Let go of the guilt

Edwin Leap with another must-read column:

And worst of all, we feel guilty about suffering and death. Because, especially in emergency rooms around America, what we see is a lot of both. We learned, as medical students, that death was the thing we were supposed to stop. And our constant inability to stem the tide of the death epidemic (now in it’s gazillionth year) fills us with untold milligrams of pure, autoclaved, concentrated guilt . . .

. . .Our culture doesn’t help the guilt problem. Every tragedy, every inconvenience, must be blamed on someone. We have review boards and commissions, congressional inquiries and consulting bodies, plaintiff’s attorneys and medical boards, and it seems at times that all they do is sit around trying to assign guilt (never guilty themselves, of course, for the problems and even tragedies caused by layers of administrative refuse).