What is Notes from a Family Meeting?
Notes from a Family Meeting is a newsletter where I hope to join the curious conversations that hang about the intersections of health and the human condition. Poems and medical journals alike will join us in our explorations. For good or ill, all the content is written by me. Nothing has been written by artificial intelligence.
In medicine, patients and their families meet together with their clinicians at critical junctures in their care. Together, they face stark realities and grapple with staggering decisions. Family meetings are one of the few places in modern medicine where we can look beyond all the technology to behold the fundamentally humble nature of this work: we’re people helping people. That doesn’t mean these meetings are easy. Cultures clash in family meetings, as the participants struggle to see and name some kind of shared reality about people and things that really matter.
I’m a physician trained in internal medicine, psychiatry, and palliative medicine. Just like I’ll always be a student of the human body, so, too, am I always trying to gather more wisdom and compassion in order to use my medical knowledge well. Surely the best uses of that knowledge help restore people to wholeness. Too often we offer blankets without warmth, food without fellowship, and sleep without rest. Still, as Stanley Hauerwas observed, “Medicine is but a gesture, but an extremely significant gesture of society, that while we all suffer from a condition that cannot be cured, nonetheless neither will we be abandoned.”
The cover image is “Peasant family at the table” by Jozef Israëls (1882). Although it has nothing to do with medicine, it actually has much to do with health: I see, among other things, community, nourishment, development, care, and hardship. It helps me to remember that we belong to our families - however we might define them. Even if our families are gone, even if we’ve left them or they’ve left us, we live in the light (or shadow) of their influence. Seeing that family sit around a small table helps me to remember that medicine serves greater ends than mere physiology and is part of a bigger context than itself.
It also helps me dream of a time when maybe we as a society could come together in a family meeting of sorts to talk about those things that matter most. That is one hope I have for these notes here, that I could share the small kernels of vitality I’ve sifted in my work and reading. Maybe we could come to the table together, with all our differences, for this big ol’ family meeting.
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Words Elsewhere
J. Briscoe. When It Comes to Deactivating Pacemakers at the End of Life, Intention is at the Heart of the Matter. Caring for the Ages. 2024.
J. Briscoe, E. Widera. Law not loopholes: medical aid in dying for those with dementia. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. 2024.
J. Briscoe. Help My Unbelief. Mere Orthodoxy. 2023.
J. Briscoe. Finding a Way Towards a Better Medicine: A Review of: Curlin and Tollefsen. 2021. The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession. Christian Bioethics. 2023.
J. Briscoe. Affirming Dignity: Arguments Against Medical Aid in Dying. Psychiatric Times. 2022.
J. Briscoe. Hope in the Hospital: A Lesson from “The Sandman.” Closler. 2022.
J. Briscoe. Dying, But Not Alone. The New Atlantis. 2021.
J. Briscoe, A. Kamal, and D. Casarett. Top Ten Tips Palliative Care Clinicians Should Know About Medical Cannabis. Journal of Palliative Medicine. 2019.
P. Riordan, J. Briscoe, T. Uritsky, C. Jones, and J. Webb. Top Ten Tips Palliative Care Clinicians Should Know About Psychopharmacology. Journal of Palliative Medicine. 2019.
J. Briscoe and D. Casarett. Medical Marijuana Use in Older Adults. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. 2018.
P. Riordan, J. Briscoe, A. Kamal, C. Jones, and J. Webb. Top Ten Tips Palliative Care Clinicians Should Know About Mental Health and Serious Illness. Journal of Palliative Medicine. 2018.
J. Briscoe. The Sacrament of Medication? Fathom Magazine. 2018.
J. Briscoe and W. Kinghorn. Spirituality, Religion, and Rational Suicide. In, Rational Suicide in the Elderly. 2016.
