The implication is not that the doctor had better know Euripides as well as John Grisham, the point is that it will benefit both patient and physician if they can feel they’re using words in the same way. It’s helpful to each to understand all the between-the-lines inflections and habits or discipline and commitments that are as important to the person being treated as the disease complaint being brought to the specialist. Arthritic hands obviously are more important to a concert pianist than to a retired accountant.
Doctors need to learn to comprehend vocabularies that don’t come to them via anatomy, biochemistry, or even psychiatry. They need to be able to get the vibes from someone for whom some other interest and/or obsession is as profound as the medical one.
I submit that the best way to do this is by a dual foray into all the arts and sciences that have to do with people’s avocations and histories and into learning how to sense what those people are not perhaps even capable of saying. If a doctor hasn’t read the obituaries for a week, it might not be direct knowledge that his patient has been widowed since she last visited. A physician who can be useful to her will know she has sustained an emotional injury before she tells him what it is. Then that doctor will have a real sense of how that must feel, not a merely intellectual knowledge of facts of average months’ duration of acute grief.
Empathy isn’t born into everyone, but it should be possible to be trained into those who don’t possess it to begin with. One of the best ways is through the arts. Literature, of course, but also music and sculpture and painting and drama — modern and classical. Sensitization can be deliberately taught, and the lessons can become priceless for the so-called family practitioner, who may have very little time with a patient who comes in only once or twice a year. This will be especially true for those patients who dislike self-revelation, or have a hard time expressing themselves.
One aspect of this relationship seems to be overlooked. Most people are uncomfortable in the presence of what they see as authority. That’s the way most patients see their doctors. Subtleties like the relative position of the authority figure who sits on a stool a little below the level of the patient’s chair help to alleviate this artificial distance, but a common understanding of human behavior based on a lot more than one person can acquire through direct experience can be the biggest help of all. Once in practice, few doctors will have time for artistic or literary excursions, so it probably would be a good idea to give them as much of that experience as possible as early as possible.
'Trickle down' isn’t just a special brand of economic theory; the term applies a lot better to an educational one that doesn’t risk discrediting in the future.
©2011 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com
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