Empathy: Most Important Medical Gift of All

Ever wondered if your doctor “remembers” you among all the other patients he or she has? Chances are the answer is yes.

Your health, your story, and you as an individual often impact physicians in surprising ways. Your interactions may even change the way they practice medicine and care for others.

Lessons learned over the holidays especially have an impact. Second-year pediatrics resident Dr. Hormuz Nicolwala of the WVU Children’s Hospital in Morgantown, West Virginia, attests to this after recently starting his palliative/hospice medicine rotation.

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One of his first patients was a new mother — who had delivered a stillborn child.

“Trying to console her through this traumatic experience, especially during the holiday season, taught me an important life lesson,” he told LifeZette. “Empathy is the most important skill you can practice. It will lead to greater success personally and professionally, and will allow you to become happier the more you practice.”

The ‘Joy’ of Good Health
While volunteering at a low-income clinic during the holidays, Dr. Jennifer Dean, a dentist with Rancho Santa Fe Cosmetic & Family Dentistry in San Diego, California, got an eye-opening lesson.

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An elderly woman in distress appeared. She had few teeth and had a very painful infection. Dean treated the woman, removing the decayed teeth and fitting her with a denture. During the treatment, the doctor learned the woman had immigrated to the U.S. 40 years before, had seven children, and had worked three jobs for most of her life to provide for them. She never had the resources to take care of her own health.

“She could finally chew her food without pain,” said one dentist about his patient.

“I had never seen a look of joy like that,” Dean told LifeZette about the patient’s reaction to her treatment that day. “What was a relatively straightforward procedure for me was absolutely life-changing for her. She could finally chew her food without pain. She taught me the value of volunteering, but more than that — and what sticks with me to this day — is the value of what we bring to people as health care practitioners, and that many people still lack basic preventative care.”

Life Can Change in a Snap
Having to tell the parents — during the holidays — that their beautiful 19-year-old daughter had an inoperable brain tumor was one of the toughest things Dr. Jeffrey Greenfield, of Weill Cornell Medicine Brain and Spine Center in New York, New York, has ever had to do. The teenager’s condition, gliomatosis cerebri (GC), invades the brain in such a way that the tumor cannot be removed surgically. Chemotherapy and radiation don’t work against it and, because of its rarity, little funding is available for research.

Greenfield didn’t expect the remarkable young woman, Elizabeth Minter, to react the way she did. Knowing her death was imminent, she decided to create hope for others.

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She and her parents spent her final months creating Elizabeth’s Hope, a campaign that evolved into the Children’s Brain Tumor Project at Weill Cornell Medicine. Her tumor became the first of its kind to be sampled, using newly available genomic sequencing, and it gave science a wealth of new information about this mysterious cancer.

Now, five years later, the project has a growing laboratory. Every tumor gets sequenced for research and the group is publishing its findings so that other researchers can advance the science.

“Elizabeth’s unselfish determination to create hope changed my own life, professionally and personally,” Greenfield told LifeZette. “I learned there’s always hope. More importantly, she changed the lives of future children and teens diagnosed with GC. Someday, I’ll tell a patient and her family that the diagnosis is GC —  but, thanks to Elizabeth, there is a cure.”

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‘Moderation Is Key’ 
A call summoning him to the emergency room two days before Christmas brought two lessons to Dr. Partha Nandi, of Detroit, Michigan. Upon his arrival, Nandi found his patient suffering from food stuck in his esophagus. He was having difficulty breathing, but literally was “filled up” with food.

The man had eaten several helpings of chicken because his sister had prepared a special recipe and he wanted to please her. After he removed the food and performed a procedure to support the man’s breathing, Nandi learned the patient had a condition that caused his food tube to narrow and had been prescribed medication. He had not, however, been taking the medication.

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“This situation helped me learn important lessons,” Nandi told LifeZette. “One, taking the prescribed medicines is critically important! Second, moderation is key. No matter how much we love our family, we don’t need to eat giant portions of food to help express our love.”

Pat Barone, MCC, is a professional credentialed coach and author of the Own Every Bite! bodycentric re-education program for mindful and intuitive eating, who helps clients heal food addictions.