COMPASSION IN MEDICINE

Dr. Patrick Lau was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to the U.S. after high
school. He retired from the VA Northern Indiana Heath Care System where he
served as Chief Radiologist and moved to Florida with his wife in 2011. He
was an active member & contributor of IACA and ICMA while in Indiana. Dr.
Lau is also a scholar of art and literature and a prolific writer, he has
been a dedicated columnist for Indy Asian American Times since 2010.

“Compassion, patience, empathy – these are the tools doctors use. Patients
expect physicians to use their expertise and their humanity to take in the
often-complicated accounts of their bodies and lives and interpret them in
some kind of diagnosis. Beyond the power of our most sophisticated medical
equipment is a physician’s humanity – the listening ear, the healing touch,
the devices of healers throughout time.” ~MiMi Grareri, M.D.

National Doctors’ Day is observed on March 30 annually. The first Doctors’
Day observance was in Winder, Georgia on March 30, 1933, which was the
anniversary of the first administration of ether anesthesia by Dr. Crawford
W. Long in surgery on March 30, 1842. It is a day established to recognize
physicians, their hard work, and their contributions to society and the
community. Traditionally, physicians are entrusted to have the qualities
of, besides competency, integrity, humanity, compassion, and sacrifice.
Recently, physicians lost their lives from taking care of patients infected
with Novel Coronavirus in China, their ultimate sacrifice.

According to the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare at
Massachusetts General Hospital (Harvard), compassionate care is defined by
the following four crucial characteristics: 1. Empathy, emotional support,
and a desire to relieve a patient’s distress and suffering. 2. Effective
communication at all stages of a patient’s illness and treatment. 3.
Respecting patients’ and families’ desires to participate in making health
care decisions. 4. Knowing and relating to the patient as a whole person,
not just a disease. Compassionate healthcare rendered to patients does
influence the outcome of recovery from illness.

A compassionate physician is dedicated and devoted to the well-being of his
patients in terms of two elements, curing and caring. He is able to feel his
patient’s pain, suffering, fear, anxiety, anger and loss of freedom
resulting from his illness. And he will compassionately commit himself to
alleviate his patient’s physical suffering as well as the suffering of his
soul.

In his book, “The Lost Arts of Healing: Practicing Compassion in Medicine”,
Dr. Bernard Lown illustrates that compassionate medical care, frequently in
terms of attentive listening, generates a healing relationship with
patients, leads to improvement of diagnostic ability, clinical outcomes, and
patients’ compliance with their prescribed treatment and recommendations.
Moreover, it can also promote physicians’ confidence and coping with the
stress of medical practice. Compassionate physicians, by and large, feel
gratified and fulfilled; they also have high self-esteem.

I steadfastly believe that all physicians ideally ought to possess the
qualities of, besides being empathic, Competent, Compassionate,
Conscientious, Caring, Committed, and Communicative (6Cs). Medicine is a
science, and healing is an art; a good physician is, therefore, the
appropriate combination of a scientist and an artist. With his experience,
broad scientific medical knowledge and cutting-edge diagnostic and
therapeutic armamentaria, he can achieve accurate diagnoses and successful
treatments for his patients’ diseases. His compassionate and humane approach
towards his patients benevolently consoles their painful mind suffered from
their physical ailments. Dr. V. Balakrishnan wrote, “A good physician
should be empathetic, but not condescending; analytical, but not critical;
detached, but not indifferent; enquiring, but not inquisitive;
knowledgeable, but not dogmatic; and humane, but not emotional.”

Unfortunately, the policy makers of the current healthcare system vigorously
attempt to contain costs, demand for high efficiency and profit, and
markedly reduce the necessary time physicians spend with patients. Today,
it is somewhat difficult for physicians to be compassionate due to time
constraints, electronic health records, mountainous paper work, and demands
to treat more and more patients with limited time frame. In the words of
Dr. Jerome Groopman, “The entire compassionate dimension of medicine, which
is really key to the profession and which is so gratifying – all of that is
threatened, severely threatened, if not erased, when you are put in an
environment where you are constantly hectored around money and efficiency
and making sure that time is minimized with patients in delivering care, in
order maximize revenue.”

Thus, expressing compassion is indeed a great challenge to the practicing
physicians. Patients incline to think that compassion is seemingly lacking
in the part of the physicians, and even lacking in the healthcare system as
a whole. Nevertheless, I trust that physicians are compassionate; this is
what drives them towards medicine, their calling, in the first place.
Tending the sick and comforting the dying is, indeed, our calling. By
displaying courtesy, empathy, commitment, compassion and caring, physicians
can restore and fortify this relationship. Dr. William Osler once said, “The
practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a
calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head.”

Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau: “To cure sometimes, to relieve often, to
comfort always.”