Concentrate On If Poem by gershon hepner

Where's a chance that the gods will send
us harm we all should concentrate
on “if” instead of “when, ” to add
an optimistic charm to fate.

By replacing “when” with “if”
we give our fate a chance to smile,
and with an upper lip that's stiff
delay our sentence for a while.

Inspired by an article in the Science Times of the NYT on June 9 by Jane E. Brody (“Well-Chosen Words in the Doctor's Office”) :

What do you want from your doctor, especially if you have a serious or life-threatening illness? Researchers who conducted interviews a few years ago with 192 patients at the Mayo Clinics in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Rochester, Minn., identified seven “ideal physician behaviors.” Patients want their doctors to be “confident, empathetic, humane, personal, forthright, respectful and thorough, ” the researchers wrote in Mayo Clinic Proceedings in 2006. At the same time, of course, patients want their health problems properly diagnosed and competently treated. How, in the course of the 15 minutes that the typical patient gets to spend with a doctor, can all this happen? With doctors increasingly pressed for time, how can they offer both the clinical expertise and the compassionate care that all patients deserve? And what can patients do to get what they most want from their doctors? In her new book, “Only 10 Seconds to Care: Help and Hope for Busy
Clinicians” (ACP Press) , Dr. Wendy Schlessel Harpham combines her experience as an internist and her nearly 18 years of experience as a cancer patient to show how simple actions and well-chosen words on the part of medical professionals can make an enormous difference in a patient’s emotional and physical well-being...Rather than focus solely on the expected outcome when a prognosis is dismal, Dr. Harpham urges doctors to “share both your expectations and your hopes with your patients.” She says that “people can expect one thing and hope for another” and reminds health professionals that they are “obligated never to extinguish hope.” She concludes, “We foster hope by telling patients that we are prepared to care for them through the likely outcome and are hoping they make an unexpected and inexplicable recovery that proves our prognosis wrong.”


6/9/09