This link has been bookmarked by 6 people . It was first bookmarked on 10 Feb 2008, by ningningning.
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13 Jun 09
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12 Aug 08
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10 Feb 08
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How does learning about a doctor’s experience as a patient help the rest of us?
It can help train doctors to do better. When patients complain, we think, “That’s just a patient complaining again.” We dismiss it way too often. These doctors, because they have this unique position as patient and doctor, they can say, “I’m one of you guys and these are the things we’re doing wrong.'’
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One thing they became aware of is how patients try to please their doctors. The doctor stands in the room and says, “Is everything O.K.?'’ Everything is not O.K., but they realized that if they say that, the doctor gets a long face. There is a normal natural instinct to want to please people. They realized that this must mean their patients have all these years been trying to please them. It gets in the way of doctors and patients really saying what is wrong. They think doctors unconsciously don’t really want to hear about problems. Patients often feel uncomfortable saying a lot about what’s going on.
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She said, “I had no idea that when patients said pain, this is what they were talking about. It was so much beyond words.'’
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That, to me, means that we as doctors are missing the experiences patients are suffering. We don’t pay attention.
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One surgeon told me that the night before he underwent surgery, his surgeon told him there is a 5 percent chance you will die in the O.R. He could have said, “There’s a 95 percent chance things will go O.K.'’ He had been a surgeon for 30 years, and he said he’d never thought about how those two kinds of information trigger such completely different emotional responses.
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09 Feb 08
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