Recently a friend told me that when I went to the doctor, I often felt that the most important thing was the doctor, when the really important thing had to be the patient.
In that sense, I recently read a wonderful short story Galeano I wanted to share with you:
“A man from the city of Neguá, on the coast of Colombia, was able to ascend into the high heavens. On his return he said that he had contemplated human life from above. And he said that we are a sea of fire. The world is that, ”he revealed. many people, a sea of fires. Each person shines with their own light among all others. No two fires are the same. There are big fires and small fires and fires of all colors. There are people with serene fires, who don’t even know about the wind, and people with crazy fire that fills the air with sparks. Some fires, foolish fires, don’t burn or burn; but others burn life with such passion that you cannot look at it without blinking, and whoever approaches it lights up ”.
We should all try to be the last type of ‘fire’, the one who ‘kindles’ the one who approaches. But especially doctors. We have that opportunity and that responsibility to our patients.
The Placebo Effect of Empathy
When a patient leaves a consultation, there can be 3 types of reactions:
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That says: “What a disaster, I will not come back”
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Say, “All correct, they are professionals”
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Let him come out and say, “How wonderful! How well they treated me!
The latter is what we doctors should try to achieve: one emotional bond with patients through our treatment and how we made them feel in our practice. Patients no longer know why they came to us, but they will remember how they felt in our practice.
And when this empathy is achieved, we get two very clear advantages about the patient: the knowledge Placebo effect, that is, the patient improves directly through a psychosomatic effect, and especially the assurance that the patient will also be involved in therapeutic adherence or the recommendations prescribed by the physician, that is, greater “adherence” to the treatment.
Drug people should be the kind of ‘fire’ that ‘lights up’ others, that makes them better. In the case of dermatologists, helping our patients get through the skin. And we must, as the story goes, one quiet fire, which is not sensitive to the wind (fashion, unrealistic expectations, money, pharmaceuticals, temporal trends, etc.). For this reason, medicine is not about constantly doing extraordinary things, but about performing normal daily tasks in an extraordinary way.
Because sometimes we doctors heal, but we have to always unload.