The phrase “There is nothig to do” and hang the label of “terminal” to our patients are things that must be in the past. If the goal of Medicine is healing, total health, beauty or youth, we are all destined to fail.




And if Society puts health professionals as soldiers against these battles, we will fight them with a very high personal cost both for the person we serve (futile life support therapy) as for us.

But when the goal is no longer the amount of life if not quality, when and what the most important thing for us is not only the ill subject, and we focus on the family… Things change!.

This new light that provide Palliative Care and I think that it is illuminating to all medicine. Thus, our action goes beyond the day of the death and continues with the family even long after care for family physicians. Bereavement care is another of the beautiful (and hard) work we can do.

But, what is grief? How to be able to understand that pain?. For me there is a song of Eric Clapton which explains it pretty well. Surely we know his notes but perhaps we have not read their translation and is so precious as hard. It makes me a lump in the throat whenever I listen it again. Eric Clapton wrote this song after the loss of his son when he was just four years old. I think that there is nothing more to add…Simply the video with subtitles.




Jose I. Ricarte