When I moved from Arizona to
Chicago my senior year of high school, along with finding schools, a house, and
planning out my life, I had to find a new primary care physician. Typically,
when you pick, your insurance carrier gives you a list of physicians and you are given their
credentials etc, but is that totally what matters? I had a list of several
doctors and went for consultations just to get a feel for what type of person
they are.
This
stems back to the human behavior that we all show empathy and see empathy from
everyone around us. This helps foster a positive nurturing environment, and
frankly, it is inborn. According to the research of Dr. Decety of the
University of Chicago Psychology Department, empathy has a deep evolutionary,
biochemical, and neurological underpinning associated with communication,
social attachments, and parental care. Therefore, we are all built to care for
others, and who other than physicians are specifically there to care for us.
They nurse us back to health and keep us healthy all other times. However, many
medical students when they start schooling are high on empathy, and then
gradually they decline and it is associated with burned out personal distress.
In other words, the people we trust most to advocate for our health and to whom
we tell our deepest and darkest secrets have lost the ability to care.
But
why does it matter if your physician shows greater empathy than another right?
Isn’t it just the treatment that you are able to receive? According to research
titled “The Relationship Between
Physician Empathy and Disease Complications: An Empirical Study of Primary Care
Physicians and Their Diabetic Patients in Parma, Italy,” “studies have shown
that physicians’ understanding of their patients’ perspective, a key feature in
the definition of physician empathy, enhances patients’ perceptions of being
helped, improves patients’ empowerment, and increases patients’ perception of a
social support network.”
The
study hypothesized that higher empathy scores by physicians would positively be
associated with lower “acute metabolic complications in diabetic patients.”
After performing the experiment in Italy, a country that has a different
healthcare system than the United States and measuring the physician empathy
levels and associating it with low, moderate, and high levels of acute
metabolic complications the results of the z-test showed that physicians in
the high empathy score group had a lower rate of patients with AMC (4.0/1000)
than did those in the moderate (7.1/1000) and low empathy (6.5/1000) groups.”
So in theory, all these physicians should connect back to Dr. Decety’s empathy
proposition that when we see others in pain, we are predisposed to find their
distress aversive and learn to avoid actions associated with this distress.
So
in the end, does it really matter who your physician is? Well, although the
statistical evidence isn’t overwhelmingly favoring the fact that a physician
with higher empathy levels will likely lead to you bring less sick or
recovering from illness, they will at least show you the basic human response
of empathy when you need to confide in someone. But then after reading both of these studies,
isn't it strange that we have physicians take empathy training courses despite it being in all of us naturally? Why do physicians lose their sense of empathy on such a high level and how can we counteract that?
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