Teaching Empathy (Fit Doctors and Sick Patients)

A reader asks:

My doctors are all very fit. It would seem that being a doctor is so demanding that it requires good health. Can doctors ever really understand what it's like to be ill?

Of course, doctors understand illness! We spend our whole lives studying it! ...but if you mean personal understanding of what it is like to feel your body betraying you, or the dread of approaching death, or the strained relationships created by severe illness—actually, most of us have never been there.

With a few notable exceptions, most people able to dedicate a dozen years of their prime to the punishing ordeal of becoming a doctor have always been pretty healthy in body and mind.

The worst Doctor D ever felt was a moderate case of sinusitis. I have no idea what how it feels to be in daily pain, to be unable to walk, to face death.

The Need For Empathy

So how do doctors, who are rarely sick, relate to ill patients?

Often poorly ...but if we do relate well it is through empathy: the emotional intelligence that allows us to experience the feelings of others. Doctors must learn the true experience of illness from our patients. Doctors may teach patients the science of disease, but in the experience of illness patients are the teachers and doctors are the learners.

Unfortunately, life in the medical business strains one's empathy. The sheer volume of suffering we see can make us numb. There is also the professional objectivity that we fear will be compromised if we care about your pain too much. Empathy may atrophy till a fit physician can diagnose and treat all day long without connecting with a single ill person in a humane, healing way.

Teaching Empathy

You—the patient—must teach the doctor. Empathy is a lesson physicians desperately need to learn. But how can you teach your MD?

The Direct Approach: Speak directly to your doctor about how uncomfortable your symptoms are and how miserable your illness makes your life. Remind your doctor about how horrible it is regularly, just to make sure they don't forget.

Hate to break it to you, but the direct approach doesn't work. In fact, it has the opposite effect. The more someone talks about their suffering the less we identify with it. Yes it's cruel, but it's human nature.

Remember when you were a kid and that elderly relative complained incessantly about their horrible bowels or joints? Chances are your grandmother really was miserable with those symptoms, but how much did you really empathize with her? Not much right? You just wanted her to stop complaining. It's called “compassion fatigue” and it has infected every doctor by about the 2nd year of medical school.

(By the way, I'm not saying you shouldn't tell your doctor your symptoms and how they affect you. Just don't expect compassion as the natural response to your discomfort.)

The Indirect Approach: Tell the doctors your symptoms and cooperate with them to diagnose and manage your disease. Only mention your miserable experience in passing. Instead, ask about how your physician is managing the stress of his or her life. Your doctor likely has a lot of frustrations despite their healthy body. Even if the doctor's problems seem petty compared with yours try to act like you care that it sucks to miss sleep or leave family dinner to care for a patient.

Believe it or not, this is the best way to teach empathy to doctors. The doctor will empathize with you instinctively.

We all naturally focus on our own sorrows and minimize the suffering of others. We awaken to empathy when we see that others care for us.

Doctors are educated in a system that only cares about how much they know and how hard they work. Few of their teachers care how they handle our rigorous training or the suffering they see. Doctors learn that feelings don't matter.

A caring patient's interest in a physician can teach more empathy than watching a whole world of suffering.

Doctor D has been told by patients that he is a caring physician. If so, it isn't because he has ever been ill himself, or any illness he's seen. It was because my first year of residency a patient with a miserable disease actually made an effort to find out about young D and encourage him. With an education like that how could I not want to understand the experience of every patient I met from then on?

What do you think? Is Doctor D too cynical about human nature? Have any patients out there had success with the “indirect approach” for teaching doctors to empathize? Healthcare people: Has a patient ever taught you empathy? Doctor D always loves to hear your thoughts and stories!