What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
Danielle Ofri
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Empathy--the ability to identify with someone else's suffering--is certainly a prerequisite for a genuine apology.”
“Thus, whatever the medical student has been taught, and even genuinely believes, about the ideals of medicine, the primacy of empathy, the value of the doctor-patient relationship--all of this is swamped once he or she steps into the wards. [...] It's no wonder that empathy gets trounced in the actual world of clinical medicine; everything that empathy requires seems to detract from daily survival.”
“Fear is a primal emotion in medicine. Every doctor can tell you of times when she or he was terrified; most can list more episodes than you might wish to hear. [...] It may be sublimated at times, it may wax and wane, but the fear of harming your patients never departs; it is inextricably linked to the practice of medicine.”
“But I realized that not only did I need to keep tuning my skills as a doctor, I also had to figure out a way to live with the uncertainty of medicine and its attendant anxiety.”
“The very fact that these doctors continuing to be doctors--highly successful ones--despite their errors and their accompanying assaults on their self-definion would itself be a potent lesson to the students and interns. It is possible to hold one's head up after an error, to admit that errors are part and parcel of human existence, even in medicine. It is possible to see the error as an aspect of oneself, not the defining characteristic of oneself.”
“Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes emotions as the “continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming.”3”
“Burnout also leads to a large swath of physicians who aren't as empathetic toward their patients as they could be.”
“To empathize with these patients, to put yourself in their shoes, may be a bit too existentially disconcerting. And so doctors unconsciously try to protect themselves by widening the moat between their own good health and their patients’ dauntingly mortal conditions”
“How the sadness is handled by the physician has a powerful impact on the medical care received by the patients. If the grief is relentlessly suppressed--as in Eva's experience during residency--the result can be a numb physician who is unable to invest in a new patient. This lack of investment can lead to rote medical care--impersonal at best, shoddy at worst. At the other end of the spectrum is the doctor who is inundated with grief and can't function because of the overwhelming sorrow. Burnout is significant in both these cases, and that erodes the quality of medical care.”
“Grief ate at these doctors, distracting them from both their families and their patients. Many reported withdrawing from emotional involvement with their patients and that their patients had noticed they weren't fully present.”
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Book Keywords:
apology, medicine, errors, empathy, burnout, grief, loss, mourning, death-and-dying, courage
