The Beauty of Impermanence | Sunita Puri, MD

The Doctor's Art

Despite the optimism of modern healthcare promising ever more miraculous cures, there are inevitably moments in medicine that compel us to face the fact that not all problems can be fixed. Recognizing the limits of medicine and navigating the space between what can be done and what should be done for a patient requires a fundamental shift in mindset, one imbued with an understanding that sometimes acceptance is the most compassionate response. Our guest on this episode, palliative care physician Sunita Puri, MD, has dedicated her life to probing this delicate space, uncovering wisdom along the way on what it means to live and die with purpose and dignity. She is the author of the 2019 memoir That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, and her writings have often appeared in The New York Times. In this conversation, we explore how she discovered palliative medicine, the importance of language in medicine's most difficult moments, and how impermanence and grief help us make meaning out of a world that often seems chaotic and senseless.

In this episode, you will hear about:

• How Dr. Puri’s relationship with her parents drew her into medicine - 2:46
• The inspirational way that Dr. Puri’s physician mother connected with patients - 4:49
• Dr. Puri’s experiences entering the field of palliative care - 10:56
• Reflections on what Dr. Puri needed to “unlearn” over the course of her career as a physician - 15:36
• The recognition that not all diseases can be cured and not all problems can be fixed - 21:37
• Advice on how to engage patients and families when further curative medical interventions are futile - 32:29
• Dr. Puri’s experiences on helping other doctors through difficult moments - 38:56
• Why Dr. Puri writes and how she came to write her book That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour - 43:43
• Grief, empathy, and the sacred mission of medicine - 49:24

In addition to her memoir That Good Night, we also discussed her New York Times article "We Must Learn to Look at Grief Even When We Want to Run Away."

You can follow Dr. Sunita Puri on Twitter @SunitaPuriMD.

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