Doctors lose empathy the same way police officers do
Hello, This is Gary Klugiewicz.
A recent Radio Health Journal radio segment proved to me something that I had often suspected in that people are more alike than they are different. The program talked about Doctors and Emotions.
It noted that doctors like police and other public safety personnel start out their careers full of hope, values, and wanting to make the world a better place. Unfortunately, life and the real world gets in the way. Added to this is the negative impact of “bad-thinking” mentors in both a doctor’s residency and a police officer’s probationary period who help to destroy the “protector mindset” that is so important in developing empathetic healthcare and public safety professionals.
The bottom line is that if we want our new doctors – and public safety professionals to remain empathetic, i.e., to see through the eyes of the others, and caring professionals , they need empathetic and caring role models in our medical schools and functioning as our public safety field training officers.
The old saying that children see, children do does say it all. This video shows the results of poor mentoring. Let’s do a better job.
Your thoughts?
Gary,
I really like this post. Thank you for sharing it with us.
My boss is a MD. I will be sharing it with him.
We like what Dr. Ofri says at 5:46 in the Radio Health audio program. She refers to emotions as the “continuous baseline that runs in the background of all our encounters…” Doctors are, of course, not immune to this baseline and, like other professionals who manage crises, must stay in tune with their emotions to remain in balance.
Thanks for sharing that powerful video of how children copy our (adult) behavior. Parental influence is just as powerful as receiving an injection of a drug. And this influence stands to permeate not just one child, but whole generations, as the influence is passed on, from father to son, mother to daughter, and so on.
Thanks again!
robert
Gary,
Good morning.
Thanks for sharing.
Having been a cop who experienced a reduction in empathy for a part of my career, I can only speak from my experience. I had become complacent in my career and it just felt easier to reduce my empathy. Problem was, apart from being unethical, it actually made the job more difficult in the long run.