We all die Unfinished: A Meditation on Existential Suffering

The relief of existential suffering.

Advanced and progressive illnesses bring existential suffering to patients as an inevitable consequence of the disease and its treatment. Physicians need a typology of existential distress to aid its recognition and improved management. The major forms of existential challenge include (1) death anxiety, (2) loss and change, (3) freedom with choice or loss of control, (4) dignity of the self, (5...

Meditation increases compassionate responses to suffering.

We're all gonna die!

What’s a poor biomedical reporter to do when entire television networks and newspapers turn their undivided attention to suicidal terrorist pilots? Forget the scientific journals. Those stories won’t run. Try another stemcell story? Not unless it’s a terrorist cell. No, the solution is to scare the living daylights out of everybody. It’s called following the news. And what better way than to po...

May we die twice?

To the Editor: The re-analysis of the INSIGHT trial presented by Mancia and associates recently in Hypertension1 is questionable in some aspects and may not have internal validity. Any conclusion based on analysis of subgroups with a small proportion of the participants of the entire trial should be taken as hypothesis generating and may invalidate it if not established a priori.2 This report d...

Intensive meditation training influences emotional responses to suffering.

Meditation practices purportedly help people develop focused and sustained attention, cultivate feelings of compassionate concern for self and others, and strengthen motivation to help others who are in need. We examined the impact of 3 months of intensive meditative training on emotional responses to scenes of human suffering. Sixty participants were assigned randomly to either a 3-month inten...