In medicine, suffering matters: encountering suffering and helping patients cope with, and navigate through suffering, are key functions of healthcare. In addition, the concept of suffering plays an important role in many high-stake areas of medical ethics including medical aid-in-dying and/or euthanasia, moral distress/burnout, and policies addressing “futility,” or medically-ineffective treatment. Yet for all its gravity and salience, the concept of suffering is underdetermined. In this webinar, I will briefly survey the history of “suffering” in American biomedicine. Then, I will discuss my own research on suffering and offer recommendations on how clinicians and bioethicists can [1] think more clearly about suffering, [2] respond to suffering ethically, and [3] accompany patients well along the road of suffering and illness.
Learning Objectives: After this webinar, attendees will be able to:
- Review theories of suffering in medicine and bioethics.
- Discuss the two kinds of suffering: suffering undergone, and suffering experienced.
- Analyze the ethics of suffering: what can suffering justify?
- Consider humanistic ways of engaging suffering: can suffering be healed?
Speaker(s)
Tyler Tate, MD, MA, is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University, where he works as a pediatrician, palliative care physician, writer, and ethicist. Dr. Tate's scholarly interests include suffering and flourishing, love and emotions, religion and bioethics, narrative medicine, and pediatric ethics. He practices pediatric palliative care and serves as a clinical ethicist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. He is also core faculty in the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics (SCBE). Prior to coming to Stanford he was an assistant professor at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon where he practiced both adult and pediatric palliative care. In 2024, he received a Hastings Center Cunniff-Dixon Early-Career Physician Award and was named a Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar. He completed his pediatric residency, clinical ethics fellowship, and master’s degree in bioethics at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, and his palliative care fellowship at Duke University in Durham, NC.