Reduced empathy is an unintended biproduct of the educational process. What happens in first year? The first exposure to a patient is a dead body. No info about their lives, families, stories of triumph. Only cause of death. No way of creating empathic connection w/ the dead. 1/
This & other bodies become tools to create emotional distance between the future Dr and patients. Students can’t get feedback from this lifeless body about the level of pain, discomfort, care or love that can be felt from the interaction.
Students are instructed to identify systems, tissues, organs, structures through dissection, reducing the body to a tool for exploring anatomy but not human experience before ever encountering a live patient. Sometimes there’s a sign of the life the body once had.
An impression on a ring finger of the wedding ring was once worn. Students seem uncomfortable when they see that & hesitate to conduct the class exercise because there’s a risk of human connection & somehow the way they cut or treat this body matters more than the others.
They breathe & focus on the task of dissection at hand and the discomfort disappears from their awareness. After the exercise its business as usual. No debriefing or exploration of this discomfort & its implications on working with future patients.
A shared experience of discomfort successfully suppressed & dismissed. Spending many hours exploring human body this way creates a bias of what’s important to notice whereby future patients are seen through the lens of systems, structures, bits & pieces vs a whole human...
...who already embody health, wellbeing, strengths & capacity to meet their needs. That’s not dissected, identified or explored with the cadaver or even among student peers in those early days unless empathy & communication skills are part of the training in those early days too.
Exposure to a dead body for the first time can be traumatic for some or many students. Is there space to unpack the effects of what students just experienced & checking in on their wellbeing? The hidden curriculum says you gotta just deal & suck it up otherwise why are you here?
Spending enough time doing something TO a dead body before working WITH live patients systematically desensitises and depersonalises so that emotional distance becomes the new normal via reduced empathic capacity. We need a new way to introduce students to helping others
that preserves empathic capacity, emotional regulation and supports technical skills building and knowledge needed to develop connected Drs.
