By Dannell Stuart, ChFC®, CLU®, CASL®
Partner, Client Advisor and Director of Business Development
Last month, Mission Wealth was honored to sponsor Hospice and Palliative Care Specialist Dr. BJ Miller through UCSB Arts & Lectures. A video of his Jan. 11 conversation with Pico Iyer can be found on UCSB Arts & Lectures YouTube channel.
Dr. Miller has an interesting background as a triple amputee and former Art History major at Princeton. As you will learn from the interview, he decided to pursue medicine in an attempt to make sense of his own accident and suffering. The timing for his visit to Santa Barbara was profound, as it occurred just 2 days after our area was devastated by the mudslides in Montecito on Jan. 9.
Dr. Miller’s passion for this topic is contagious. His talk was particularly poignant to me after enduring the illness and loss of my mother just 15 months ago. Death and end of life care have been on my mind more than ever before.
Furthermore, as a trustee and volunteer with Visiting Nurse & Hospice Care of Santa Barbara, I could really relate to Dr. Miller’s perspective on disease and dying. As he so eloquently states in this conversation, death is not optional. Dying is not a failure. Let us never be surprised that we die. Let us never be surprised that life is hard!
As our population ages, hospice and palliative care will continue to be critical and relevant. The typical physician’s job has been to keep the patient alive, whereas the palliative care physician's job is to understand the patient and link them to the kind of care that is going to serve them best. Throughout this process, sometimes they have to help the patient reconcile with the fact that they are dying. Dr. Miller's goal is to help change the frame of reference for healthcare providers - rather than focusing on the disease, how can we all work to focus on the person with the disease?
I hope you enjoy this talk as much as I did!
