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What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine QUOTES

What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine QUOTES

1 " Suddenly, I was plunged back into an avid learning environment, starting at the bottom and working my way painstakingly up the mountain. The thrill of learning and accomplishing stimulated me so much that the work was pleasurable. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

2 " The very fact that these doctors continuing to be doctors--highly successful ones--despite their errors and their accompanying assaults on their self-definion would itself be a potent lesson to the students and interns. It is possible to hold one's head up after an error, to admit that errors are part and parcel of human existence, even in medicine. It is possible to see the error as an aspect of oneself, not the defining characteristic of oneself. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

3 " How the sadness is handled by the physician has a powerful impact on the medical care received by the patients. If the grief is relentlessly suppressed--as in Eva's experience during residency--the result can be a numb physician who is unable to invest in a new patient. This lack of investment can lead to rote medical care--impersonal at best, shoddy at worst. At the other end of the spectrum is the doctor who is inundated with grief and can't function because of the overwhelming sorrow. Burnout is significant in both these cases, and that erodes the quality of medical care. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

4 " Grief ate at these doctors, distracting them from both their families and their patients. Many reported withdrawing from emotional involvement with their patients and that their patients had noticed they weren't fully present. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

5 " Empathy--the ability to identify with someone else's suffering--is certainly a prerequisite for a genuine apology. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

6 " Empathy requires being attuned to the patient's perspective and understanding how the illness is woven into this particular persons' life. Last--and this is where doctors often stumble--empathy requires being able to communicate all of this to the patient. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

7 " In general, empathy is easier the more we can identify with someone. When we can genuinely envision ourselves in a situation, it's possible to intuit what that person's suffering might feel like. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

8 " It can be rough going to maintain both composure and empathy in these situations, but a doctor's failure to do that is probably the number one reason why patients feel dissatisfied with their physicians and end up doctor-shopping endlessly. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

9 " But while the patient does bear some responsibility, I believe that the onus falls more heavily on the doctor to be attuned to the factors--cultural, ethnic, or just personal style--that influence how patients present their symptoms. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

10 " Hospital life--with its byzantine array of moving parts layered atop the unpredictable rhythms of illness--is a permanent state of flux. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

11 " What these older physicians exhibited is termed clinical curiosity. They stroke to understand their patients in order to elucidate the underlying medical conditions. This thoroughness, patience, and dogged curiosity may have been ingrained in them because they trained at a time when they were no rapid CTs or MRIs. But even now, when these diagnostic tools are at their fingertips, these physicians maintain this approach to patients, one that serves to appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each patient and his or her illness. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

12 " But I realized that not only did I need to keep tuning my skills as a doctor, I also had to figure out a way to live with the uncertainty of medicine and its attendant anxiety. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

13 " Burnout also leads to a large swath of physicians who aren't as empathetic toward their patients as they could be. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

14 " But at the most basic level, doctors need to be able to come forward with their errors and near-misses, otherwise we will never know where the problems lay. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

15 " Thus, whatever the medical student has been taught, and even genuinely believes, about the ideals of medicine, the primacy of empathy, the value of the doctor-patient relationship--all of this is swamped once he or she steps into the wards. [...] It's no wonder that empathy gets trounced in the actual world of clinical medicine; everything that empathy requires seems to detract from daily survival. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

16 " Fear is a primal emotion in medicine. Every doctor can tell you of times when she or he was terrified; most can list more episodes than you might wish to hear. [...] It may be sublimated at times, it may wax and wane, but the fear of harming your patients never departs; it is inextricably linked to the practice of medicine. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

17 " Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes emotions as the “continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming.”3 "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

18 " To empathize with these patients, to put yourself in their shoes, may be a bit too existentially disconcerting. And so doctors unconsciously try to protect themselves by widening the moat between their own good health and their patients’ dauntingly mortal conditions "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

19 " Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes emotions as the "continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming." This basso continuo thrums along while doctors make a steady stream of conscious medical decisions. "

― Danielle Ofri , What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine