The Compassionate Doctor

Choosing the right doctor is essentail for so many reasons, not least of which is because any serious illness is rarely treated in a one-off procedure. With treatment requiring regular check-ups and ongoing visits, you may need to maintain contact with your doctor for weeks, months, even years. In light of this, you both need to get along with each other in every way possible.

Your doctor has to adopt a non-critical attitude and accept you for who you are. Knowing more about your beliefs and values is essential learning on the part of your doctor. It will help them interpret your problems within your value system, not theirs.

You expect your doctor to give you the best advice possible, and you will follow their advice if you respect their knowledge and judgment. However, you are less likely to do so if they cannot appreciate how you feel about medical information and procedures-and especially if your doctor conceals his/her lack of empathy behind a mask of arrogance. It is to your mutual benefit to build a therapeutic partnership that eliminates the imbalance between the doctor's paternalism and your dependence. No doctor should project his or her fear of failure or obsessive desire to fix the world onto you.

The fact is, doctors are not God, they are human. As humans, they have no real control over the final outcome. If they prescribe a course of treatment, they cannot control whether it will work or not. If it works, it isn't because they are God. If it doesn't work, it isn't because they are the Devil. Both you and your doctor need to recognize this fundamental fact.

The compassionate doctor is the one who can appreciate your suffering, and does whatever they can to relieve it. They understand that to show pity is an expression of fear, to show compassion is a sign of love; that to fulfil their calling as a doctor, they have to go beyond defined medical duties.

In her landmark book, Living with Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross points out that the most extreme anguish we can feel is to be forsaken and not to be heard; that we cope better if we are reassured that our doctors will not desert us. The compassionate doctor will understand this and pay particular attention to your needs, will never hide from their humanity by labeling you "unhelpful" or "uncooperative," by calling your disease "the worst of its kind I've ever seen" or blaming the system by saying something like, "I'd like to help, but my hands are tied." They will do what they can to allay your fears (and theirs) by accepting their role as your expert guide, and will help you work through and understand your illness. They will be aware how scary the buzz-words are that doctors use and how terrifying the paraphernalia and procedures of a hospital or treatment centre can be, so they will try to explain everything to you-and then check to make sure you understand.

Even if they go out of their way to choose the right words, doctors have to recognize that you may hear only what you want or don't want to hear. For example, your doctor may say, "You need to undergo surgery," but you hear, "You don't need to undergo surgery."

You need someone to listen to you, share your pain, your desolation, your despair, and your hopes. No one who truly appreciates your suffering will ever give you gratuitous advice, attempt to out-do you with their own personal experiences, make moral judgments about your behavior, or try to be dogmatic. This can be extremely upsetting, as it was for Richard, a man with lymphoma I once counseled who said to me, "I feel as if I'm invisible to my doctor. He has no idea of how I feel. According to him most of my problems are in my head. All he does is tell me what he thinks." Even now, women tell me that male doctors show them little compassion, and regard their complaints as neurotic or "all in the head."

Most experienced doctors accept that modern science is limited in dealing with such a complex organism as a human being. The compassionate doctor will accept you as the person you are, not as someone defined by your illness-just as they are not (hopefully) defined by their profession but as the person they really are. Accepting that you have the right to be treated with consideration and with love, they will see you as a human being with a name-not as a case labeled "the myeloid leukemia case," or ‘"the motor neuron case."

It is my hope that instead of doctors saying, "We think we can cure frequently, relieve much of the time, and comfort when we get around to it," they will say, "We can cure frequently, relieve often, and comfort always."