MHM Magazine

Could it be time to rethink what’s the most important aspect of being a doctor? Not just for our patients, but also – shock, horror – for ourselves? Are we missing the fact that while studying harder helps us make an accurate diagnosis and craft a treatment plan, we can easily overlook our patients’ needs and, crucially, our own? Perhaps even the idea that care and empathy are purely the result of our trained speech and actions is long overdue a re-assessment? As a professor of pediatrics, I plead guilty to blindly passing on what I’ve learned in the past without truly questioning its validity. This article is a call to action for those who brim with potential and who long to change the existing paradigm. Warning: Shifting that paradigm requires us to look deeper – which may hurt before it heals. Let me propose that over the years we have learned to accept a professional “sense of self,” that is profoundly inadequate in support of an effective healing process. We have all been taught that scientific rigour is the noble road to furthering our understanding and our knowledge in the field. The scientist in me couldn’t agree more! “How I love the cartesian worldview with all its charts and graphs and measures,” he declares. The academic teacher inside me is also stepping forward to applaud all these classifications and algorithms. “What a joy to standardise the skill set of the next generation of healthcare professionals,” he adds. And now my inner CEO chimes in, exhilarated by the resulting spreadsheets as a mark of his quality control and process optimisation. “This is what I need to save money — and I can even talk about it as promoting efficiency,” he grins, satisfied. Finally, the entrepreneur claims the limelight on my inner stage, delighted by the business opportunities of this approach. “Look at me making drugs and devices available in support of achieving the defined health outcomes!” he crows. But what if the health outcomes we define and the measures we apply are too superficial? Superficial because of our current state of scientific ignorance and the fact that our beloved scientific rigour only accepts evidence as truth and does not allow us to ponder the unknown for anything other than a research hypothesis. Superficial because healthcare professionals work in a system inundated with disease and driven by emergencies with limited time to step back and reflect deeply. Superficial because being vulnerable seems dangerous in an environment where waves of suffering patients are crashing By Dr. Jan Bonhoeffer University Children’s Hospital Basel, Switzerland contact@heartbasedmedicine.org . THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF BEING A DOCTOR 6 | MENTALHEALTHMATTERS | Issue 5 | 2021 MHM