12
Improving Education
Can Empathy Be Taught?
Does a doctor have to get sick in order to become more sensitive? The
physicians here posed critical questions of how to improve sensitivity in
the profession: whether trainees and other providers can be taught to be
more empathetic, and if so, how. Clearly, formidable internal and ex-
ternal obstacles exist to improve patient care, including implicit stigma:
the fact that physicians often see patients as somehow ‘‘less than.’’ To
bolster themselves and conquer disease, many doctors distanced them-
selves from, and identified less with, patients. Yet overall, these physi-
cians changed their practices in ways ranging from small to large.
Recently, questions of how to make doctors better have received atten-
tion (1). But the doctors here suggest additional ways, and their intimate
stories offer insights that made even ‘‘good’’ physicians better. They came
to reassess and alter their relationships with patients: approaches to tests
and diagnoses, treatment problems, poor adherence, nonmedical aspects
of care, and communication about end-of-life and other taboo topics.
Though potentially, illness could merely embitter and frustrate a doctor,
that was overall not the case here. Indeed, many now wanted to take on,
as a mission or legacy, improving the training of future providers. Through
their pain, these doctors hoped to enlighten and inspire others.
Nonetheless, some joked that ideally, medical students should be
hospitalized and forced to sleep in patient rooms, to experience the
disruptions, inconveniences, powerlessness, and humiliations that pa-
tients routinely encounter. Eleanor described how such an experience,
with its loss of power over one’s very body and life, and its confrontation
with the unknown, could transform trainees.
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