DOCTOR — BEDSIDE – NATURAL APTITUDE AND CONSTANT PRACTICE
Posted on May 15, 2009, under General health.
To be able to empathise with each patient, yet to remain unaffected by his worries is a great skill requiring natural aptitude and constant practice.
Many doctors can only cope by always remaining detached. We choose our medical students because they are good at exams. It would be too hard to try to choose them because they were caring and sensitive to others’ feelings.
How to choose medical students is a problem that has worried many senior doctors and most medical faculties. Exams may be a bad way of assessing a student’s capabilites but there doesn’t appear to be a better way.
Anton Chekhov, the Russian author and poet who was also a doctor, expressed it this way. “Doctors whose attitude to human suffering is strictly official and professional become so callous in the course of time from force of habit that they cannot treat their clients in any but a formal way.”
Dr Anthony Moore, senior lecturer in the Department of Surgery at the University of Melbourne, writing in the Medical Journal of Australia had this to say: “Have you ever wondered about the sort of complaints received by the Medical Disciplinary Board?
*326/71/1*
