Daily Dose of Humanities

Submission by: David Go, OMS III

Image Source: https://www.clipart.email/download/1793411.html

Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s book “When Breath Becomes Air” provides a sobering view of living life in the face of impending death. Dr. Kalanithi was a brilliant physician finishing his neurosurgery residency when he was suddenly diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer. During his battle with cancer, he wrote this book detailing his experiences from the perspective of both a physician and as a patient. His writing contained many pearls to learn from, but two quotes stood out to me.

1) “In that moment, all my occasions of failed empathy came rushing back to me: the times I had pushed discharge over patient worries, ignored patients’ pain when other demands pressed. The people whose suffering I saw, noted, and neatly packaged into various diagnoses, the significance of which I failed to recognize… I feared I was on the way to becoming Tolstoy’s stereotype of a doctor, preoccupied with empty formalism, focussed on the rote treatment of disease and utterly missing the larger human significance.”

In this quote, we see the perspective of Dr. Kalanithi in the role of the physician. He is inundated with tasks focussed solely on getting his work done. Patients became problems on his list of things to be taken care of. I chose this quote because this is a common problem among many physicians and significant contributor to physician burn out. Burnt out physicians have often lost sight of the bigger picture and forget why they originally chose to pursue medicine.

In order to remedy this we must take time to reflect on our interactions. We must live life with gratitude for the opportunity to be serving as physicians. We cannot lose the empathy that we all had when we entered medical school.

2) “I could see that in Brad’s eyes I was not a patient, I was a problem: a box to be checked off.”

In this second quote, we see the perspective of Dr. Kalanithi in the role of the patient. He was requesting for his chemotherapy medication to treat his bone pain from Brad the resident physician, but this medication required special authorization. Being that it was in the middle of the night, Brad did not want to wake and trouble the attending physician.

This quote stands out to me in contrast to the first quote where Dr. Kalanithi was in the physician role similar to Brad viewing the patient as a problem rather than a person.

Now as the patient, Dr. Kalanithi realizes how it feels when a physician sees you as a problem.

Tell us how you feel after reading about Dr. Kalanithi’s change in perspective. Have you seen this happening in your care? How can we help change this “problem” perspective?