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What Makes A Good Therapist?


This is for Dr. D.

We were having lunch when Dr. D mentioned she wanted to write a book aimed at teaching residents how to do psychotherapy. It would start with a section on What Makes a Good Therapist? What does she thinks makes a good therapist? Real life experiences which impart an ability to empathize. Do we grow from our own difficulties? More specifically, do we grow in to better therapists? I asked another shrink this, and he said that people like to believe there is some meaning to their suffering, and perhaps it’s nice to believe that if you’ve been stuck suffering, then it makes you a better therapist, but he wasn’t so convinced it was true. Me? I don’t know, maybe. Or maybe not. Personally, I’m fine with the idea of not suffering, at all, ever again, so long as I live.

In residency, I was taught that warmth and empathy are important to being a good therapist.   Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*

Patient Engagement: How Empathy Can Empower Your Patients

In my recent post on KevinMD, “Deeply Connect and Engage Your Patients With Empathy,” I write about how empathy is essential to help empower our patients: “It is with empathy that we can engage and empower our patients.”

Doctors and nurses are leaders in health care.

Being a great leader means having a clear vision, mission or goal. It means being committed, and knowing how to listen and communicate, but it involves much more. It’s about having heart, empathy, and an uplifting spirit.

I value and respect a well written post by Thomas Goetz, author of The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine recently published on KevinMD, “How can doctors successfully engage their patients?” Goetz writes about “Five things they should seek to give every patient, strategies to tap the most underutilized resource in medicine, their patient,” however I feel the most critical ingredient is missing, empathy.

Empathy

It is with empathy that we can engage and empower our patients. With empathy and heart we can help our patients feel good, valued and respected. Empathy allows us to engage and empower our patients to take charge of their health and well-being. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Health in 30*

The Humanistic Side Of Medicine

An excellent opinion piece by Sally Satel, M.D., a psychiatrist, appeared in the Wall Street Journal this morning about white coat ceremonies as ways to reinforce the humanistic qualities of medicine. The best part, however, was this perspective:

But the question of whether empathy can be taught—and, in particular, whether a white-coat ceremony is a good means for promoting that virtue—is a matter of some debate.

Judah Goldberg, a young doctor at Chilton Memorial Hospital in New Jersey raises an intriguing paradox. He asks how the white coat can bring doctors closer to the subjective experience of patients when, as an icon of the profession, it is meant to isolate and distinguish them from the lay community.

“To the extent that empathy can be taught through a ritual,” Dr. Goldberg told me, “a hospital gown, the common garb of human frailty, would be more fitting than a distancing white coat.”

I must say, the thought of everyone seeing each others’ posterior sides as they paraded across the stage at such a ceremony did make me smile. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*

Medicine Is A Human Thing

If there is a central theme to this blog, it is this: Medicine is a human thing.

On the Facebook page of my podcast, I recently asked for readers to tell me some of the “war stories” they have from the doctor’s office. What are some of the bad things doctors do wrong? I quickly followed this with the flip side, asking readers to comment on the best interactions that they’ve had with their doctors.

The response was overwhelming, and equally quick to both rant and rave. They told stories about doctors who didn’t listen, explain, or even talk with them. They told about arrogance and disconnectedness from the people from whom they were seeking help. They also told about doctors who took extra effort to listen and to reach out in communication. They talked about doctors who genuinely seemed to value them as humans. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Distractible Mind*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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