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how do practitioners/doctors/surgeons manage seeing unpleasant medical conditions?

...And keep themselves anxiety free, stress free and emotionally uninvolved?

You get desensitised over time

It's like when we see people getting brutally executed many times, we lose the the squeamishness and can watch it without feeling anything.

Reply 2

Joyful_soul

Original post by Heavychut

You get desensitised over time

It's like when we see people getting brutally executed many times, we lose the the squeamishness and can watch it without feeling anything.

Sure, but what can someone at the start of their career take to manage the initial stress?

Reply 3

Ronove

Original post by Joyful_soul

Sure, but what can someone at the start of their career take to manage the initial stress?

I think debriefing with colleagues afterwards is generally the first port of call for dealing with it.

Reply 4

username1236842

It depends on what you mean by unpleasant conditions. I had difficulty giving people bad news initially and remember being very tearful when telling someone seriously jaundiced that he had inoperable cancer because no-one else had bothered to tell him his test results, I had never met him before but was on call and he was about to get an ambulance back to the hospital he had come from. I felt someone in our hospital should tell him before he left, especially as he had asked to see a doctor but felt I wasn't the "right" doctor and it was all very rushed and upsetting. I also had a toddler die on Easter Sunday when I did paeds and was very upset about that. The general goryness of medicine doesn't bother me though, although i hate unpleasant smells especially faeces and couldn't be a pathologist. I can now have 3 people in a row come in and see me and burst into tears and not get too emotionally involved.

I think remembering the quotation for The House of God "the patient is the one with the disease" helps. They have an unpleasant disease not me, my job is to help them deal with it, not pretend/ imagine I have the disease. You can overempathise in medicine.

Reply 5

Democracy

Original post by Joyful_soul

...And keep themselves anxiety free, stress free and emotionally uninvolved?

I suspect a not insignificant number of medics actually don't manage to do this - hence the high prevalence of depression, anxiety, alcoholism, etc within the profession.

Original post by taysidefrog

I think remembering the quotation for The House of God "the patient is the one with the disease" helps. They have an unpleasant disease not me, my job is to help them deal with it, not pretend/ imagine I have the disease. You can overempathise in medicine.

Should be required reading for every applicant imho - infinitely more relevant than New Scientist!

And yeah, I agree, that particular "law" is definitely worth bearing in mind.

(edited 9 years ago)

Reply 6

shiggydiggy

Came in to post law #4, beaten to it.

Reply 7

ukmed108

Original post by Joyful_soul

...And keep themselves anxiety free, stress free and emotionally uninvolved?

I'm not squeamish. Precious little really grosses me out.

Reply 8

Helenia

Original post by Joyful_soul

...And keep themselves anxiety free, stress free and emotionally uninvolved?

I found the "blood and guts" stuff relatively easy to learn to deal with. You learn anatomy, pathology etc, so when you do see it, you know what it is and you learn what needs to be done to treat it, rather than just going "OMG BLOOD GROSS." Some stuff is more disgusting than others, and I find things that smell bad more difficult than injuries/conditions that just look gross, perhaps because I can turn off the emotional reaction to visual stimuli more easily by approaching it logically, whereas smells provoke a more visceral reaction.

The emotional side of medicine can be more difficult to deal with, and I suspect this is what leads to doctors having high rates of mental illness/substance abuse/suicide. What outsiders often don't realise is that it's not just patients being very sick/dying that affects you. I am not afraid of death, it comes to us all and the best we can do as doctors is prevent it where possible and make it comfortable otherwise. I recognise that it is a sad situation for the patient and their relatives, but most of the time I don't feel sad myself - sombre would be a better word. There are some deaths that affect me more than others still, kids in particular. The emotional problems that are less often acknowledged are things like the stress of managing in job where you are hopelessly stretched and out of your depth, being shouted at by angry relatives for things that aren't really your fault, the terror of making a mistake and the horror when you do. Good clinical supervision and debriefing helps a lot - my colleagues and I will often have an informal debrief/whine/bitching session over coffee if something bad has gone on, and more formal routes are available if necessary.