Empathy In Medical Schools
An average emergency room visit consists of a five hour wait in a dank seating area, a pile of forms to fill out, a long wait in a hospital bed, and a doctor who speaks for five minutes about a treatment and leaves for the next patient. Hospitals and doctors’ offices are terrifying places for most and doctors rarely provide comfort to those who need it. Medical schools teach their students to be stone cold, logic based, machines, treating patients as diseases not people, and stripping away their pupil’s humanity. In a medical setting, caring for a patient includes “…an intense effort to appreciate a patient’s situation by asking the ‘right’ questions and then listening precisely in a manner that is unselfconscious, non-judgmental, and open …show more content…
Unfortunately, they do not understand what empathy really is. Hospitals use training programs that take a logical approach to teach physicians how to be empathetic when empathy is the opposite of logical reason; it is an emotional response to someone else’s suffering or fear. They treat patients as a body, “leading to alienation, misunderstanding, and poor treatment outcomes.” (Astrow, 420). Medical schools have students practice patient interactions on each other. These encounters do not properly prepare students for the level of concern and anxiety a patient may have. Simulated encounters are not taken seriously by students who are motivated by the grade they receive (Warmington, 33-332). Interviews done on new patients to an HIV clinic showed that most patients felt their doctors were knowledgeable about their disease, but lacked good communication skills (Dang, Giordano, Njue, Westobrook). Doctors learn how to speak biologically and understand administration jargon. Normal patients do not comprehend the impersonal language used by physicians and often become frightened and frustrated because the doctor cannot communicate properly. Understanding that patience is a virtue and taking the time to explain difficult diagnoses in a way so that the patient understands the information being presented is paramount when treating illness (“The Miracle in Front of
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