Suffering: Should doctors fix it?
Back in my secular days, I viewed the suffering of the dying as unnecessary-an enemy requiring intervention. In fact, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the medical decision-making surrounding the withdrawal of extraordinary treatment for the terminally ill. I’d been disturbed by medical doctors’ fear and resistance to letting patients die and determined to understand it. And if possible, provide solutions. I got the chance when doctors at the Texas Medical Center hospital where I worked asked me to take the Chair of the I.E.C. after the chaplain, founder of the committee, left.
As Chair of the Institutional Ethics Committee, I perceived our main goal as providing support to doctors who feared legal reprisal for removing or withholding the lengthy list of artificial ways to maintain ventilation and a beating heart in dying patients. Since Hermann was only the second American hospital to form an ethics committee, we quickly gained notoriety. Then New York Times reporter Lisa Belkin, author of First Do No Harm, spent close to a year shadowing several of us on the ethics committee. She and I joked about which would be done first: her book or my dissertation.
Lisa won.
How far we have come in “caring” for the dying since those early days! Our continued war on the meaning of words provides us with a clever workaround for the uniform 50-state illegality of euthanasia, itself a euphemism for killing a person. The eerie acronym M.A.I.D supplies the 21st-century fix for suffering. Medical Assistance in Dying is legal in thirteen states.
My “Yes!” to suffering: should doctors fix it? transformed when I learned it isn’t meaningless-suffereing can be used.
Suffering isn’t only physical.
Our thoughts, feelings, and emotions can run rampant, overwhelming our reason. Anxiety and depression afflict millions. In fact, a 2025 Cato Survey writes, ” …in what’s being called a national mental-health crisis, psychiatric diagnoses in almost every category are reaching all-time highs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that autism now appears in 1 in 31 children, a 381% increase since 2000. Childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnoses nearly doubled between 1997 and 2022. Childhood anxiety diagnoses rose 54% between 2016 and 2022. Past-year prevalence of any mental illness among adults reached 23.1% in 2022, with young adults at 36.2.
Mental Health Industry Watchdog took 2021 physician prescribing data to determine that over 80 million Americans, aged zero to 65+, are on psychiatric drugs. The age range looks like an error.
Surely, infants are not on psychiatric drugs!
Wrong. According to the Watchdog, in 2021, over 80,000 babies aged 0-1 were on psychiatric drugs…!
America’s therapeutic culture (medicalizing our lives) took time.
The twentieth century saw the professions of law and medicine enjoying an extended alliance where medical decision-making was awarded more and more autonomy by the state and federal governments, such that the profession of medicine was infused with more self-rule than had ever before been granted. This new alliance was deserving of a new concept and new language by the sociologists studying the dizzying speed with which medicine was gaining political and cultural power. The word profession describes a group of individuals whose knowledge, education, vocabulary, decision-making, and yes, even poor outcomes, could be evaluated only by one another. Individuals who lacked specialized training could not reasonably judge the practice of the physician. Doctors were individuals who were above the common law because their specialized knowledge and expertise placed them outside of the usual human foibles of greed, immorality, corruption and ignorance; only other doctors were permitted to testify for or against physicians accused of malpractice or negligence. Such was the agreement between medicine and law for much of the last century.
The Fragrance Shed By A Violet: Murder in the Medical Center
One hundred years after the birth of the most successful corporation the world has ever seen, American medicine, it can feel like a chasm divides those who believe wholeheartedly in its claims of authority, and those of us who look with horror at overtreatment, poor outcomes, and deception.
When the National Institute of Mental Health says that half of all American adolescents have experienced mental illness, that isn’t psychiatry advancing as a field. It’s the result of various incentives for pathologizing ordinary struggle.
Love: I know nothing about it.”
My statement was in reply to a priest who had asked if anything was wrong. Mass had ended, and there I sat, alone in the big, cold New England Catholic Church. Staring at the quintessence of agonized suffering: the crucified Christ. Instead of coming to console with words or presence, the young priest merely smiled. But it was a smile that conveyed approval of what I had said. As if I had passed some kind of test. Perhaps I had.
The first article I wrote as a Catholic Christian was titledTo Love Is To Suffer, and was published in Canticle Magazine in the late nineties. In the piece, I alluded to then-New York City Cardinal John O’Connor’s writings and homilies on suffering. Cardinal O’Connor was bold in his defense of life, speaking aggressively against contraception, abortion, forseeing the current popularity for physician assisted suicide. There was no worse tragedy, he preached, than “wasted suffering.”
“Christ did not save the world when he was teaching or preaching,” he would say. “He saved the world when he was hanging on the cross.”
Our far-too-small hearts cannot come close to understanding the insane love of the Lord of the Universe for the humanity made in their image and likeness. But we can try, by pondersing Jesus’ birth, thirty-three years of life on earth, his last twenty-four hours: mystery, paradox, and more paradox. Fr. Derek Sadowski’s lovely piece, Abiding in Love and Truth, provides a method to do so.
“I find, in fact, that the more glimpses and tastes I receive of the goodness of God, the more I will suffer in aching for more. I see the same experience in the lives of the Saints and the prayer of any great mystic in our spiritual Tradition…As Brené Brown puts it, “Negative capability is a difficult muscle to build. We’re wired to resolve tension and seek certainty. This capability requires the ability to reach inward toward stillness rather than out toward counterfeit facts and reason.”
“Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).
“…negative capability…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Abiding in Love and Truth
