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My Doctor, My Friend
In a piece several months ago in the Boston Globe, “Blurred Boundaries Between Doctor and Patient,” columnist and primary care internist Suzanne Koven writes movingly of her patient Emma, whom Koven...
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A Musical Offering
“There is no doubt in my mind that the study of music aids in the study of medicine. The study of one appears to potentiate the other.” ~ F. William Sunderman, M.D.,...
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Empathy, Psychotherapy, Medicine
What passes for psychoanalysis in America these days is a far cry from the psychoanalysis Freud devised in the early years of the last century. A sea change began in the 1970s, when Heinz Kohut, a...
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Pathways to Empathy?
Dipping into the vast[1] literature on clinical empathy, one quickly discerns the dominant storyline. Everyone agrees that empathy, while hard to define, hovers around a kind of physicianly caring...
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Naming the Pain
I always begin my “Medicine and Society” seminar by asking the students to identify as many of the following terms as they can and then to tell me what they have in common: nostalgie; railway spine;...
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Exit the Family Doctor
WHERE’S the good old family doctor, with his microscopic bills, With his bag of plasters, powders, and those evil-tasting pills? How our troubles used to lighten and our aches and pains abate, When his...
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The Times They Are a-Changin': Trends in Medical Education
Medical educators certainly have their differences, but one still discerns an emerging consensus about the kind of changes that will improve healthcare delivery and simultaneously re-humanize...
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Your Tool Touches Me
It is little known that René Laënnec, the Parisian physician who invented the stethoscope at the Necker Hospital in 1816, found it distasteful to place his ear to the patient’s chest. The...
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Doctor, How Do You Rate?
As if the challenges of “online professionalism” and Facebook “friending” don’t complicate doctor-patient relationships enough, there is the additional strain of online rating services, where patients...
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