Empathy, emotional attachment, and the end.

Abstract

In my first year at medical school, just months apart, I lost my three remaining grandparents. They had each received the treatment they needed, yet the end for each felt incomplete. Through reflection, engaging with art, and looking for answers in places such as Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End ,1 I began to piece together what had appeared to have been missing from the last stage of their lives. When asked what makes a good doctor in medical school interviews, I was armed with a list of desirable qualities to develop during my training: intelligence, diligence, communication skills, empathy. Empathy has been described as understanding the emotional responses generated by a situation to the extent that the viewer could be the viewed.2 But if the viewer is the viewed, as medical students are we expected to feel the pain of all our patients? It is surely more reasonable to ask us to acknowledge patients’ fears and anxieties without …