too long the lightening of the burden that we sometimes place on our patients to be healthy. Because medicine is a burden for many – and not just for our patients. It has become a burden for us too.
At the end of another extraordinary busy week, not only for me and the other doctors but for everyone in the practice, one in which we have once again been flooded with patients and their concerns, it’s no wonder that many of us feel that we are drowning. When, as now, many feel they are on the point of going under and are understandably concerned only about survival, it’s hard to appreciate beauty. As a result, as we try to cope with all the competing, seemingly urgent, demands made upon us, as we struggle to simply make it through the day, all the joy that we once drew from our working lives slowly drains away
Part of the problem though is of medicine’s own making. We have medicalised life too much by our insisting that what is in reality entirely normal is in fact dangerously abnormal and in need of medical attention. This is as true for what we would term marginally raised cholesterol levels as it is for the everyday unhappiness that characterises all our lives from time to time. No wonder we are inundated with requests for medical help when we have made far too much a medical matter, no wonder the lists of those we have to phone grow ever longer when we continue to urge everyone to ‘not hesitate to call if it gets any worse’, no wonder we have the worried well when we have told the well that they should worry.
It’s not only that there aren’t enough of us working in medicine, part of the problem is that medicine is trying to do more than it should. With our increasing obsession with data we are in danger of losing sight of the art of medicine and consequently we risk doing ourselves and our patients a disservice by causing concern where none was warranted. We need more medics but we also need less medicine, at least less of the unthinking algorithmic, protocol driven medicine that is increasingly encouraged. If only though we had the time to think!
Because the truth is that it really is possible to live a long and happy life with a cholesterol of 5.8. Indeed, it may be easier to do so than with a cholesterol of 4.7 when one has to worry whether that externally imposed target is being maintained by the medication one is taking, medication that, in addition to its side effects, daily declares to us as we are take it, that we are ill. This is not to say that we should never prescribe, but we must not imagine that what we tell our patients to do is more important than the real purpose of living. We will all have our views on what the real meaning of life is but I suspect we can all agree that it consists of more than swallowing a tablet of atorvastatin every day.
The truth is that we will continue to find our jobs impossible to bear for as long as we insist on carrying the weight of demand that we have created.
Elsewhere in ‘The Decay of Lying’, Wilde famously made the claim that ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life’. I’m still pondering whether or not I agree with Oscar on this, but what I do know is that the lives of our patients are mirrored in our professional lives. As our patients lives are a mix of the good and the bad, so too are our times at work. Our jobs will never be easy – did we really ever expect them to be – and as it is sometimes a struggle for our patients, so too will our jobs sometimes be a struggle too.
This is not to suggest that we should roll over and accept how impossible our jobs are becoming, far from it, but we do have to accept the inevitability that sometimes we too will experience times of particular difficulty. Even so, it is worth perhaps remembering that even in the toughest of times there will be, if we look out for them, moments to enjoy and beauty to be appreciated. This last week has been as tough as any I can remember but in it I have experienced the kindness of a colleague, the appreciation of a grateful patient, and the concern of the person that, as I rang them at 9pm, told me that I really ought to be going home. There have even been the odd occasions when, amidst the chaos, I have even enjoyed the satisfaction of having managed one or two genuine medical problems with perhaps a modicum of competence!
But it’s not just our work that is this mixture of pleasure and pain. As our patient lives mirror our work lives, so too do they mirror our personal lives. Ancient wisdom tells us that there is ‘a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance’. [Ecclesiastes 3:4]. We are, therefore, out of synch with reality if we think we should be happy all the time. It is normal to grieve the sadnesses that we all sometimes experience in this life.
Even so, as one of those Christian types, I am frequently comforted by those words written by the apostle Paul, with which he describes himself as somebody who is ‘sorrowful, yet always rejoicing’. [2 Corinthians 6:10]. For me this speaks to matters beyond this life but i think it also applies to the here and now.. It reminds me that even in the sad times that we all sometimes experience we can still know what it is to be happy. As for me, for example, I am currently looking forward to becoming a Grandad, my daughter being a little over 38 weeks into her first pregnancy. And this, despite there being other circumstances in my life that cause me to be sad, is something that, along with many other people and things, is a constant cause of great joy to me.
Although not always an easy one, the trick I think is to realise that, just as one can still experience sorrow when there are things that make us happy, one can also be happy when there are things that make us sad. We don’t have to wait until all the sadness in life is gone before we allow ourselves to be happy. We can take pleasure in those things that bring us joy even when there is much that causes us distress.
For me, as I start a welcome couple of weeks off and prepare for ‘grandfatherhood’ with a pipe, a pair of slippers and a packet of Werther’s Originals, I suspect I may find it easier to take pleasure in the coming days than some who may read this post. Even so, I hope that this weekend, irrespective of how hard your week has been, you too can find some happiness to enjoy.
And even, perhaps, some beauty too.
Related Posts:
To read ‘Blaming it on the Boogie’, click here
To read ‘Health – it’ll be the death of us. Is there institutional arrogance in the NHS?’, click here
And now three blogs which, in my head at least, make up a trilogy on the subject of burnout:
To read ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’, click here
To read ‘When the Jokes on You’, click here
To read ‘With great power…’, click here
And one blog on the dangers of perfectionism:
To read ‘Professor Ian Aird’ – A Time to Die?’, click here
And finally, a couple of related Christian blogs to finish with:
To read ‘T.S. Eliot, Jesus and the Paradox of the Christian Life’, click here
To read ‘Good Friday’, click here
Some musings 