Good medicine

If what we do as doctors is not supposed to do any harm, then really good medicine is characterized by one thing above all: it works.

It does not just act on the patient, but works out of the patient.

If you want to check this, ask a patient how it feels to walk again, to see again or to be freed from pain. Or how it feels to smile again from the inside, to look awake - and by that I don't mean looking in the mirror or in the lifeless echo chambers of self-dramatization.

No, I'm thinking here of people who can look at each other again.

And not because their face now looks better, no: because they have managed to get out of the cellar (as one patient once wrote to me) thanks to medical treatment of their face.

(I have operated.)

This patient climbed the steps all by herself.