Dr. Ofri writes of learning that her patients want what she wants when she becomes a patient. As she delivers her first child, she experiences many of the little insults that are so common in our modern healthcare system, and often it is those small things that dehumanize and frustrate us. We usually get good care but feel neglected as a person.
Yet, she also writes that, even with the best of intentions, time is finite and physicians and providers are constantly under pressure to move quickly and efficiently through their days all the while having to make significant, often critical decisions.
I have always known that there is art in medicine as there is in nearly every endeavor. I have no idea how many healthcare providers feel it is important or even think about this, but Dr. Ofri has and tries to illustrate what it means in this book. Mostly, it seems, it's about trying to find time to look at a patient directly and really listen to what they are saying. So few of us want to be treated impersonally. Empathy surely helps heal, if not the body, then certainly the mind.
The last chapter is about Dora who has Alzheimer's and who fell in her nursing home and was admitted to the hospital with complications. Dr. Ofri communicates with Dora's sister Goldie who tells her about Dora: "We went through the camps together, you know. She took care of me after we lost our parents. She is the reason I survived." Dr. Ofri looks more closely and finds the "numbers" from the concentration camp on Dora's are, and she becomes so much more than a dying patient. She touches the skin and thinks about "handling the very same flesh as that Nazi...[and] grateful that between then and now there had at least been decades of loving touch from a devoted sister and a husband....[and] now I was part of that chain of touch."
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