The Evidence Is That People Who Enter

Our Reluctance To Honestly Examine The Experience Of Aging And Dying Has Increased The Harm We Inflict On People And Denied Them The Basic Comforts They Most Need.

After Readinf Some Essay On The Nature Of Human Fallibility, I Was Very Aware That We Are The Recipients Of A Huge Amount Of Discovery Over The Last Century. Medicine Exemplifies This. And That Has Transitioned Us From A World In Which People's Lives Were Mostly Governed By Ignorance To One That's Constrained By Ineptitude. A Century Ago, We Didn't Know, For Instance, What Diseases Afflicted Us, What Their Nature Really Was, Or What To Do About Them. And That Has Changed.

Outsiders Tend To Be The First To Recognize The Inadequacies Of Our Social Institutions. But, Precisely Because They Are Outsiders, They Are Usually In A Poor Position To Fix Them.

At Times, In Medicine, You Feel You Are Inside A Colossal And Impossibly Complex Machine Whose Gears Will Turn For You Only According To Their Own Arbitrary Rhythm. The Notion That Human Caring, The Effort To Do Better For People, Might Make A Difference Can Seem Hopelessly Naive. But It Isn't.

In Psychology, There's Something Called The Broken-leg Problem. A Statistical Formula May Be Highly Successful In Predicting Whether Or Not A Person Will Go To A Movie In The Next Week. But Someone Who Knows That This Person Is Laid Up With A Broken Leg Will Beat The Formula. No Formula Can Take Into Account The Infinite Range Of Such Exceptional Events.