Pain, Medicine, and Meaning

Doctors can get easily carried away with diagnoses, tests, treatments, and diseases. Ultimately, however, most of us go into the profession to relieve suffering, to help patients achieve the most they can. Pain clinic was a good reminder of this, where our focus was less on disease and treatments but more on the symptoms and how to ameliorate them. We let our oncologist colleagues deal with the metastatic cancer, our neurosurgeons evaluate for the spine procedure, our rheumatologists manage the immunosuppressants. Our job was to validate the patient's pain and figure out how to manage it and help them improve their function. Perhaps this is medicine at its heart.

Image is in the public domain, from Wikipedia.