Holistic Education Tasmania: July 97 News
Encouraging Compassion
Dr Rachael Remen, a professor at UCSF medical school, has implemented a program to help doctors and medical students remember their humanity and develop compassion rather than just "wearing the professional mask of objectivity".
She sees a medical degree as a disease from which doctors need to recover. Her program Care of the Soul aims to "heal the wounds of culture by discovering one's wholeness".
She starts off by putting students into small groups which also contain two doctors. She then asks:
- what do you fear will change in you as a result of this medical training?
- what part in you is this? What would it be like for a patient to meet this part?
As a result of exploring these questions together, through attending to each other with respect and focus, each student is able to reveal their "humanity". In the second session she asks the group to listen with respect to each other's stories of loss and their own grief when patients do not recover. This enables them to develop a sense of acceptance and intimacy with each other that breaks down the traditional barriers of professional competition and isolation found in the medical world.
She asks doctors and students to keep a daily journal with questions like... What surprised me today? What inspired me? What moved me?
One doctor, she said, had enormous difficulty in writing anything, saying nothing had happened to him in any of those categories. After some discussion with him she received a phone call months later.... he was very excited about the wonderful people he had been meeting recently - they were his patients!
After completing her course, a doctor who was delivering his 300th or so baby, stopped and realised with immense awe that his face was the first human face that the baby had seen. He was not just a doctor but a representative of humanity.
Return to contents...