How do you know which doctors are the ones who can appropriately comfort patients during times of suffering?
You don’t.
Anesthesiologist Dr. T talks about how medical schools don’t really screen which prospective physicians are “cavalry-ready,” or not.
“People are either ready, willing, and able to be close to human suffering – to look at a weeping man, woman, or child in the eye, talk to people in distress, touch their wounds, embrace broken bodies and wounded souls, without recoiling – or they’re not,” she writes, “and they have to build up layers of arrogance, insensitivity, and cynicism in order to function. You’re either afraid of it or willing to confront it face-to-face. There’s no check-box for that on medical school applications.”
Well said.
Although more medical schools are adding curriculum to “train” doctors’ bedside manner, physicians either have empathy or they don’t. It’s not something that can be learned well.
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Tufts Medical School has an entire program of graduate study and a certificate program teaching medical professionals to deal with and respond appropriately to pain.
Check it out…
http://www.tufts.edu/med/education/phpd/msprep/index.html
It’s also important for dentists. I know, i just has a root canal.
I think that doctors need more education on pain management. Many won’t prescribe pain meds because they are mistakenly afraid of addiction. Being a chronic pain patient myself I also know that few doctors take into consideration the fact that my ability to function is necessary for me to take care of my family. It effects every facet of my life and yet many physicians label any patient who comes through the door asking for pain medication a drug seeker.
I do not think you can “train” doctors, or nurses for that matter, to have empathy. You certainly can role-model it however. A class or lecture on empathy is meaningless. It would be much more powerful to show true compassion to a patient while you are at their bedside, with the medical students at your side. If doctors have to “build up layers of arrogance, insensitivity, and cynicism in order to function”, then there is something seriously wrong with the state of medical education. Who is helping these young doctors deal themselves with the suffering of human life they see day in and day out? My guess is no one is.
Not prescribing pain medications has nothing to do with lack of empathy. It has nothing to do with “fear of addiction.” It has everything to do with fear of legal ramifications. Maintaining pain patients on chronic narcotics would be easy. Instead, I refer everyone to pain management or try to fire them from my practice, because I can’t live with the possibility of doing jailtime.
It’s called medical school, not doctor school.
If it doesn’t bother someone to watch another person suffer, then they will never gain the skills required to be a compentant physician.
You can’t teach people how to care, or why they are supposed to care. You can only teach them the science and model the art and hope they catch on. Most do.
I saw a research article in a peer-reviewed journal once that found students entering medical school had more empathy than the general population, while doctors graduating medical school had less.
Personally, I don’t think high empathy has as much to do with good care and dealing with patients well. Putting someone at ease or comforting them involves an analytic task in which you have to discern the specific needs of the patient. This isn’t empathy, it’s skill and should be able to be taught to MDs.
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