274 Interacting with Their Patients
They should be admitted through the ER—have people bustling
back and forth, nobody saying what’s going on, why they are doing
particular evaluations, what anybody is thinking, what the differ-
ential diagnosis may be, how long it’s going to take—leave them
with all that uncertainty.
In its ability to make physicians appreciate fully what it is like to be a
patient, patienthood was seen as unique. Ernie, who had Huntington’s
disease, thought that only the process of becoming ill would make med-
ical students more empathetic.
If you’re not personally affected, it’s impossible to imagine what it’s
really like. I’m not sure what would make students more empa-
thetic. Maybe you have to go through it yourself.
Potentially, health care professionals can be taught to see more clearly
that they have only one point of view, and that it is just one of many,
differs from that of patients, and can be restrictive. Humans evolved such
that each person generally sees through just one main vantage point, his
or her own. Unfortunately, that creates problems. Novelists and film-
makers know and illustrate these limitations. Faulkner’s The Sound and
the Fury and Kurosawa’s Rashoman each depict one event from differing
individuals’ perspectives. Perhaps only narratives can reveal another per-
son’s point of view—the experience of literally being inside another
skull, seeing the world through his or her eyes. Otherwise, we usually
rarely realize the constrictions on our perspectives. To each of us, our
views seem coherent, and correct. The doctors here can impel others to
become more aware of the extent to which physicians’ ways of seeing
infact differ from those of patients, and are ultimately bounded.
These doctors illuminate, too, how and why book and experiential
learning differ. As patients, these doctors learned much that they had not
fully realized before. Not until now did they truly see and learn what it
was like to be in the opposite role. Illness taught them what books failed to.
Thus, these doctors limned the divide between intellectual and experi-
ential knowledge, and the extent to which experience involves emotions
and deeper layers of self. The discrepancies can be vast. Yet awareness of
this gap can help bridge it.
To heighten these sensitivities, several physicians thought that med-
ical school can more effectively teach specific skills in ways other than
by hospitalizing all students. Much of doctor-patient relationships and