By John Brewer Eberly, Jr., MD and Ben Frush, MD
We recently published a case commentary in the AMA Journal of Ethics titled, “What Should Physicians and Chaplains Do When a Patient Believes God Wants Him to Suffer?” which has us thinking about suffering, medicine, and our own convictions as Christians. As new graduates of medical school, we’ve found it important to take up these conversations not only with our fellow medical workers, but with our friends and pastors, both that we might learn from the suffering within their work and offer an inside perspective on modern medicine—an enterprise which we see as a particularly powerful, trust-shaping force rarely addressed from the pulpit. If those in medicine really do function as the “new priests” of modernity, we hope pastors, priests, and fellow believers will enter, take to task, and challenge these conversations at the intersections of theology, medicine, and culture.
Witnessing a person suffering is a common experience for medical workers. At times the suffering is quite ordinary (the cough or small cut). Other times it is intractable, excruciating, and nonsensical—the spine riddled with tumors, the pediatric cancer, the infant abuse. Folks in the healing profession are a strange bunch, for they feel a peculiar urge (the ancients would say “call”) to move toward such pain in hopes of healing.
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