How the perception of the medical profession changes in front of death request

Abstract

In an evolving society, death reappears as an existential urgency. Although technological progress and medical sciences have facilitated a technical response to the demand for health, the subjectivism of treatment technology often relegates the patient to existential solitude. Even in the presence of a therapy for his illness, the patient does not have the opportunity for a relationship to care for his suffering. This dichotomy of care, which is subdivided on the one hand into ‘treating’ and on the other into ‘being present’, leads, especially in the context of the end of life, to the risk of attesting care to the technical level alone, making the patient’s request to the doctor to ‘administer’ the end of life ‘justified’, suppressing the relational echo of the doctor’s return to the patient’s human need. This article aims to recover the reflections linked to clinical and human experience preparatory to accompanying the patient in a relational pathway by offering him, in the various stages of care, a “return echo”, useful in not compressing the physician’s perception at the level of automatic dispenser.