Editorial Comment 3/31/2020: Brevity

1. Brevity in access to courses and presentations, for this week :  April 3-4 introduces the distance independent  “ASAM Virtual 2020.”  A heroic accomplishment by staff and faculty to provide content equal in quality and breadth to that in the annual scientific meetings, it is April 3-4; and because of its electronic facilitation, both real-time and recorded, registration is available to and through the sessions. Additional sessions will be provided throughout the month of April. 
2. Brevity in the articles offered this week abstracted in this week’s ASAM Weekly:  Still 6 in number but chosen with an eye to topical concision.  If ASAM Weekly can be said to have a superego,  then its byword is brevity.
3. Brevity in practice:  clinicians will know better than politicians, and even more than poets, the necessity for compactness in messaging.  It is not just a matter of being constrained for time by coders and insurance reviewers. It is about providing a message that the patient will grasp on the first pass; crudely, a soundbite, but with the intent of memorable guidance. Doctors are generally impatient with lengthy perorations (well, maybe excepting their own, at society dinners).  This is truly the case when they are trying to find the words that will comfort their patients, staff, and fellow clinicians and give them proper guidance. 
4. Brevity of life:

a. In epidemics – and in wars, fast natural disasters (volcanoes, tsunami, earthquakes), slow natural disasters (droughts, famines, polar meltdowns) – no one is ever completely prepared.  Such that, even when the catastrophe has passed, we are invited to examine our destiny and legacies, and inventory where they are wanting.    Legacies are not all that easy to create for something as small as a man. And for physicians, whose task is relentless, the restoring of health – frequently without the full cooperation of the patient - it is generally modest.  You may not staple a brass plaque onto your recovering patient.

b. Mankind may lust for long life, but historically lives have been a brief encounter.  Only in the past century have we become accustomed to the luxury of retirement; 70 years of life was less an expectation than an ambition.  Perhaps a distinction between 1919 and now, two pandemics a century apart, was the perception then that destiny is a short-term relationship. Without a great expectation, there may have been disappointment but also less fear.

- Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM