Your toddler trips and scrapes her knee. Your teenager falls out of a tree and breaks his arm. Your partner needs sudden surgery. A parent is diagnosed with stage 4 cancer…

When those closest to us suffer, we suffer with them. Their physical pain weighs on us, and if it continues long enough, it can manifest physically in our bodies as well.

Physicians, especially surgeons, try to maintain emotional distance for their patient’s safety. If you’ve experienced the anguish of caring for a critically-ill loved one, you may understand how hard it can be to think straight, how difficult it can be to make critical decisions. Doctors maintain distance to avoid this problem.

But they can’t avoid being human, or feeling like a human when things go wrong. When a doctor’s patient suffers, so does the doctor, even though they must do it quietly. Consider this: if you know how bad it feels when your toddler scrapes her knee, or how terrible it feels if a parent is diagnosed with cancer, then imagine how much worse it would be if you felt responsible for it all.

Doctors are our caretakers, they’re in a position of power, and as such, they feel responsible when patients suffer. Because doctors feel they must maintain a confident and supportive demeanor, burying their own struggles, the extent of their emotional and mental harm goes unknown outside of the inner circle of medicine. Even the name for this circumstance sounds unemotional. It’s called an ‘adverse patient event.’

The US National institute for health defines it this way: “An AE is a harmful and negative outcome that happens when a patient has been provided with medical care.”

JAMA recently published a mixed-methods study that dealt with this growing difficulty among physicians. The study used a combination of surveys (for surgical trainees) and qualitative interviews (for surgical staff.) Respondents had a wide range of responses to AE’s, including depression, guilt, shame, and fear of attempting related procedures again.

Most respondents preferred mentorship to cope with a move past AE’s. When we fall, we look to those with more experience for guidance. We highly recommend the original article with all the statistics, methods, and discussion. See the reference at the end.

Until religion, technology, or philosophy brings us to some miraculous promised land where suffering cannot reach, we can only look out for each other as best we can. Most of the time, that means doctors looking out for us, because that’s what they signed up to do.

But occasionally it means us looking out for them, because we’re all human.

Thanks for reading,

               Transonic Systems, Inc

                              The Measure of Better Results

Reference:

1. JAMA Network Open. 2024;7(6):e2414329.doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.14329