Mohammed Umer Waris

Every New Year arrives with its familiar rituals. We raise a glass, make a resolution, and offer a toast to things we hope will be different this time around: better habits, better balance, better health. We say “I’ll drink to that” as shorthand for optimism, an easy affirmation that the future is still negotiable and a longer life is possible. Then along comes a map. At first glance, it looks political, counties shaded red and blue, borders sharp enough to stir tribal instincts.

Causing quite a stir, Mark Zuckerberg (Meta’s CEO) recently proposed Artificial Intelligence (AI) companionship for those suffering from social isolation. All of this unfolds amid a climate of epidemic-levels of loneliness, as declared by the Surgeon General, and the storms it has unleashed upon the edifices of our personal and collective health.

We work in an impossibly depleted health care system and under impossibly high expectations of perfection from society. We hold our peers, our team members, our trainees, and most of all, ourselves to rigid, lofty ideals of flawlessness. By glorifying perfectionism in medicine, we have effectively dehumanized ourselves. The oath we take is “Do No Harm.” It is not “Try your best to do no harm.” Is it appropriate to expect such absolute perfection from mere mortals?