Tag Archives: patient-centered medicine

Telemedicine Rising

Posted on March 5, 2018 | 1 comment

In a “Viewpoint” published in JAMA a month ago,[1] Michael Nochomovitz and Rahul Sharma suggest that the time has come to create a new medical specialty: virtual medicine.  Extrapolating from the manner in which medical specialties have traditionally arisen (viz., “by advances in technology and expansion of knowledge in care delivery”), they submit that telemedicine has advanced to the point of providing the basis for a new kind of specialty care.  Telemedicine, as they define it, comprises various web-based telecommunications modalities, social media, teleconferencing, video face-to-face communications with patients, among them.  They place before us  medical virtualists, physicians who “will spend the majority or all of their time caring for patients using a virtual medium.”

Unlike today’s physicians, who make use of this or that “virtual medium” haphazardly and without formal training, the virtualist will achieve a set of “core competencies” through formal training.  Their curriculum for certification, according to the authors, should include “knowledge of legal and clinical limitations of virtual care, competencies in virtual examination using the patient or families, ‘virtual visit presence training,’ inclusion of on-site clinical measurements, as well as continuing education.” Among the techniques in their arsenal will be those aimed at achieving “good webside manner” (authors’ italics).

Now, far be it from me to discourage the use of  remote technologies to render health care delivery more efficient and especially to bring primary care to underserved communities. The value of “remote surgery” that ranges from telementoring and remote guidance to actual robotic operations is well-documented.  But is a new medical virtualism specialty really in our best interest?  Certainly,  telemedicine will play an  increasing role in medicine; the question is whether this “role” should become the basis of a bounded specialty.  This would make the medical virtualist the first medical practitioner whose practice excluded (or drastically marginalized) patients, making it radically different from nonpractice specialties such as pathology or diagnostic radiology.

It is problematic especially in the cognitive specialties.  We would have a subspecies of primary care doctors who specialized in care that was patient-uncentered, i.e., that was premised on the self-sufficiency of piece-person care as opposed to whole-person care.  The proposal takes the current fragmentation of care among subspecialists and refashions it into a virtue.  That is, we will have virtuous physicians who only practice virtual medicine and feel good about doing so.  Such care differs from subspecialty care in a key respect:  we typically see our subspecialists in the flesh.  We can ask them questions, demand explanations, and criticize them for not giving us the time and attention we seek.  In the absence of adequate time and attention, we can seek out a different subspecialist who is more patient-centered and welcoming.   With the medical virtualist, on the other hand, dehumanization is integral to the specialty itself.  The patient has no recourse; he is outside the virtualist’s purview altogether.

It is striking that the issue of patient trust is nowhere mentioned in the article,   even though empirical research suggests that trust is the “basic driver” of patient satisfaction.  It has been linked to less treatment anxiety, greater pain tolerance, and greater compliance.[2]  But the authors subordinate all such issues to their focus on efficiency and ease of use.   As such, their case rests on the assumption that informed the patient rights movement of the 1970s and ’80s:  that patients are simply consumers in search of a commodity.  Now, a half century after passage of the Patient’s Bill of Rights, the commodity is increasingly mediated by technology.[3]  And “the success of technology-based services,” according to the authors, “is not determined by hardware and software alone but by ease of use, perceived value, and workflow optimization.”  The need to humanize the delivery of technology, to convey to the patient some sense of what I have termed “caring technology,”[4] falls outside a conversation framed in terms of consumerist values.

But once we factor trust into the equation, we open a can of worms.  For patient trust implicates the doctor’s touch, which includes both the laying on of hands and the implementation of office-based procedures.  It also implicates human qualities such as caring, empathy, and the willingness to tolerate ambiguity.  Finally, it puts us in contact with the  Hippocratic Oath, in which ethical obligations revolve entirely around physicians treating patients who are full-fledged human beings, fellow sufferers.  This is why Jennifer Edgoose and Julian Edgoose, writing in a recent issue of Annals of Family Medicine about “Finding Hope in the Face-to-Face,” begin with this sentence:  “The daily work of clinicians is conducted in face-to-face encounters, whether in exam rooms, homes, or alongside hospital beds, but little attention has been paid to the responsibilities and ethical implications generated by this dimension of our relational work.”[5]  Among these implications is the physician’s obligation not merely to be an instrument of diagnosis and treatment, but also to contain the patient’s “wounded humanity” in the sense of Pellegrino.[6]

I wrote In the Hands of Doctors precisely to explore, both historically and in the present, this dimension of physicians’ “relational work,” including the better and worse ways in which it can appropriate technologies that are not only sought after by patient-consumers, but viewed as remote and intimidating by patient-persons.  Physicians who know their patients as wounded and vulnerable can humanize technology by pulling it into a trusting doctor-patient relationship.

These thoughts are a counterpoise to the authors’ brief for “the medical virtualist.”  Their proposal is provocative and troubling.  It inverts figure and ground, so that telemedicine, heretofore an adjunct to face-to-face care, becomes the ground of a specialty in which face-to-face care is incidental at best.  In the domain of primary care, it segues into the philosophical question of who or what primary care virtualists are being trained to care for.  Can one be a primary care physician of any type and care for some “thing” other than whole persons?  The status of virtualism in surgical specialties is no doubt different.

I invite others to reply to this posting with their thoughts on a topic that will only grow in importance in the years ahead.

_______________________

[1] Michael Nochomovitz & Rahul Sharma, “Is It Time for a New Medical Specialty?  The Medical Virtualist,” JAMA, 319:437-438, 2018.

[2] Paul E. Stepansky, In the Hands of Doctors: Touch and Trust in Medical Care (Montclair: Keynote, 2017), 21 and references cited therein.

[3] Stepansky, In the Hands of Doctors, 133-135

[4] Stepansky, In the Hands of Doctors, 82-98.

[5] Jennifer Y. C. Edgoose & Julian M. Edgoose, “Finding Hope in the Face-to-Face,” Ann. Fam. Med., 15:272-274, 2017.

[6] E. D. Pellegrino, Humanism and the Physician (Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 124, 146, 184, and passim.

 

1 Comment

Posted in Healthcare Delivery Systems, Medical Technology, Old & New, Primary Care, Telemedicine

Tagged , , ,

The Times They Are a-Changin’: Trends in Medical Education

Posted on October 24, 2013 | Leave a comment

Medical educators certainly have their differences, but one still discerns an emerging consensus about the kind of changes that will improve healthcare delivery and simultaneously re-humanize physician-patient encounters.  Here are a few of the most progressive trends in medical education, along with brief glosses that serve to recapitulate certain themes of previous postings.

Contemporary medical training stresses the importance of teamwork and militates against the traditional narcissistic investment in solo expertise.  Teamwork, which relies on the contributions of nonphysician midlevel providers, works against the legacy of socialization that, for many generations, rendered physicians “unfit” for teamwork.  The trend now is to re-vision training so that the physician becomes fit for a new kind of collaborative endeavor.  It is teamwork, when all is said and done, that “transfers the bulk of our work from the realm of guesswork and conjecture to one in which certainty and exactitude may be at least approached.”  Must group practice militate against personalized care?  Perhaps not. Recently, medical groups large and small have been enjoined to remember that “a considerable proportion of the physician’s work is not the practice of medicine at all.  It consists of counseling, orienting, extricating, encouraging, solacing, sympathizing, understanding.”

Contemporary medical training understands that the patient him- or herself has become, and by rights ought to be, a member of the healthcare team.  Medical educators ceded long ago that patients, in their own best interests, “should know something about the human body.”  Now we have more concrete expressions of this requirement, viz., that  if more adequate teaching of anatomy and physiology were provided in secondary schools, “physicians will profit and patients will prosper.”   “Just because a man is ill,” notes one educator, “is no reason why he should stop using his mind,” especially as he [i.e., the patient] is the important factor in the solution of his problem, not the doctor.”  For many educators the knowledgeable patient is not only a member of the “team,” but the physician’s bonafide collaborator.  They assume, that is, that physician and patient “will be able to work together intelligently.”  Working together intelligently suggests a “frank cooperation” in which physician and patient alike have “free access to all outside sources of help and expert knowledge.”  It also means recognizing, without prejudice or personal affront,  that the patient’s “inalienable right is to consult as many physicians as he chooses.”  Even today, an educator observes, “doctors have too much property interest in their patients,” despite the fact that patients find their pronouncements something less than, shall we say, “oracular.”  Contemporary training inherits the mantle of the patient rights revolution of the 1970s and 80s.  Educators today recognize that “It is the patient who must decide the validity of opinion from consideration of its source and probability.”  Another speaks for many in reiterating that

It is the patient who must decide the validity of opinion from consideration of its source and probability.  If the doctor’s opinion does not seem reasonable, or if the bias of it, due to temperament or personal and professional experience is obvious, then it is well for the patient to get another opinion, and the doctor has no right to be incensed or humiliated by such action.

Contemporary medical training stresses the importance of primary care values that are lineal descendants of old-style general practice.  This trend grows out of the realization that a physician “can take care of a patient without caring for him,” that the man or woman publicly considered a “good doctor” is invariably the doctor who will “find something in a sick person that aroused his sympathy, excited his admiration, or moved his compassion.”  Optimally, commentators suggest,  multispecialty and subspecialty groups would retain their own patient-centered generalists – call them, perhaps, “therapeutists”  — to provide integrative patient care beyond diagnostic problem-solving and even beyond the conventional treatment modalities of the group.  The group-based therapeutist, while trained in the root specialty of his colleagues, would also have specialized knowledge of alternative treatments outside the specialty.  He would, for example, supplement familiarity with mainstream drug therapies with a whole-patient, one might say a “wholesome” distrust of drugs.

Contemporary training finally recognizes the importance of first-hand experience of illness in inculcating the values that make for “good doctoring.”  Indeed, innovative curricula now land medical students in the emergency rooms and clinics with (feigned) symptoms and histories that invite discomfiting and sometimes lengthy interventions.  Why has it taken educators so long to enlarge the curriculum in this humanizing manner?  If, as one educator notes, “It is too much to ask of a physician that he himself should have had an enigmatic illness,” it should still be a guiding heuristic that “any illness makes him a better doctor.”  Another adds:  “It is said that an ill doctor is a pathetic sight; but one who has been ill and has recovered has had an affective experience which he can utilize to the advantage of his patients.”

The affective side of a personal illness experience may entail first-hand experience of medicine’s dehumanizing “hidden curriculum.”  Fortunate the patient whose physician has undergone his or her own medical odyssey, so that life experience vivifies the commonplace reported by one seriously ill provider:  “ I felt I had not been treated like a human being.”  A physician-writer who experienced obscure, long-term infectious illness early in his career and was shunted from consultant to consultant understands far better than healthy colleagues that physicians “are so prone to occupy themselves with the theoretical requirements of a case that they lose sight entirely of the human being and his life story.”  Here is the painful reminiscence of another ill physician of more literary bent:

There had been no inquiry of plans or prospects, no solicitude for ambitious or desires, no interest in the spirit of the man whose engine was signaling for gas and oil.  That day I determined never to sentence a person on sight, for life or to death.

Contemporary medical training increasingly recognizes that all medicine is, to one degree or another, psychiatric medicine.  Clinical opinions, educators remind us, can be truthful but still contoured to the personality, especially the psychological needs, of the patient.  Sad to say, the best clinical educators are those who know colleagues, whatever their specialty, who either “do not appreciate that constituent of personality which psychologists call the affects . . . and the importance of the role which these affects or emotions play in conditioning [the patient’s] destiny, well or ill, or they refuse to be taught by observation and experience.”   This realization segues into the role of psychiatric training in medical education, certainly for physicians engaged in primary care, but really for all physicians.  Among other things, such training “would teach him [or her] that disease cannot be standardized, that the individual must be considered first, then the disease.”  Even among patients with typical illnesses, psychiatric training can help physicians understand idiosyncratic reactions to standard treatment protocols.  It aids comprehension  of the individual “who happens to have a very common disease in his own very personal manner.”

_____________

These trends encapsulate the reflections and recommendations of progressive medical educators responsive to the public demand for more humane and humanizing physicians. The trends are also responsive to the mounting burnout of physicians – especially primary care physicians – who, in the  cost-conscious, productivity-driven, and regulatory climate of our time, find it harder than ever to practice patient-centered medicine.  But are these trends really so contemporary?  I confess to a deception.  The foregoing paraphrases, quotations, and recommendations are not from contemporary educators at all.  They are culled from the popular essays of a single physician, the pioneer neurologist Joseph Collins, all of which were published in Harper’s Monthly between 1924 and 1929.[1]

Collins is a fascinating figure.  An 1888 graduate of New York University Medical College, he attended medical school and began his practice burdened with serious, sometimes debilitating, pulmonary and abdominal symptoms that had him run the gauntlet of consultant diagnoses – pneumonia, pulmonary tuberculosis, “tuberculosis of the kidney,” chronic appendicitis, even brain tumor.  None of these authoritative pronouncements was on the mark, but taken together they left Collins highly critical of his own profession and pushed him in the direction of holistic, collaborative, patient-centered medicine.  After an extended period of general practice, he segued into the emerging specialty of neurology (then termed neuropsychiatry) and, with his colleagues Joseph Fraenkel and Pearce Bailey, founded the New York Neurological Institute in 1909.  Collins’s career as a neurologist never dislodged his commitment to  generalist patient-centered care. Indeed, the neurologist, as he understood the specialty in 1911, was the generalist best suited to treat chronic disease of any sort.[2]

Collin’s colorful, multifaceted career as a popular medical writer and literary critic is beyond the scope of this essay.[3]  I use him here to circle back to a cardinal point of previous writings.  “Patient-centered/relationship-centered care,” humanistic medicine, empathic caregiving, behavioral adjustments to the reality of patients’ rights  – these additives to the medical school curriculum are as old as they are new.  What is new is the relatively recent effort to cultivate such sensibilities through curricular innovations.  Taken together,  public health, preventive medicine, childhood vaccination, and modern antibiotic therapy have (mercifully) cut short the kind of  experiential journey that for Collins secured the humanistic moorings of the biomedical imperative.  Now medical educators rely on communication skills training, empathy-promoting protocols, core-skills workshops, and seminars on “The Healer’s Art” to close the circle, rescue medical students from evidence-based and protocol-driven overkill, and bring them back in line with Collins’s hard-won precepts.

It is not quite right to observe that these precepts apply equally to Collins’s time and our own.  They give expression to the care-giving impulse, to the ancient injunction to cure through caring (the Latin curare) that, in all its ebb and flow, whether as figure or ground, weaves through the fabric of medical history writ large.  Listen to Collins one final time as he expounds his philosophy of practice in 1926:

It would be a wise thing to devote a part of medical education to the mind of the physician himself, especially as it concerns his patients.  For the glories of medical history are the humanized physicians.  Science will always fall short; but compassion covereth all.[4]

[1] Joseph Collins, “The alienist in court,” Harper’s Monthly, 150:280-286, 1924; Joseph Collins, “A doctor looks at doctors,” Harper’s Monthly, 154:348-356, 1926; Joseph Collins, “Should doctors tell the truth?”, Harper’s Monthly, 155:320-326, 1927;  Joseph Collins, “Group practice in medicine,” Harper’s Monthly, 158:165-173, 1928;  Joseph Collins, “The patient’s dilemma,” Harper’s Monthly, 159:505-514, 1929.   I have also consulted two of Collins’s popular collections that make many of the same points:  Letters to a Neurologist, 2nd series (NY: Wood, 1910) and The Way with the Nerves: Letters to a Neurologist on Various Modern Nervous Ailments, Real and Fancied, with Replies Thereto Telling of their Nature and Treatment (NY: Putnam, 1911).

[2] Collins, The Way with Nerves, p. 268.

[3] Collins’s review of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the first by an American, was published  in The New York Times on May 28, 1922.  His volume The Doctor Looks at Literature: Psychological Studies of Life and Literature (NY: Doran, 1923) appeared the following year.

[4] Collins, “A doctor looks at doctors,” p. 356.  Collins’s injunction is exemplified in “The Healer’s Art,” a course developed by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen over the past 22 years and currently taught annually in 71  American medical colleges as well as medical colleges in seven other countries.  See David Bornstein, “Medicine’s Search for Meaning,” posted for The New York Times/Opinionator on September 18, 2013 (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/medicines-search-for-meaning/?_r=0).

Copyright © 2013 by Paul E. Stepansky.  All rights reserved.

Leave a comment

Posted in Doctor-Patient Communication, General, Medical Education, Psychiatry in Medicine

Tagged , , , ,

Pathways to Empathy?

Posted on May 18, 2012 | 2 comments

Dipping into the vast[1] literature on clinical empathy, one quickly discerns the dominant storyline.  Everyone agrees that empathy, while hard to define,  hovers around a kind of physicianly caring that incorporates emotional connection with patients.  The connection conveys sensitivity to the patient’s life circumstances and personal psychology, and gains expression in the physician’s ability to encourage the patient to express emotion, especially as it pertains to his medical condition.  Then the physician draws on her own experience of similar emotions in communicating an “accurate” empathic understanding of how the patient feels and why he should feel that way.

Almost all commentators agree that empathy, whatever it is, is a good thing indeed.  They cite empirical research linking it to more efficient and effective care, to patients who are more trusting of their doctors, more compliant in following instructions, and more satisfied with the outcome of treatment. Patients want doctors who give them not only the appointment time but the time of day, and when they feel better understood, they simply feel better.  Furthermore, doctors who are empathic doctor better.  They learn more about their patients and, as a result, are better able to fulfill  core medical tasks such as history-taking, diagnosis, and treatment.  Given this medley of benefits, commentators can’t help but lament the well-documented decline of empathy, viz., of humanistic, patient-centered care-giving, among medical students and residents, and to proffer new strategies for reviving it.  So they present readers with a host of training exercises, coding schemes, and curricular innovations to help medical students retain the empathy with which they began their medical studies, and also to help overworked, often jaded, residents refind the ability to empathize that has succumbed to medical school and the dehumanizing rigors of specialty training.[2]

It is at this point that empathy narratives fork off in different directions.  Empathy researchers typically opt for a cognitive-behavioral approach to teaching empathy, arguing that if medical educators cannot teach students and residents to feel with their patients, they can at least train them to discern what their patients feel, to encourage the expression of these feelings, and then to respond in ways that affirm and legitimize the feelings.  This interactional approach leads to the creation of various models, step-wise approaches, rating scales, language games (per Wittgenstein), and coding systems, all aimed at cultivating a cognitive skill set that, from the patient’s perspective, gives the impression of a caring and emotionally attuned provider.  Duly trained in the art of eliciting and affirming emotions, the physician becomes capable of what one theorist terms “skilled interpersonal performances” with patients.  Seen thusly, empathic connection becomes a “clinical procedure” that takes the patient’s improved psychobiological functioning as its outcome.[3]

The cognitive-behavioral approach is an exercise in what researchers term “communication skills training.”  It typically parses doctor-patient communication into micro-interactions that can be identified and coded as “empathic opportunities.”  Teaching students and residents the art of “accurate empathy” amounts to alerting them to these opportunities and showing how their responses (or nonresponses) either exploit or miss them.  One research team, in a fit of linguistic inventiveness, tagged the physician’s failure to invite the patient to elaborate an emotional state (often followed by a physician-initiated change of subject), an “empathic opportunity terminator.”  Learning to pick up on subtle, often nonverbal, clues of underlying feeling states and gently prodding patients to own up to emotions is integral to the process. Thus, when patients don’t actually express emotion but instead provide a clue that may point to an emotion, the physician’s failure to travel down the yellow brick road of masked emotion becomes, more creatively still, a “potential empathic opportunity terminator.”  Whether protocol-driven questioning about feeling states leads patients to feel truly understood or simply the object of artificial, even artifactual, behaviors has yet to be systematically addressed.  Medical researchers ignore the fact that empathy, however “accurate,” is not effective unless it is perceived as such by patients.[4]

Medical educators of a humanistic bent take a different fork in the road to empathic care giving.  Shying away from protocols, models, scales, and coding schemes, they embrace a more holistic vision of empathy as growing out of medical training leavened by character-broadening exposure to the humanities. The foremost early proponent of this viewpoint was Howard Spiro, whose article of 1992, “What is Empathy and Can It Be Taught?” set the tone and tenor for an emerging literature on the role of the humanities in medical training.  William Zinn echoed his message a year later: “The humanities deserve to be a part of medical education because they not only provide ethical guidance and improve cognitive skills, but also enrich life experiences in the otherwise cloistered environment of medical school.”  The epitome of this viewpoint, also published in 1993, was the volume edited by Spiro and his colleagues, Empathy and the Practice of Medicine.  Over the past 15 years, writers in this tradition have added to the list of nonmedical activities conducive to clinical empathy.  According to Halpern, they include “meditation, sharing stories with colleagues, writing about doctoring, reading books, and watching films conveying emotional complexity.”  Shapiro and her colleagues single out courses in medicine and literature, attendance at theatrical performances, and assignments in “reflective writing” as specific empathy-enhancers.[5]

Spiro practiced and taught gastroenterology in New Haven, home of Yale University School of Medicine and the prestigious Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute. One quickly discerns the psychoanalytic influence on his approach.  The humanistic grounding he sought for students and residents partakes of this influence, whether in the kind of literature he wanted students to read (i.e., “the new genus of pathography”) or in his approach to history taking (“The clues that make the physician aware at the first meeting that a patient is depressed require free-floating attention, as psychoanalysts call it.”).

A variant of the “humanist” approach accepts the cognitivist assumption that empathy is a teachable skill but veers away from communications theory and cognitive psychology to delineate it.  Instead, it looks to the world of psychotherapy, especially the psychoanalytic self psychology of Heinz Kohut.  These articles, most of which were published in the 90s, are replete with psychoanalytic conceptualizations and phraseology; they occasionally reference Kohut himself but more frequently cite work by psychoanalytic self psychologists  Michael Basch and Dan Buie, the psychiatrist Leston Havens, and the psychiatrist-anthropologist Arthur Kleinman.

Authors following a psychoanalytic path to empathy assign specific tasks to students, residents, and clinicians, but the tasks are more typically associated with the opening phase of long-term psychotherapy.  Clinicians are enjoined to begin in a patiently receptive mode, avoiding the “pitfalls of premature empathy” and realizing that patients “seldom verbalize their emotions directly and spontaneously,” instead offering up clues that must be probed and unraveled.  Empathic receptiveness helps render more understandable and tolerable “the motivation behind patient behavior that would otherwise seem alien or inappropriate.”  Through “self-monitoring and self-analyzing,” the empathic clinician learns to rule out endogenous causes for heightened emotional states and can “begin to understand its source in the patient.”  In difficult confrontations with angry or upset patients, physicians, no less than psychoanalysts, must cultivate “an ongoing practice of engaged curiosity” that includes systematic self-reflection.  Like analysts, that is, they must learn to analyze the countertransference for clues about their patients’ feelings.[6]

There is a mildly overwrought quality to the medical appropriation of psychoanalysis, as if an analytic sensibility per se – absent lengthy analytic training – can be superadded to the mindset of task-oriented, often harried, clinicians and thereupon imbue them with heightened “empathic accuracy.” Given the tensions among the gently analytic vision of empathic care, the claims of patient autonomy, and the managerial, data-oriented, and evidence-based structure of contemporary practice, one welcomes as a breath of fresh air the recent demurrer of Anna Smajdor and her colleagues.  Patients, they suggest, really don’t want empathic doctors who enter their worlds and feel their pain, only doctors who communicate clearly and treat them with courtesy and a modicum of respect.[7]

And so the empathy narratives move on.  Over the past decade, neuroscientists have invoked empathy as an example of what they term “interpersonal neurobiology,” i.e., a neurobiological response to social interaction that activates specific neural networks, probably those involving the mirror neuronal system.  It may be that empathy derives from an “embodied simulation mechanism” that is neurally grounded and operates outside of consciousness.[8]  In all, this growing body of research may alter the framework within which empathy training exercises are understood. Rather than pressing forward, however, I want to pause and look backward.  Long before the term “empathy” was used, much less operationalized for educational purposes, there were deeply caring, patient-centered physicians.  Was there anything in their training that pushed them in the direction of empathic caregiving?   I propose that nineteenth-century medicine had its own pathway to empathy, and I will turn to it in the next posting.

[1] R. Pedersen’s review article, “Empirical research on empathy in medicine – a critical review,” Pat. Educ Counseling, 76:307-322, 2009 covers 237 research articles.

[2] F. W. Platt & V. F. Keller, “Empathic communication: a teachable and learnable skill,” J. Gen Int. Med., 9:222-226, 1994; A. L. Suchmann, et al., “A model of empathic communication in the medical interview,” JAMA, 277:678-682, 1997; J. L. Coulehan, et al., “’Let me see if I have this right . . .’: words that help build empathy,”  Ann. Intern. Med., 136:221-227, 2001; H. M. Adler, “Toward a biopsychosocial understanding of the patient-physician relationship: an emerging dialogue,” J. Gen. Intern. Med., 22:280-285, 2007; M. Neumann et al., “Analyzing the ‘nature’ and ‘specific effectiveness’ of clinical empathy: a theoretical overview and contribution towards a theory-based research agenda,” Pat. Educ. Counseling, 74:339-346, 2009; K. Treadway & N. Chatterjee, “Into the water – the clinical clerkships,” NEJM, 364:1190-1193, 2011.

[3] Adler, “Biopsychosocial understanding,” p. 282.

[4] Suchmann, et al., “Model of empathic communication”; Neumann, “Analyzing ‘nature’ and ‘specific effectiveness’,” 343; K. A. Stepien & A. Baernstein, “Educating for empathy: a review,” J. Gen. Int. Med., 21:524-530, 2006; R. W. Squier, “A Model of empathic understanding and adherence to treatment regimens in practitioner-patient relationships,” Soc. Sci. Med., 30:325-339, 1990.

[5] H. Spiro, “What is empathy and can it be taught?”, Ann. Int. Med., 116:843-846, 1992; W. Zinn, “The empathic physician,” Arch. Int. Med., 153:306-312, 1993; H. Spiro, et al., Empathy and the Practice of Medicine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); J. Shapiro & L. Hunt, “All the world’s a stage: the use of theatrical performance in medical education,” Med. Educ., 37:922-927, 2003; J. Shapiro, et al., “Teaching empathy to first year medical students: evaluation of an elective literature and medicine course,” Educ. Health, 17:73-84, 2004; S. DasGupta & R. Charon, “Personal illness narratives: using reflective writing to teach empathy,” Acad. Med., 79:351-356, 2004; J. Shapiro, et al., “Words and wards: a model of reflective writing and its uses in medical education,” J. Med. Humanities, 27:231-244, 2006; J. Halpern, Empathy and patient-physician conflicts,” J. Gen. Int. Med., 22:696-700, 2007.

[6] Suchmann et al., “Model of empathic communication,” 681; Zinn, “Empathic physician,” 308; Halpern, “Empathy and conflicts,” 697.

[7] Halpern, “Empathy and conflicts,” 697; A. Smajdor, et al., “The limits of empathy: problems in medical education and practice,” J. Med. Ethics., 37:380-383, 2011.

[8] V. Gallese, “The roots of empathy: the shared manifold hypothesis and the neural basis of intersubjectivity,” Psychopathology, 36:171-180, 2003; L. Carr, et al., “Neural mechanisms of empathy in humans: a relay from neural systems for imitation to limbic area,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 100:5497-5502, 2003; G. Rizzolatti & L. Craighero, “The mirror-neuron system,” Ann. Rev. Neurosci., 27:169-192, 2004; V. Gallese, et al., “Intentional attunement: mirror neurons and the neural underpinnings of interpersonal relations,” J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 55:131-176, 2007.

Copyright © 2012 by Paul E. Stepansky.  All rights reserved.

2 Comments

Posted in Doctor-Patient Communication, Empathy, Medical Education, Psychoanalysis

Tagged , , ,

A Musical Offering

Posted on February 24, 2012 | Leave a comment

“There is no doubt in my mind that the study of music aids in the study of medicine.  The study of one appears to potentiate the other.”                                  ~ F. William Sunderman, M.D., Musical Notes of a Physician (1982)

My father, William Stepansky, whose lifelong passion for violin and string chamber playing is recorded in The Last Family Doctor, holds a singular status in the history of World War II.  He was the only GI in the US Army to join his infantry division at the D-Day staging area in the dripping heat of Yuma, Arizona with a violin in tow.  Wiser minds prevailed, and he sent the violin home, but not before knowledge of his unlikely traveling companion spread throughout the unit.  Here he is in army fatigues playing violin in Germany in the final year of World War II.  The violin in question, a fine mid-eighteenth-century instrument by the Prague maker Thomas Andreas Hulinzky (1731-1788), was the gift of a group of GIs who retrieved it in the vicinity of the famous Hohner Factory in Trossingen, Germany in early 1945.  Apparently knowing about the violin-toting  kid from South Philly who was a surgical tech, they brought the “liberated” fiddle back to his surgical clearing station and offered it to him – but only on condition that he play it for them then and there.

He obliged them, and the Hulinzky became his violin for the next half century, the instrument that provided his four sons with childhoods suffused with Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and a host of later Romantics.  We learned standard repertoire through my father’s practicing and chamber rehearsals and performances.  And we played with him ourselves – two pianists, a violinist, and a cellist.   Here is a family trio in action in 1976; this one includes David Stepansky (piano), Alan Stepansky (cello), and William Stepansky (violin).

Why the violin mattered so much to our father and how it entered into the kind of medicine he practiced – I forego these precious bits of biography here.  But I cannot resist commenting on Danielle Ofri’s recent piece, “Music Teachers for Doctors?”, since it stimulates memories of growing up with a  gifted physician-musician in a remarkably musical household.

Picking up on a recent article by the internist Frank Davidoff, Ofri suggests that the critical feedback that performing musicians receive throughout their careers from “teachers, audiences, critics and their own ears” exemplifies the kind of “coaching” that, in parallel fashion, might aid physicians in the “performance” of clinical medicine.  Senior colleagues who observe physicians as they actually practice medicine and provide “detailed feedback,” she suggests, might play the same energizing motivational role as music teachers and coaches who relentlessly critique their students’ performance skills and spur them to higher levels of artistry.

It’s a bit difficult to understand precisely what Ofri and Davidoff mean by the term “performance.”  It seems to be a catchall for clinical competence, of which creative problem solving; emotional engagement;  collaborative sensibility; and enthusiasm for the work are all components.  The greater one’s allotment of these attributes, the better one “performs” clinical medicine.

Davidoff, who observes that most musicians “perform almost exclusively in groups,” is especially taken with the interactive and cognitive yield of group performance.  It inculcates a better sense of “teamwork,” of the “specialization” associated with one’s particular instrument, and of the importance of clinical improvisation, i.e., the wherewithal to deviate from established protocols in response to the needs of “particular patients in particular contexts.”  Ofri, for her part, sees clinical coaching modeled on musical coaching as especially relevant to the creeping complacency, the mid-career “plateaus” to which all-too-human physicians are subject.  Musical-cum-clinical coaching would remind physicians that the quest for “performance” excellence is never ending; it might goad them to further career growth and renewed satisfaction in their work.

Between these two contrasting emphases, I am more aligned with Davidoff, though I question whether the value of group performance is best thought of in terms of an interactional concept such as “teamwork” or a cognitive skill such as improvisation.  The improvement to which “good enough” doctors  should seek ongoing feedback is of a different sort.   What they could really use is a dose of the sensibility associated with chamber music playing, for ensemble work feeds into the art and craft of dialogue, of give and take, of respectful recognition of different voices moving together in accord with the anatomical blueprint provided by a composer.

Rather than provide “coaches” who give physicians feedback to improve their clinical “performance,” let’s take them right to the medicomusical locus itself.  To wit, let’s make instrumental training and chamber performance an integral part of postgraduate clinical training.  And, by way of bringing this utterly fanciful notion back down to earth – or at least within earth’s orbit – let’s give physicians “continuing education” credit both for playing in musical ensembles and for taking seminars and workshops on how to listen to chamber music.

But let’s play out the original fantasy.  What a boon to patients if doctors were obliged to make music among themselves.  Better still if they made music with nonphysicians and best of all if they made music with current or former patients.  In so doing, they might build up tacit knowledge relevant to caring for people rather than diagnosing and treating illnesses.  From chamber playing, they would learn about harmonious interchange, about counterpoint (as Davidoff points out), about respecting intelligent voices other than their own.  Tacit knowledge – the concept comes to us from the Hungarian-British scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi – by its nature resists articulation among those who possess it.  But, speaking from the outside, let me say that the tacit knowledge I have in mind hovers around the art of doctor-patient communication, of learning to converse with patients in a manner more responsive to individual illness experiences.  Here is my claim:  Chamber music holds the promise of broadening, however tacitly, the physician’s sense of dialogic possibility when he or she is with patients.

Consider chamber music as a special kind of narrative journey.  It is not the hero’s journey that culminates in individual redemption and rebirth but the journey of individual voices conjoined in pursuit of something communal, call it musical truth.  Individual voices assert their authority; they take the lead when called on, enabling other voices to play their supportive roles with greater sensitivity and more perfect ensemble.[1]  The voices interweave and interpenetrate; they invade musical space only to make graceful exits; they weave exquisite filigrees around the melodic inventiveness of others; they learn to yield melodic pride of place, only to reclaim it once again as transformed by other voices.  Out of the dialogue emerges a tapestry whose separate threads merge in single-minded  purpose.  This interpretive solidarity, this playing together, is hemmed in by a composer’s intentions, framed by the compositional traditions and performance practices of a particular time and place.  Absent any single voice, the journey can not be undertaken; there is no tapestry to be woven.

What have we here if not a musical analogue of the kind of narrative competence associated with patient- and relationship-centered medicine?  Interweaving, interpenetrating, entering and exiting, listening to other voices, yielding to other voices, hearing differently because of other voices – aren’t these things at the heart of narrative medicine?

This was the medicine that my father practiced long before scholars decided to study “narrative medicine” as a kind of medicine.  As a violinist, he was especially drawn to Bach, but also to the early and late Romantics, and he could shape a phrase with the same warmth and control with which he helped patients reshape the personal stories they brought to him.  He was a charismatic listener who encouraged his patients to bring him their stories.  But he always listened as their doctor, with the quiet authority to decide on a course of treatment and reassure them all was in hand – because all was in his  mind.  He was, after all, the first violinist, the leader of the quartet.  He knew the score, and he was comfortable taking the lead, both with other chamber players and with his patients.

My father was a man of great modesty and reserve, but his violin always soared with controlled passion.  Just so in medicine:  his personal reserve never diminished the polyphonic textures and expressive sonorities of his medicine, of how he listened to and conversed with his patients and then proceeded to doctor them.

_________________

My father’s model for a life of medicine and music was F. William Sunderman. One of Philadelphia’s premier internists, Sunderman was an accomplished medical researcher at Pennsylvania Hospital.  During the 1930s, he developed new methods for measuring blood cholesterol, glucose, and chloride and invented  the Sunderman Sugar Tube.  During the war, he served as Medical Director of the Manhattan Project, where he developed an antidote for the nickel carbonyl piosoning to which the first atomic bomb assemblers were prone.

Among Philadelphia’s literati, however, Sunderman was best known for integrating medicine and music into a single exemplary life.  The side-by-side entrances of his four-story brownstone at 2210 Delancy Street bore complementary aluminum plaques, one adorned with a caduceus, the other with a lyre and singing bird.  To the former came his patients; to the latter the musicians – eminent scientists and physicians among them – who joined him regularly for chamber music.  Sunderman’s passion for the violin, which in his case was embodied in a collection of exquisite instruments – a Gagliano, a Vuillaume, a Guarnarius – was fast becoming part of Philadelphia’s cultural landscape.

What must Sunderman have thought when, in the fall of 1947, a young war veteran recently graduated from Philadelphia College of Pharmacy wrote him and requested an audience.   The young man, a Jewish immigrant whose parents fled the Russian Pogroms in 1921, knocked on Sunderman’s “musical” door with his GI-liberated Hulinzky in hand.  He announced without fanfare:  “I want to be like you.  My life will be medicine and music.”  And without further ado, my father played for him.  And Sunderman was impressed, both with the young man and with his playing.  And so he endorsed the violinist-pharmacist-serviceman’s application for admission to Philadelphia’s Jefferson Medical College.

Among the area musicians who joined Sunderman for chamber playing on a regular basis was a young cellist and Harvard graduate (class of ’32).  At Harvard, Robert U. Jameson not only played cello but rose to the presidency of the Pierian Sodality, the forerunner of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra.  (In 1941, nine years after Jameson’s graduation, the Orchestra performed his orchestration of  Edward Ballantine’s “Variations on Mary Had a Little Lamb.”)   Now in the real world, Jameson made his living teaching English at The Haverford School on Philadelphia’s Main Line.  An extraordinary teacher who seemed to know his students from the inside out and hence to understand exactly what they needed (viz., how to “coach” them),  Jameson remained a devotee of cello throughout his life.  In the mid-1970s, in failing health but still in the saddle at Haverford, he counted among his students a remarkably gifted young cellist. The two bonded, and the teacher became admiring of his student and warmly supportive of his career aspirations.

The young man played the Saint-Saens Cello Concerto at his teacher’s memorial concert in the spring of 1978, one cellist saluting another, and then moved on to the Curtis Institute, Harvard, and the New York Philharmonic, where he served as Associate Principal Cellist. The cellist, my brother Alan Stepansky, is now Professor of Cello at the Peabody Conservatory and Manhattan School of Music  and a performer and teacher of international stature.

A decade earlier, in the late 1960s, this same Robert U. Jameson took in hand another student who showed  promise as a writer but was in need of the kind of disciplining a chamber-music-playing English teacher could provide. Jameson, a student, like all cellists, of Bach’s Cello Suites, helped him harness luxuriant adolescent prose and understand that restraint is the handmaiden of passion, indeed, that it is the better part of a writer’s valor.  I was that student.  Did Mr. Jameson’s love of cello and chamber playing enter into his understanding of language and his ability to impart, perhaps tacitly, the elements of well-wrought narratives?  Did his instrument help make him the teacher and mentor he was?  Who’s to say it didn’t.

[1] The importance of taking the lead in chamber playing and the manner in which a strong leader enables other players to provide support “with greater sensitivity and more perfect ensemble” – this insight and this wording come from my brother Alan Stepansky.

Copyright © 2012 by Paul E. Stepansky.  All rights reserved.

Leave a comment

Posted in Doctor-Patient Communication, General, Medicine and Music, Medicine in WWII, Narrative Medicine

Tagged , , , , , ,

Primary Care/Primarily Caring (III)

Posted on November 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

“The good physician knows his patients through and through, and his knowledge is bought dearly.  Time, sympathy and understanding must be lavishly dispensed, but the reward is to be found in that personal bond which forms the greatest satisfaction of the practice of medicine.  One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.”

— Francis W. Peabody, M.D., “The Care of the Patient” (1927)

Beginning in the 1980s, primary care educators, concerned that newly trained family physicians, freighted with technology and adrift in protocols, lacked people skills, resuscitated an expression coined by the British psychoanalyst Enid Balint in 1969.  They began promoting “patient-centered medicine,” which, according to Balint’s stunning insight, called on the physician to understand the patient “as a unique human being” (J. Roy. Coll. Gen. Practit., 17:269, 1969).  More recently, patient-centered medicine has evolved into “relationship-centered care” (or “patient and relationship-centered care” [PRCC]) that not only delineates  the relational matrix in which care is  provided but also extols the “moral value” of cultivating doctor-patient relationships that transcend the realm of the biomedical.  In language that could just as well come from a primer of relational psychotherapy, these educators enjoin clinicians to embrace the clinician-patient relationship as “the unique product of its participants and its context,” to “remain aware of their own emotions, reactions, and biases,” to move from detached concern to emotional engagement and empathy, and to embrace the reciprocal nature of doctor-patient interactions.  According to this latter, the clinical goal of restoring and maintaining health must still “allow[ing] a patient to have an impact on the clinician” in order “to honor that patient and his or her experience” (J. Gen. Int. Med., 21:S4, 2006).

Recent literature on relationship-centered care evinces an unsettling didacticism about the human dimension of effective doctoring.  It is as if medical students and residents not only fail to receive training in communication skills but fail equally to comprehend that medical practice will actually oblige them to comfort anxious and confused human beings.  So educators present them with “models” and “frameworks” for learning how to communicate effectively.  Painfully commonsensical “core skills” for delivering quality health care are enumerated over and over.  The creation and maintenance of an “effective” doctor-patient relationship becomes a “task” associated with a discrete skill set (e.g.,  listening skills, effective nonverbal communication, respect, empathy).  A recent piece on “advanced” communication strategies for relationship-centered care in pediatrics reminds pediatricians that “Most patients prefer information and discussion, and some prefer mutual or joint decisions,” and this proviso leads to the formulation of a typical advanced-level injunction:  “Share diagnostic and treatment information with kindness, and use words that are easy for the child and family to understand” (Pediatr. Ann., 4:450, 2011).

Other writers shift the relational burden away from caring entirely and move to terrain with which residents and practitioners are bound to be more comfortable.  Thus, we read of  how electronic health records (EHRs) can be integrated into a relational style of practice (Fam. Med., 42:364, 2010) and of how “interprofessional collaboration” between physicians and alternative/complementary providers can profit from “constructs” borrowed from the “model” of relationship-centered care (J. Interprof. Care., 25:125, 2011).  More dauntingly still, we learn of how  relational theory may be applied to the successful operation of primary care practices, where the latter are seen as “complex adaptive systems”  in need of strategies for organizational learning borrowed from complexity theory (Ann. Fam. Med., 8S:S72, 2010).

There is the sense that true doctoring skills (really the human aptitude and desire to doctor) are so ancillary to contemporary practice that their cultivation must be justified in statistical terms.  Journal readers continue to be reminded of studies from the 1990s that suggest an association between physicianly caring and the effectiveness and appropriateness of care, the latter measured by efficiency, diagnostic accuracy, patient adherence, patient satisfaction, and the like (Pediatr. Ann., 40:452, 2011; J. Gen Intern. Med., 6:420, 1991; JAMA, 266:1931, 1991).  And, mirabile dictu, researchers have found that physicians who permit patients to complete a “statement of concerns” report their patients’ problems more accurately than those who do not; indeed, failure to solicit the patient’s agenda correlates with a 24% reduction in physician understanding (J. Gen. Int. Med., 20:267, 2005).

The problem, as I observed in The Last Family Doctor, is that contemporary medical students are rarely drawn to general medicine as a calling and, even if they are, the highly regulated, multispecialty structure of American (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Canadian) medicine militates against their ability to live out the calling.  So they lack the aptitude and desire to be primary caregivers – which is not the same as being primary care physicians – that was an apriori among GPs of the post-WWII generation and their predecessors.  Primary care educators compensate by endeavoring to codify the art of humane caregiving that has traditionally been associated with the generalist calling – whether or not students and residents actually feel called.  My father would probably have appreciated the need for a teachable model of relationship-centered care, but he would also have viewed it as a sadly remedial attempt to transform individuals with medical training into physicians.  Gifted generalists of his generation did not require instruction on the role of the doctor-patient relationship in medical caregiving.  “Patient and relationship-centered care” was intrinsic to their doctoring; it did not fall back on a skill set to be acquired over time.

The PRCC model, however useful in jump-starting an arrested doctoring sensibility, pales alongside the writings of the great physician-educators of the early twentieth century who lived out values that contemporary educators try to parse into teachable precepts.  For medical students and primary care residents, I say, put aside the PRCC literature and introduce them ab initio to writings that lay bare what Sherwin Nuland terms “the soul of medicine.”  I find nothing of practical significance in the PRCC literature that was not said many decades ago – and far more tellingly and eloquently – by Francis W. Peabody in “The Care of the Patient” (JAMA, 88:877, 1927), L. J. Henderson in “Physician and Patient as a Social System (NEJM, 212:819, 1935), W. R. Houston in “The Doctor Himself as a Therapeutic Agent” (Ann. Int. Med., 11:1416, 1939), and especially William Osler in the addresses gathered together in the volume Aequanimitas (1904).  Supplement these classic readings with a healthy dose of Oliver Sacks and Richard Selzer and top them off with patient narratives that underscore the terrible cost of physicians’ failing to communicate with patients as people (such as Sacks’s own A Leg to Stand On [1984] and David Newman’s powerful and troubling Talking with Doctors [2011]), and you will have done more to instill the principles of patient and relationship-centered care than all the models, frameworks, algorithms, communicational strategies, and measures of patient satisfaction under the sun.

Copyright © 2011 by Paul E. Stepansky.  All rights reserved.

Leave a comment

Posted in Family Doctors, Then & Now, General Practice, Medical Education, Primary Care

Tagged ,