by Lachlan Campbell

Created on: February 04, 2009

Doctors shouldn't have empathy for their patients. Before you turn away in disgust, think for a moment.

Empathy for your patients means you will feel all their suffering and pain. You will be concerned for their suffering, you will be saddened when they feel sad and you will be distraught when they die.

Imagine one of your friends comes to you with news of a serious medical condition that they might not live through. You would feel scared for them, and you would desperately hope they'd make it through. One person's pain would be terrible to process.

Now try every single patient you see. Doctors on average have three THOUSAND patients a year. That's three thousand cases of woe and illness to cope with. To empathise with all of the three thousand would be a massive strain to cope with. The burden of stress would be incredible. And for Doctors, stress is a bad thing.

It is in the Doctors' and Patients' interests for the Doctor to be as calm and unstressed as possible. Stress will cause problems in work, possibly resulting in bad judgement or accidental malpractice. Given the ridiculous hours and general high stress levels anyway, empathy-related stress should be kept to a minimum.

Empathy can play a different hand in bad judgement as well. If a Doctor feels sympathy for a patient's pain, he may try and carry out the least painful operations. Unfortunately these may not necessarily be the best for the patient's health, or the safest. While this may not be an issue in lighter afflictions, when a patient's life is at stake then the choice should be clear cut. Do the best for the patient's health - not the least painful. However when a Doctor's judgement is clouded by sympathy and a desire to cause little pain, then the wrong choices might be made.

You may argue that it is inhuman to be unfeeling, and surely it is the responsibility of a Doctor to look after patient's wellbeing. Pain and wellbeing are not synonyms in any context, and so isn't it important for the Doctor to be aware of suffering?

Not if it causes the Doctor to suffer as well. There are less Doctors than ill people - we need to keep our Doctors in prim health, and that means mentally as well. Undue depression and stress from an overactive empathy is a burden and not useful at all. Ideally, a Doctor should be like a machine - recognising pain but unaffected by it, and with an eye for the most effective treatments instead of the least painful.

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