Image Credit: James Blevins

A Healthcare System that Gets You

Clinical Empathy

A 2011 study showed that empathy decreased during both medical school and residency, attributed to curriculum, experiences in clinical practice, and overall stress.

In this sense, empathy isn’t measured just by checklist item 31 — “Voiced empathy for my situation/problem” — but by every item that gauges how thoroughly my experience has been imagined. Empathy isn’t just remembering to say “That must really be hard,” it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see: an old woman’s gonorrhea is connected to her guilt is connected to her marriage is connected to her children is connected to the days when she was a child. All this is connected to her domestically stifled mother, in turn, and to her parents’ unbroken marriage; maybe everything traces its roots to her very first period, how it shamed and thrilled her.

A Systemic Approach

What’s required is a fundamental shift in how we both train and organize our health professionals to meet patients where they are.

--

--

I serve a vision for the more-than-human world grounded in interdependence. You can subscribe to my newsletter at https://stevedaniels.space

Get the Medium app

A button that says 'Download on the App Store', and if clicked it will lead you to the iOS App store
A button that says 'Get it on, Google Play', and if clicked it will lead you to the Google Play store
Steve Daniels

I serve a vision for the more-than-human world grounded in interdependence. You can subscribe to my newsletter at https://stevedaniels.space