Lack of Physician Empathy: Another Cause of Popular Distrust in Medicine
In a recent previous post, we discussed the reasons why many patients no longer trust the medical system. A disturbing study that found too little empathy from doctors toward their cancer patients could also be a contributing cause. From the story: U.S. researchers who assessed interactions between a small group of people with lung cancer and their doctors found physicians provided little emotional support even when patients seemed to be searching for it.
In their defense, doctors are under tremendous financial pressure from managed care economics to push the patients through their offices assembly line style. And as the story discussed, the study was small. But clearly, the milk of human kindness should be a crucial part of medicine and despite the pressures they are under, doctors will have to do a better job.
When patients made comments on topics like the personal impact of cancer, their diagnosis and treatment and struggles with the health care system, doctors responded with words of empathy only 10 percent of the time, the researchers said.
This was a small study -- appointments between doctors and 10 patients at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Houston were audio taped and analyzed for whether the physicians provided empathy for the plight of these people with a deadly illness.
But Dr. Diane Morse of the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York said the findings reinforce other research showing doctors fall short in the simple act of acknowledging the emotional difficulties of their patients' predicament.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:26 AM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
Wesley, it would be interesting to see study results for other types of cancer, not just that of the lungs. I would wonder whether lung cancer has a stigma among medical providers that other types of cancer would not.
Most doctors would probably point to smoking tobacco as being the primary cause of the lung cancer cases they treat. They might therefore have less empathy for patients with that particular malignancy, in the belief that the patient likely brought it upon himself from a habit that has been the subject of health warnings since the World War I era 90 years ago. So maybe these doctors are in fact more indifferent in manner to lung cancer patients where other types of cancer would arouse more sympathy.
Side note: in early 1993, just before I left the job I had then (which is why I remember the time period), National Public Radio had a segment on one of its daily news programs on a Washington, DC-area doctor who had decided that he would no longer see patients who smoked. He said that if they choose to keep that habit despite all the health warnings, meaning that they really didn't care about their health, then why should he expend any effort to keep them healthy himself? This not only ties in with the attitude above, but with your warnings about futile care theory and the like. He had a point, but--brrr!
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