If it doesn't work, stop it

Editor—“The aphorism `Don't just do something, stand there!' seems ludicrous.”¹

Does it?

Reading this reminded me of something a student wrote in a reflective piece at the end of the University of Bristol's fifth year preregistration house officer shadowing course. She was confronted on a ward round for senior house officers with an extremely unwell, very breathless man. The house officer and senior house officer sprang into action. She looked at him and realised he was dying, and dying soon.

While everyone else examined him, gave him oxygen, and arranged investigations she looked on and wondered if she would be capable of such actions when she qualified. She also described feeling powerless, and that there was nothing she could do. She wrote: “And then the words of a particular palliative care consultant came into my mind: `If there is nothing else to do, you can hold their hand.' So I did. He died shortly afterwards.”

Sometimes there is nothing to do, or there is nothing doctors should do, in terms of management or treatment.

Medicine entails “ritual, custom, and the expectations of doctors, patients, and society.”¹ But it also entails compassion and humanity, the ability to be with someone and to give of yourself as a human being. And that is what this student did. Sometimes the aphorism might read: “Don't just do something, hold my hand.” And that would not be ludicrous.