Giving Thanks
Dear Readers:
Our times are marked by constant information at our fingertips; bits of information come to us in snippets, written by friends, family, strangers, and even something called artificial intelligence. The quality, importance, relevance, and need for much of that information is often questionable. In addition, this overabundance of information can lead to us feeling unmoored and possibly even overwhelmed.
However, we health care providers have so much to be thankful for. First and foremost are our patients and the trust they put in us. The very real and tangible expectations of care and human interaction that we face every day give us a reality that many do not experience. Even more so, we who provide wound-related care often see our patients weekly or monthly (sometimes multiple times a week), getting to know them and participating in their healing process. We get to use our innate compassion, learned knowledge, and acquired skill to help heal our patients’ wounds. There are many frustrations in medicine: the overbearing electronic medical record, the uninformed third-party payer, the recalcitrant medical condition. However, the patient should never be considered one of them. They have chosen to partner with us to help make them better, and we are privileged to be allowed to help them.
In addition, we can work with likeminded individuals who have chosen health care and more specifically wound care and wound closure, because they are interested in it and they like the challenge. We therefore can discuss complex problems with the experts to provide enhanced care to our patients. In addition, many of us have the chance to mentor the next generation of clinicians in the care and healing of our patients. Explaining the pathophysiology of disease helps us hone our educational skills, while the trainees’ questions often open our minds to new ideas or help to focus our own clinical thoughts and algorithms of care.
Unlike the waterfall of information that greets us daily, we can reach out to find information that is germane to our professional life. We can go to sources, such as Wounds, to look for cutting-edge information that can help us improve patients’ lives—by healing wounds quicker or by simply making patients more comfortable. We can use the information at our fingertips, in a precise and thoughtful fashion, driven by our dedication to patient well-being. We are not forced to sift through endless amounts of material to find the answers to specific questions.
In short, our patients and the improvement of the underlying condition gives us, the wound care clinician, a professional purpose daily. Whether we are providing hands-on wound care, performing wound-related surgery, diagnosing a wound-causing medical condition, writing a journal article, or teaching a student, it is the patient and their confidence in us to help them that drives us. It is often that we are thanked by our patients for healing them, for caring for them, and for being there; there is nothing wrong at all with thanking them in return for allowing us to take care of them, for putting their trust in us and allowing us to partner with them. After all, we are in this together on their journey to healing.
John C. Lantis II, MD
Editor-in-Chief, Wounds
woundseditor@hmpglobal.com
