Health-care conversion

David Heim recently highlighted
the article
in the June 9 issue of The New Republic
(subscribers only) by pioneer bioethicist Daniel Callahan and Sherwin B.
Nuland, author of How We Die.
According to Callahan and Nuland, our health-care system has for decades
"been waging an unrelenting war against disease," with dire effects
on the culture. But something can be done about it. Simply (!) it will take,
"to use a religious term in a secular way-something like a conversion
experience on the part of physicians, researchers, industry, and our nation as
a whole."

Religious professionals are not mentioned in the article,
but the phrase "conversion experience" will get their attention. They
ought to have something to say on the subject of a health-care system obsessed
with finding cures for lethal diseases, and some may be saying it. But their
voices on this subject tend to be muted, reflecting their sickroom- and
hospice-honed experience.

I left parish ministry 48 years ago, but I recall vividly
the training that went into pastoral care for those aged who were chronically
or terminally ill: you do talk about death, and about meeting it. You are
called to help people let go of this life and not to depend on hugely expensive
but, in the end, futile and fatal endeavors to "conquer" cancer and other
unconquerables through unaffordable investments.