Part of what seemed iffy was the claim that it was good for both the patients and the practitioner, when it was correlated (from what you said) with experience, with no mention of quality of care.
When someone says their source is “a doctor”, what are the odds that it’s a researcher specializing in that particular area? Especially when the information is something which could as easily be a fluffy popular report as something clearly related to a specialty?
Also, I had a prior from Bernard Siegal which is also intuitively plausible—that doctors who are emotionally numb around their patients are more likely to burn out. This was likely to have been based on anecdote, but not a crazy hypothesis.
I believe you have a sign error in your last paragraph. Doctors who do not emotionally numb themselves are the ones considered at risk to burn out. I have a friend from one of my T groups who is a physician at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and she is now working in intensive care where the people are really messed up and people die all the time. She believes genuine loving care for her patients is her duty and makes her a better physician; she was trained be emotionally numb and she felt like it was an epiphany for herself to rebel against this after a couple of years in her current assignment.
I have not asked her if her attitude is obvious to her supervisors. My guess is that it probably is not; I do not think she is secretive about it (although she probably does not go around evangelizing to the other doctors much) but I would think that the other doctors are too preoccupied to observe it.
In the book Consciousness and Healing Larry Dossey M.D. also explicitly discusses behavioral norms of professional physicians being to minimize emotional involvement and he has arguments that this is a bad practice. (That book is not an example of good rational thinking from cover to cover.)
Part of what seemed iffy was the claim that it was good for both the patients and the practitioner, when it was correlated (from what you said) with experience, with no mention of quality of care.
Desensitization to powerful negative emotional reactions is not the same thing as not caring and not building a personal relationship.
Most of our default emotional reactions when we are in close contact with others who have physical or emotional injuries aren’t exactly optimal for the purpose of providing assistance. Particularly when what the doctor needs to do will cause more pain.
Part of what seemed iffy was the claim that it was good for both the patients and the practitioner, when it was correlated (from what you said) with experience, with no mention of quality of care.
When someone says their source is “a doctor”, what are the odds that it’s a researcher specializing in that particular area? Especially when the information is something which could as easily be a fluffy popular report as something clearly related to a specialty?
Also, I had a prior from Bernard Siegal which is also intuitively plausible—that doctors who are emotionally numb around their patients are more likely to burn out. This was likely to have been based on anecdote, but not a crazy hypothesis.
I believe you have a sign error in your last paragraph. Doctors who do not emotionally numb themselves are the ones considered at risk to burn out. I have a friend from one of my T groups who is a physician at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and she is now working in intensive care where the people are really messed up and people die all the time. She believes genuine loving care for her patients is her duty and makes her a better physician; she was trained be emotionally numb and she felt like it was an epiphany for herself to rebel against this after a couple of years in her current assignment.
I have not asked her if her attitude is obvious to her supervisors. My guess is that it probably is not; I do not think she is secretive about it (although she probably does not go around evangelizing to the other doctors much) but I would think that the other doctors are too preoccupied to observe it.
In the book Consciousness and Healing Larry Dossey M.D. also explicitly discusses behavioral norms of professional physicians being to minimize emotional involvement and he has arguments that this is a bad practice. (That book is not an example of good rational thinking from cover to cover.)
Desensitization to powerful negative emotional reactions is not the same thing as not caring and not building a personal relationship.
Most of our default emotional reactions when we are in close contact with others who have physical or emotional injuries aren’t exactly optimal for the purpose of providing assistance. Particularly when what the doctor needs to do will cause more pain.