CME Accredited

Patrick Kelly, MD

This section will examine how the experience of suffering, both past and present, affects the potential for human flourishing, seeking to synthesize the most recent literature on this point. The reason for doing so it that as clinicians treating suffering patients, not merely in the midst of a global pandemic but more importantly in the everyday reality of chronic, often intractable, incurable diseases, this question of the potential paradox of flourishing may have powerful value. To ask further questions, is it the case that our patient's suffering invariably mitigates against flourishing? Or can there possibly be a paradoxical relationship? That is to say, does suffering hold within it the potential of contributing to greater degrees of flourishing in a way in which our current understanding does not fully take into account? In our review of the literature on flourishing, the question we will keep in mind will be, is it possible for patients to reach these proposed levels of flourishing with the character trait formation associated with them without first passing through challenges, hardships and even suffering?