Bioethics Seminar: Coping with death
One of the more difficult areas of human existence is addressing, adapting to, and responding to when a person dies. The metaphor I prefer for this is that when a person dies the fabric of the community is rent and the practices and processes surrounding death are designed to re-weave the community.
My hypothesis is that in the Modern era there is a loss of cultural knowledge (previously held within faith communities and indigenous communities) on how to address dying and that medical students frequently grapple with how to respond to the death of patients. I believe that the profession's difficulty in managing death (best described in Atul Gawande “Being Mortal”) could be related to a lack of comfort of doctors around dying.
This presentation will illustrate this hypothesis by describing my own process as a GP of learning to manage death and dying and speculate on the ways in which we could assist our students to be more comfortable around death.
Speaker: Ben Gray