The Evidence Is That People Who Enter

In The End, People Don't View Their Life As Merely The Average Of All Its Moments-which, After All, Is Mostly Nothing Much Plus Some Sleep. For Human Beings, Life Is Meaningful Because It Is A Story. A Story Has A Sense Of A Whole, And Its Arc Is Determined By The Significant Moments, The Ones Where Something Happens. Measurements Of People's Minute-by-minute Levels Of Pleasure And Pain Miss This Fundamental Aspect Of Human Existence. A Seemingly Happy Life Maybe Empty. A Seemingly Difficult Life May Be Devoted To A Great Cause. We Have Purposes Larger Than Ourselves.

Arriving At An Acceptance Of One's Mortality Is A Process, Not An Epiphany.

You Want To Ensure People Can Do It Right 99 Percent Of Time. When We Have To Fire One Of Our Surgical Trainees, It Is Never Because They Dont Have The Physical Skills But Because They Dont Have The Moral Skills - To Practise And Admit Failure.

We Now Have 30 Percent, For Example, Of Medicare Patients Who Are Seeing Doctors Who Are Rewarded For Doing This Kind Of Work, Like High Blood Pressure Control. So, The Affordable Care Act Has Pushed This Direction Down The Road.

The Possibilities And Probabilities Are All We Have To Work With In Medicine, Though. What We Are Drawn To In This Imperfect Science, What We In Fact Covet In Our Way, Is The Alterable Moment-the Fragile But Crystalline Opportunity For One's Know-how, Ability, Or Just Gut Instinct To Change The Course Of Another's Life For The Better.