Abstract
The goals of medicine tend to be framed around addressing suffering, pathology, and
functional deficits. While this is a natural orientation when dealing with serious
illness, it is also incomplete and neglects significant opportunities to improve the
quality of life of patients, families, and clinicians. The “total enjoyment of life”
is a multidimensional framework that can serve as a positive counterbalance to the
“total pain of illness.” It allows clinicians, researchers, policymakers, and other
stakeholders to take a systematic and comprehensive approach to the active promotion
of well-being. The five opportunities for enhancing well-being in this framework are
meaning, social connections, happiness/contentment, spiritual transcendence, and pleasure.
Applying these concepts in clinical settings, patients, families, and clinicians can
together find opportunities to increase the total enjoyment of life in the face of
incurable and intractable illnesses. For family care partners, these concepts can
be applied to improve self-care, enhance relationships, and develop more creative
approaches to supporting a loved one living with illness. Clinicians working with
these concepts may find their clinical work more satisfying and impactful and can
also apply these concepts to their own lives to increase wellness. In clinical research,
this framework can be applied to improve intervention effectiveness and relevance
of outcome measures. Lastly, these concepts have the potential to impact public health
approaches that focus on well-being and flourishing as the goal and metric of a healthy
society.
Keywords
joy - meaning - love - neurologic illness - family caregiver - provider well-being
