A Tense Moment: When a Patient Wants You to Pray With Them.

One day on rounds, (the time when everyone on a particular rotation, med students, residents, and the attendings or the boss, walk around and see every patient on that particular service) I had an attending (my boss) ask me what my religion was.  This was all sparked by a patient we had just seen that talked up God so much, that I'm not really sure why she was in the hospital.  She made it seem like he was doing everything to help her, and we, mere mortals were just giving her a place to sleep other than her own bed. As you could have guessed, I'm on open Atheist, and so I answered my attending by telling him so.

You should have seen his face.

A mixture of surprise, disappointment, and anger.  He started to turn red and began a rant about how could I possibly think I was going to be a good physician if I don't have God in my life.  I listened attentively but said nothing, until he asked:

"What would you do if that patient we just saw had asked you to pray with her? Huh? Are you going to disappoint her?"

He got more than he bargained for with this question.  I replied:

"Of course not, I would have no problem praying with her.  Afterall, it's not against my religion to pray, and it doesn't harm me at all, but if it has a possibility of helping one of my patients feel better or more comfortable, I would have no problem doing it."

It was my turn for a question. My attending was obviously devoutly Catholic, as he made this fact known practically every day.  So, I asked him:

"What would you do if a patient asked you to pray with them and they were Buddhist?  What if they were Jewish?  What if they were Muslim and they asked you to get down on a prayer mat after washing your hands and feet and praying with them because it would make them feel better.  Would you?"

He did not appreciate this questioning at all.  First off, attendings are the ones that are used to asking all the questions.  Residents and medical students rarely question attendings, it's all part of the culture of medical education.  My attending seemed angry and flustered, but eventually answered that

"Of course I wouldn't, it would be against my religion!"

I smiled, and was content with this interaction.  It was good for me, because it made me more confident that I could assert myself and my beliefs, or lack there of, but more importantly, it taught everyone that had watched this interaction something as well.  It taught them that Atheist does not mean "religion hating" or "intolerant".  I in fact was far more tolerant of other religions than my attending.
If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm not actually against religion.  Do they get on my nerves sometimes? yes. Does it cause a great deal of strife across and within cultures? Yes.  But I also know that some people need religion as their crutch.  If they have nothing else, it is what gets them through their day, their illness, their life.  Who am I to take that away?  I support religion so long as it doesn't harm or infringe upon others.  That is where I draw the line, and I defend that line vehemently.

Take care, and I hope everyone has a wonderful week.

-The Atheist Physician.

Death and Dying

As an open Atheist, you can expect to hear this question frequently: "How can you not believe that there is something better waiting for you in the afterlife?"  The easy answer is that I simply do not need to believe it.  I'm happy with my life as it is, and for me, this is all I get, this life and no other.  I consider myself lucky to be, but a blip on the radar of time.  The amount of time I occupy this earth is nothing more than a minuscule fraction of all of time.  The reason I am on this earth is simply because, evolutionarily, I was selected for, and my purpose is nothing more than to live my life, enjoy it, try to help others as much as possible, leaving the earth better than when I came into it, and dying so that someone else may take my place.  Like it or not, there are limited resources on this earth and every person and every organism that has ever lived could never occupy it at the same time.  We all die so that someone or some thing else may take our places.  It's truly that simple.

In my profession, I am faced with death on a rather frequent basis.  Many people would describe my business as a battle with death, in an attempt to win.  If I win, my patient survives, if I lose, my patient dies.  I'm not happy with that analogy though, for a few reasons.  First, I can never win the battle with death.  The best I can do is to delay it.  Second, I do not view death as the "enemy." Just before his passing, the first patient to take advantage of the physician assisted suicide law in Oregon (AKA the Death with Dignity Law) told his physician "Doctor, death is not the enemy, the enemy is humanity."  Indeed I cannot count the number of times in which I have witnessed death to be merciful.  After all, I am an Atheist and this life is all I have to live for, why would I want to spend it suffering?  A very wise man once told me, that as a physician, my job is to help my patients die as young as possible, as late in life as possible.  I strive to reach this mark each and every day.

The next question that I inevitably receive is: "So, there's no afterlife according to you, so what exactly is there?"  My reply is just as simple as my answer to their first question, and happens to be a quote from Epicurus, I'm certain that "your non-existence after death will be no worse than your non-existence prior to your birth."  This seems to bring my view about the afterlife into a better prospective for the believers in a heaven, nirvana, or otherwise enlightened state postmortem.

Because I deal with death and dying on a near daily basis, it's an area that is rather interesting to me, you should expect more writings on it in the future.  I'm only getting started.

-The Atheist Physician