Changing the way that we see death –An Evening with Dr. B.J. Miller

by the Beth Donovan Hospice

Dr. B.J. Miller’s story starts when he was a sophomore at Princeton and decided to climb a commuter train parked at a rail station, for fun. When he got to the top, electrical current arced out of a piece of equipment into the watch on his wrist. Eleven-thousand volts shot through his left arm and down his legs.

Doctors took each leg just below the knee, then they turned to his arm. For weeks, the hospital staff considered him close to death. But Miller, in a devastated haze, didn’t know that. He only worried about who he would be when he survived.

When he entered medical school years later he discovered palliative care, an approach to medicine very similar to his approach to recovery. He now talks about his recovery as a creative act, “a transformation,” and argues that all suffering offers the same opportunity, even at the end of life, which gradually became his professional focus.

Dr. Miller’s TED Talk, “What Really Matters at the End of Life,” about keeping the patient at the center of care and encouraging empathic end-of-life care, has garnered over 9 million views to date and ranked among the most viewed talks.

Dr. Miller is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), and is an attending specialist for the Symptom Management Service of the UCSF Helen Diller Comprehensive Cancer Center, one of the country’s very first outpatient palliative care clinics. He is the Dream Foundation Honorary Medical Chair, the only national dream-granting organization for terminally-ill adults. He is also the co-founder of Mettle Health helping cli-