Empathy, Medicine, and Coming Home

As some of you know, an unexpected medical event to one of my family members has been a recent and difficult ordeal. I don't particularly believe that bad things may happen for future good reasons that we cannot, in the emotional confusion of a crisis, see and understand until later, but it did make me think about how I see myself as a doctor...past, present, and future. It is almost trite to talk about the experience of doctor as patient, less so perhaps of doctor as family member of patient, and many good (and not so good) books and essays have been written on this topic. However, it does remind me of something I read a long time ago, Empathy and the Practice of Medicine : Beyond Pills and the Scalpel, and how challenging it is as a physician to constantly put yourself in the patient's situation, particularly if you have insufficient personal experiences to draw upon. Perhaps this is one of the better reasons to argue for admitting well-rounded applicants to medical school and supporting their "nonflatness"--They will have a potentially larger body of experience to draw upon to empathize with their patients which is, I think, the core of the humanity of this particular profession.