Vision personnelle et professionnelle d'un gériatre sur la mort et de la fin de vie : un parcours pédagogique d'éthique de la sollicitude

Medical art requires a long period of teaching and training through a companionship, which can be initiatory by its nature. One of the most revealing steps of the transition from student to responsible physician is experiencing a patient's death or end of life. This article aims to reveal how my personal questionings along my medical, geriatric and palliative curriculum on these topics questions my medical practice. From a false and idealized representation of a permanent victory of medical progress against sickness and death, our academic courses allows us to better grasp the limits of medical practice, disability, the unavoidable end of life as well as the optimal palliative care. Applied education, practice and confrontation with our real limits also question the patient's place in decisions as important as their end of life. This mobilizes some medical skills: patient's advocate, humanist, reflective. Doing so, a physician can undertake the care of the patient until his death, respects his dignity and informed choices and doesn't leave him alone when he is facing the most incomprehensible experience, death, including social death. This personal path of a theoretical and applied learning of geriatrics and palliative care testifies an appropriation of Paul Ricoeur's ethics of solicitude (or ethics of care), which leads to recognize our own vulnerability by recognizing the other's one.