Empathy and the Practice of Medicine part 3

What does empathy mean? I liked how the author of today's chapter put it. Empathy is knowing that it could be you that is the patient, that you could one day go crazy and lose it all, including your sanity. Oftentimes, we as healthcare workers take for granted the suffering of our patients, saying that it could never be us because we have never been diagnosed with that before. However, let me remind everyone that you can come down ill with anything at any time, and no one is immune to everything. You could be dealing with cancer patients, and one day you could be a cancer patient yourself. You could be working with hospice patients, ready to die and see God's face, and one day you may be one yourself. Just because you aren't a patient now doesn't mean that you won't be one in the future.

On the other hand, I do realize that empathizing with someone with an illness that you have never had can be pretty hard to do indeed. Oftentimes, we naturally empathize with people who have or have had the same illnesses that we have struggled with personally. It is human nature: you say, "Hey, I've dealt with that before so I totally know what you are going through." Communicating this may help put the patient at ease, because it may communicate that you have a pretty extensive knowledge into it, if you bothered to research it at all to increase the quality of care you received. Most of all, it communicates that you understand completely what they have gone through, or are currently going through, and can relate to them. This can help promote the feeling that you will do whatever it takes to help the patient find relief.

The harder cases to relate to are those in which you have never had any personal experience. Often it would be easy to toss empathy by the wayside in order to gain a list of symptoms from the patient to construct your list of possible conditions. While this is something that needs to be done, empathy cannot be tossed by the wayside when the physician is doing this. The best physicians utilize both empathy and science at the same time, and are conscious to maintaining both in their practice of medicine. For those cases that are harder to empathize with, I would, as a physician, strive to imagine myself in the shoes of the patient. What would I feel? Would I be frustrated? Angry? Depressed? Happy? Non-respondent? What would I desire my standard of living to be? What would I expect from others? I would then use this kind of information to provide for my patients what they need. Of course, assumptions can be dangerous, that is why it is important first to ask the patient what they need and to help meet those needs (even if it is getting a simple glass of water). Go above and beyond what people expect, and they will come back to you in the future. Listen to people and you will be listened to. Treat people with no mercy, and people will torment you mercilessly. The practice of medicine, just like every other interaction with people, depends on adherence to the Golden Rule: do unto others what you would have them do unto you. That is why it is important to integrate empathy into the practice of medicine.