Recently I had the immense pleasure of being asked to co-teach a class at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The course is a requirement for first year medical students, and it is called “Doctoring 1”. The medical school puts a tremendous amount of effort into this course, which teaches many things including how to deliver bad news, how to interview a patient thoughtfully and without judgment, and how to encourage and counsel on healthful behaviors. When the physician who recommended me to the program spoke to me about it, he said, “it is an opportunity to remind medical students that they are human”.
Strangely enough, this made sense to me. See, I work in oncology. So I work with doctors who have chosen a very hard road in many ways. Some of them are researchers whose interest is more in the intellectual, cerebral realm than the interpersonal one. Some of them see so much suffering, they disconnect a little Continue Reading