Dealing with death: Unavoidable med student rite of passage

Dealing with death: Unavoidable med student rite of passage
Medscape; by Joanna Broder; 6/23/25
When Kristina Newport, MD, was a first-year medical resident doing a night shift at a small veterans’ hospital, one of her patients, who was very sick with multiple chronic diseases, made the decision to forego further treatments... Ultimately, this patient died peacefully with his daughter sitting next to him. For Newport, the experience was “remarkable” and transformative and led her to go into palliative care medicine. It was also so different from many of the patient deaths that followed, where the teams she was part of tried many interventions to no avail. “Our job is to alleviate suffering,” Newport told Medscape Medical News. “And sometimes that means allowing people to die naturally. And so, my first experience really cemented that and helped me to understand how valuable it is to play a therapeutic role in that situation and allow that process to happen.”
Notable mentions: Raya Kheirbek, Ira Byock, and Kayla Fresco.