ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Available for over a year

Good Morning, As my doctor's appointment overruns by 20 minutes my sense of entitlement rises with my blood pressure. The packed waiting room is grumbling too and it is easy to see why representatives of 7000 GP's are claiming that they cannot cope with the existing demands of their patients. My doctor apologises for the wait and during the consultation I ask how he is coping. He suggests it's a constant challenge trying to meet everyone's needs and expectations. 'The thing is,' he says, 'I never know what's coming through the door. It could be a sore throat. It could be a cancer. Either way it's a person. But 10 minutes often isn't enough to give the patient what they need.' It's disconcerting to think of doctors not having the time to provide the care they would like. The traditional image of the GP is a figure of unruffled authority, dispensing calm certainties and healing. Part of problem lies not just with increased numbers of patients but in the fact that medical advances are prolonging life. In this age of stents and statins, people are living longer and thus more are experiencing diseases of aging that require further medical support. Doctors have always inhabited the frontier of life and death, a place where duties and rights collide and difficult choices have to be made: whether to dispense costly drugs, whether to up a treatment or stop it altogether; how to balance optimism with realism while trying to remain human in the brief window they have with their patient. All the while holding in tension the reality that we are - as T. S. Eliot brutally put it - all dying. In his great poem The Wasteland Eliot wrote 'He who is living is now dead, we who were living are now dying, with a little patience.' And it's interesting that the word patience shares the same root as the word we give to someone receiving medical care, particularly when patience is hard to find in a world where people expect their doctor to make them better. Significantly, both words come from the Latin for suffering from which we get the word passion. And in those lines from The Wasteland, Eliot was referring to The Passion of the Christ where another clash of duty and rights occurs. The raising of blood pressure in Gethsemane may have had cosmic implications, but the questions Jesus puts to God are the questions most patients put to their doctors: can you make it better? Can you stop this suffering? How can I control this finitude? When a prophet once said we are not promised tomorrow, it wasn't to leave us in despair but to urge us to lose one kind of life to embrace another. Maybe letting go of the illusion that we can control our own atrophy and mortality is part of the salve that we seek.