What We're Reading: When Breath Becomes Air

If you’re like me, you didn’t do all the assigned reading in your medical humanities course as a first-year medical student. We were busy, plus we already knew how to be human. What we didn’t know was how to be doctors.

When Breath Becomes Air by Dr. Paul Kalanithi gives us — now doctors — a chance to make it right again when it comes to that reading list. Paul, as we come to know him, is a neurosurgical chief resident at Stanford when he’s diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. What follows is the story of his diagnosis and his too-early death. And no, I didn’t just ruin the story for you. It would be hard not to know that Dr. Kalanithi succumbs to his illness given the esteemed profile of his life and his memoir. But knowing the end of the story makes this story better. It means we as readers can grasp the magnitude of the experience from the first page and admire how Paul prepares himself, his family, and the rest of us for the ending.

Caring for patients is the greatest privilege of any physician’s life, yet for every called code, every devastating head injury, and every terminal rhythm, I’ve taken comfort in one fact: I’m not the patient. Dr. Kalanithi reminds us that someday we will be that patient, and our plans in the meantime are just that: plans. Imagining ourselves as patients, even for but a moment, may help us be better doctors, and Dr. Kalanithi’s story insists we do just that.

Griffin Myers, MD, MBA

Oak Street Health

Griffin Myers is the Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer for Oak Street Health and Adjunct Instructor of Emergency Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Learn more about Griffin Myers...

Sorry, comments are closed for this item.

E. Koehn, MS, RN (Ret.)

Kalanithi's book is informative and well written. I think it is well to keep in mind that as part of a family of several physicians his support from the medical establishment was different from the patient who is not. He was invited to contact his physician or the nurse practitioner and did not have his concerns to a medical assistant. Care must be taken not to generalize approaches and his coping to those who do not fit that scenario. Also to remember, even patients from non-medical families may want control that the medical establishment does not allow them. We need to listen and hear what patients tell us.

June 23, 2016 at 10:48 am

Topics

Patient-Centered Care

The Patient Engagement Capacity Model: What Factors Determine a Patient’s Ability to Engage?

Article by Cynthia J. Sieck, Daniel M. Walker, Sheldon Retchin & Ann Scheck McAlearney

Patient engagement assessments often don’t dig deep enough to identify why patients don’t participate in their own health care. We present a new model to help providers pinpoint the reasons for lack of engagement and address them more effectively.

Patient Engagement Survey: Health Care Has a Lot to Learn from Consumer-Friendly Industries

The consumerization of health care continues to reshape the way that patients engage with providers and experience care. Most providers see this fundamental change in the health care model as a necessary response to changing patient demands, and have embraced the need to learn from other industries.