Empathy Is Part Of Healing

 Empathy Is Part Of Healing

Empathy is very much lacking in current medical practice. It is a pity to empathy itself, as it should be the cornerstone in alleviating the patients and the relatives from the pain of getting lost in the wilderness of medical care to the disease.

In the current era of medical care, the patient is not viewed as a human with suffering but more of a humanoid with a defect.

Thus, the human doctors and other medical staff turn into emotionless people, whereby the service to the sick and the relatives become non-existent.

In the process, human robots give treatment to humanoids to correct the defect with no qualms to reason it out with the patients or the relatives of what is being done and what is to be anticipated. So, there is a shut down in communication with the patients and their relatives. They are expected to deduce whatever imaginative superlatives which they assume are being done by the medical staff.

Is this what medicine is?

Well, medicine has its nobility in healing an individual by the care which should be shown by the medical staff rather than the medicine itself. The contented patients who leave the ward are not the patients which were treated with medical knowledge, instead, they are the patients who were treated by empathetic medical staff.

Hence, we have to focus and cultivate empathy towards our patients. No patients choose to be a patient, but the situation made them such. Unfortunately, the circumstances make them lose their identity and to be labeled as patients, to stay in the place which they don’t desire, in the name of treating them.

Then, they become invalid and everything will be done to them. Sadly, most of the time, the patient and the family won’t know what is being done as no medical staff has the time to show empathy towards them.

Isn’t medicine a holistic care of the patients, where empathy is infused in the treatment for better outcome of the patients, and at the same time to alleviate the anxiety of the patients and their relatives?

Medical staffs with years of working and facing life and death situations may get immune to it and at times get tired of it. However, to the relatives of the patients, their worries revolve around the patient.

Isn’t it that medical staffs have to carry their humane attitude in them to help those who are longing to know more about what is being done to their loved ones, who is deemed an invalid in the hospital bed?

I noticed that empathy is lacking in the current medical service as the medical staff don’t know what is suffering unless they have undergone it by themselves which is very unlikely. Besides that, the high standard of living has taken away the value of compassion and caring from the current medical staff. So, it should be made part of the curriculum of medical training to instill the value of empathy towards patients and relatives, though some may argue that it should be inborn in an individual.

 I opine that it should be equivalent to teaching medicine; empathy too should be taught in the formation years of medical studies. This is to inculcate in them that healing does not only require knowledge but also requires empathy. Thus, good medical staff is one who uses skills infused with empathy to achieving the goal of healing the patients under their care