Research says yes:
When tested for empathy, medical students at baseline generally scored higher than their nonmedical peers. But, as medical students experienced more burnout, there was a corresponding drop in the level of empathy toward patients.
Pauline Chen writes about the possibility that the more empathic potential doctors may be the ones most vulnerable to burnout in medical school.
It’s why more support is needed to help medical students through the grueling training process.
For those suffering through the pre-clinical years of school, I found that things got much better during clinical rotations the last two years.
And even though residency was tough hours-wise, I had a good time as it was much closer to what I envisioned myself doing today.
topics: medical school, empathy
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{ 2 comments }
At my medical school, I felt that empathy was not rewarded, with the possible exception of psychiatry, despite administrative word-service to the contrary. The “big fields”, ie surgery and internal medicine, valued empathy at zero. And other fields such as pediatrics and family practice (my chosen field) were not far behind.
However, I’m not so sure that this process of minimzing empathy is impracxtical; in fact, I think in some ways, it prepares doctors for future practice.
Today, empathy is rarer than ever, in my opinion, due to the merging of an old-fashioned paternalistic approach and the modern consumer driven/business model approach. In the “real” world, empathetic doctors are frequently crticized as inefficient and impractical.
Empathy can be powerful in the doctor patient relationship, but it hurts. Docs at the least need to be able to turn it off sometimes. Even psychiatrists. What do you call doctors who can’t? Impaired. The best doctors retain the capacity for empathy, but learn to regulate it and even turn it off altogether according to the demands of the situation.
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