Sublime

including dopamine researcher Dr. Anna Lembke, hormone expert Dr. Aviva Romm, neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart Bieber, and metabolic health specialist Dr. Casey Means (an impressive fan club, if I’ve ever seen one).

While our secular age seems to stymie pastors, surgeons like Kalanithi are awakening to the pastoral task as central and transformational. The invitation to share in the depth of human experience, to enter into the reality of death, seems to bring an overwhelming sense of transcendence within the most immanent of occupations.

In the United States, hospitals often affiliate with specialized treatment centers, primary care physicians (family doctors), and so forth, but regulators usually squash these affiliations as anticompetitive and monopolistic unless there is evidence of “clinical integration.”