Essay about Narrative Medicine: Doctor´s Empathy

Dr. Vincent Lam is a profound Canadian physician and writer. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures is his award winning novel that speaks on the reality of what it’s actually like to be in medical school aiming to be apart of a medical profession and the difficult expectations students must face while still managing to stay sane during those challenging years of their lives. It’s a collection of short stories partly based off of his experiences in the medical field, following the lives of fictional characters Ming, Fitzgerald, Chen, and Sri as they endure medical school and later work as doctors. Dr. Lam does a remarkable job at incorporating unique and compelling characters with intriguing storylines who face common and extraordinary moral dilemmas that seem to shape their overall characters. Lam introduces themes of love, fear, tradition, drugs, death, self doubt, duality, etc.

William Carlos Williams' Doctor Stories tell the realities of being a physician. The physicians in the Doctor Stories tell the careful balance that many doctors face throughout their careers. From addiction to lust, to more, doctors are humans with human emotions. William Carlos Williams proves that doctors can still perform their jobs despite interesting conditions. Through the expression of characters and slight sadness expressed in his short stories, coupled with his expressive poetry, William Carlos Williams conveys the feelings a doctor has that makes them no different than other people.

When asked what trait a physician bears in the 21st century, most would agree with compassion. Pierre Elias author of the narrative essay, “Insensible Losses: When The Medical Community Forgets The Family”, argues that physicians may be compassionate when it comes to their patients, but “lack a systematic approach to communicating with families when a patient’s health deteriorates unexpectedly, requiring a change in care providers” (Elias 707). Pierre Elias is a medical student from Duke University. He is nearing the end of his clinical rotations when he is forced by his inner moral conscience to deliver difficult news to a patient’s family whom no other physician makes time for.

The importance of empathy in any helping profession, medical or social, cannot be overstated. The workers that exemplified it in their practice did the best that they could with their limited resources.

All too often in regards to medical treatment, physicians are taught everything known about the scientific approaches to disease but still fail to realize the important details of how the disease impacts the individual. Many physicians do not show empathy to their patients and instead just focus on the current diagnosis and the probable outcome. This creates a divide between patient and provider and can even lead to negative feelings of the patient that far outweigh the diagnosis itself. A feeling of hopelessness and despair may accompany the empty feeling that comes with failing to explore the patient’s perspective on care. In this essay, Parrish states,

Prominently featured in the mission statements of virtually of every medical school and medical institution in the world is the call for empathetic doctors. These institutions wish to train medical professionals that possess qualities of sympathy and compassion, and hospitals wish to employ health professionals that showcase similar qualities. The reality, however, is starkly different, as physicians, jaded by what they have seen in the medical world, lose the qualities that drove them to medicine in the first place. In Frank Huyler’s “The Blood of Strangers,” a collection of short stories from his time as a physician in the emergency room, Huyler uses the literary techniques of irony and imagery to depict the reality of the world of a medical professional. While Huyler provides several examples of both techniques in his accounts, moments from “A Difference of Opinion” and “The Secret” in particular stand out. Huyler uses irony and imagery in these two pieces to describe how medical professionals have lost their sense of compassion and empathy due to being jaded and desensitized by the awful incidents they have witnessed during their careers.

In Dr. Charon’s piece, “To Render the Lives of Patients,: she talks about preventing the dehumanization of medical students during medical training and explains a method that could help medical students distance themselves from their own needs and focus on the patient’s point of view, which in thus would reduce frustration and hinder dehumanization.

But instead, it seems that what they are doing is feeding on each other hope. For example, patients remain hopeful that doctors can cure their diseases and doctors are hopeful that technology can deliver these changes to their patients. However, by feeding on their unrealistic hope, physicians enter without knowing into this vicious cycle for pushing for harsher and unrealistic means or treatments that endanger in the process the patient’s sense of dignity. That said, Susan ‘s physicians and his son, at one point, were victims of this cycle because they allowed, instead of alleviate the pain in Susan’s

He relates this experience to the fact that medicine is “anonymous, thankless, faceless, and uncertain” but also “necessary”. I think it is interesting how he feels that it is “necessary” that most of the practice of medicine is faceless. In my opinion, this may be a result of the field of medicine he is in. For some fields of medicine like emergency medicine, most doctors see the patient at the onset of the emergency and then rarely again. However, other doctors like Pediatricians or Family Medicine Physicians see their patients on a regular basis and in that case their practice of medicine, in my opinion, can’t be faceless or not caring about establishing empathy with

An invention as an insight into the means of the sick to become a restored person. The understanding of this narratives serves as the beginning point for disease narrative ethics (Frank, 2013).

“’I had a dream, a dream many of you may share: the dream to cure someone. ’”1 This quote from “Beyond the Glass” illustrates the passion physicians share for their patients and the drive they have to cure people. In Discovery Magazine’s “Behind the Glass,” author Daniel Weaver uses writing techniques such as imagery, characterization, and repetition of main ideas to demonstrate the unique and complex relationship a physician can have with a patient and disease.

Luckily, narrative skills can be trained. Several attempts have been made to teach young practitioners how to empathize with patients without missing scientific knowledge and technicalities. Empathy is normally experienced, but it is also a matter of predisposition, and exposure to sensitive narratives. “Literature seminars and reading groups have become commonplace in medical schools and hospitals” , such that students can be emotionally prepared to break the usual detachment in favour of human interaction whenever needed. The possibility to train empathy is not new at all. Many scholars are advocates for a cult of storytelling (or simply literature): among them, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who looks at classics to draw inspiration for moral reasoning.

Storytelling is the art of transmitting ideas and messages is an integral part of our societies and cultures. The origins of storytelling trace back to the 15000 and 13000 B.C where drawings of extinct animals in the Lascaux Caves indicate 900 animals and the drawing of one human. In the modern world storytelling has taken different shapes and mediums. Storytelling has existed in all kinds of fields as, “…archaeologists dig up clues in the stones and bones…” (Gottschall, 15), which they use to create stories of the past with those remains, “business executives are increasingly told that they must be creative storytellers” (15),to make narratives about their products and brands, and just like them doctors are storytellers as well. Recently, researchers have acknowledged that storytelling plays a powerful role in the practice of medicine. Storytelling plays a crucial role in medicine as it provides an important role for health literacy which leads to an increase in the overall health of the patient, provides a central role in the physician/patient relationship and introduces the concept of digital storytelling that can promote reflective learning by medical students.

It is well known that entertainment texts have a natural tie to health topics, which is evidenced by the 90+ medical drama television series. One example of an entertainment text is through the script of ABCs hit television series, Grey’s Anatomy. While the whole series of Grey’s Anatomy bears great relation to health communication study, a more discrete version of the script is seen within particular episode entitled “Give Peace a Chance,” Season 6 Episode 7, which can be directly related to health communications and narrative paradigm. This specific episodes plot and script focuses on one of the medical professionals becoming the patient and, in turn, observing how he takes on the patient role and how the other health care professionals balance between their roles as health care providers and friends. In this episode, Isaac, a well-known and well-liked hospital lab technologist, comes to Dr. Derek Shepherd with a consult. Dr. Shepherd scanned over the scans given to him and states that the diagnosis is a massive spinal cord tumor which had overtaken the spine and the blood supply and that he would love to operate, but would have to cut the spinal cord to remove the tumor. Dr. Shepherd then asked Isaac who the doctor on the case is, to which he replies “You are. These are my scans and I want you to remove my tumor.” Throughout the episode, Isaac continues to encourage Derek to operate, even if it means paralysis below the hips. Over the course of the episode, Derek

This has been established for us before where recognition of trial and error of what medical methods work in sustaining health have been passed on in narration. This long history of continuous narration has now made medicine a tradition that we humans live by, spanning across