BJ Miller, M.D.: How understanding death leads to a better life

A meaningful life, a good life, is not the absence of suffering. Suffering teaches us too much. It's too important of vehicle for us, actually. A full life requires it.

It's one thing to know details about molecules—how they work, but it's a very different thing to know why it's amazing to have molecules in the first place ... If you're going to go into the healing professions and clinical professions, you better find a way to delve into why life is amazing and horrifying. Why is it so hard to let go of? Why is it so hard to love life when you know it's going away? What is this all about? In other words, questions around meaning and identity.

What's the best major that I would recommend for someone who wants to go into medicine? I don't have great insight on this, but the one thing I generally suggest is anything other than pre-med ... Whether you study art history or engineering or a foreign language and a foreign culture, you're probably going to get something out of it that you would never get if you studied pre-med ... Most of everything you study in pre-med you're going to pick up in medical school.

I don't buy the narrative that we have an obesity crisis just because people are fat, dumb, and lazy. I think we live in a toxic food environment, and we don't have a healthcare system that's really geared to help people out of it.

There really is no time like the present to say what it is you want to say to people who matter. It's not the movie where your final breath is asking for forgiveness or telling somebody you forgive them or that you love them—that's very unlikely to happen.

People die much more miserable than they need to because they haven't dared to look at this thing called death before it's too late.

Why do human beings make art? Why do we take the material of our life, and create with it, and fashion something from it that wasn't there before but now exists thanks to us? It's kind of a stunning impulse that human beings have. Whether you're making art that's going to hang in a museum or you're just futzing around your house, we are a very creative species.

Just physiologically... we are wired to run away from death. Any threat to our existence, we have deep wiring that makes us fight that thing or flea it.

I would challenge HHS [The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] to read the definition of palliative care and tell me why the definition of palliative care isn't the mission of all of healthcare.