We are four physicians committed to the core principles of integrity, compassion, empathy, humility, respect, and the delivery of holistic care. It fails us.
Doctors are taught a biomedical perspective on how to treat human disease. With the right medicines or cutting-edge procedures, physicians may alleviate a patient’s physical suffering. But this physiologically based view which is emphasized during the four years of medical school is obviously incomplete. Medicine is much more complex. Every day it collides with politics. It conflicts with our fait
h. It challenges us. While treatments are often necessary, sometimes a touch or a few words are equally important in the healing process. Physicians are taught to cure, but as humans, they must also care. Unfortunately, the mental, physical, and emotional rigor of medical training often deteriorates a medical student’s or resident physician’s compassion and desire to serve. Ethical erosion, burn-out, and loss of patient-centeredness are epidemic among medical trainees. The four of us—all physicians in training—reject the inevitability of this loss of caring. As such, we have dedicated ourselves to fighting the erosion of core values through humanism inspired writing. Humanism in medicine “describes relationships between physicians and their patients that are respectful and compassionate. It is reflected in attitudes and behaviors that are sensitive to the values, autonomy, cultural and ethnic backgrounds of others.” Humanism is integrity, compassion, and empathy in every encounter, all of which align with the values and atmosphere that we aspire toward. We write to witness, reflect and record the journey of becoming practicing physicians and to name and consequently accept or reject the cultural waters in which we swim. By intentionally exploring our own development through writing, we each hope to guard against the erosion of humanistic values that so commonly affects resident physicians. We want to invite and inspire others to share in this journey. So with support from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, we are creating online space where providers, students, and patients alike can reflect and share their stories with one another as a means to combat the loss of humanism in medicine both by identifying when it is lost and celebrating when it prevails. This online forum will lie at the intersection of academic journal and personal blog. Beginning with a weekly column in the first year, we aim to grow to accept submissions on a range of interdisciplinary topics such as individual patient care, the education of new physicians, health policy, and population health. We invite you to join us in building this special space where medicine, writing, and humanism can intertwine to provide reflective pause, combat the corroding effects of training, and promote more caring in medicine. New content will be posted weekly, on Fridays at 12 pm. We look forward to navigating this journey together.
