Bed, White Walls, All Surfaces Are Padded

Prominently featured in the mission statements of virtually of every medical school and medical institution in the world is the call for empathetic doctors. These institutions wish to train medical professionals that possess qualities of sympathy and compassion, and hospitals wish to employ health professionals that showcase similar qualities. The reality, however, is starkly different, as physicians, jaded by what they have seen in the medical world, lose the qualities that drove them to medicine in the first place. In Frank Huyler’s “The Blood of Strangers,” a collection of short stories from his time as a physician in the emergency room, Huyler uses the literary techniques of irony and imagery to depict the reality of the world of a medical professional. While Huyler provides several examples of both techniques in his accounts, moments from “A Difference of Opinion” and “The Secret” in particular stand out. Huyler uses irony and imagery in these two pieces to describe how medical professionals have lost their sense of compassion and empathy due to being jaded and desensitized by the awful incidents they have witnessed during their careers.

In the next stanza, the poet describes “A figure walking towards cloaked in blue/ Beeping/ Tubes/ Needles.” The poem addresses the routinely and monotonous aspect of being in the hospital for long periods of time. It is a critique of the biomedical model and how the hospital system is created where patients are tended to by multiple doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals. The patients and healthcare professionals are unable to form a relationship that consists of what Kleinman describes as “empathetic witnessing” (Kleinman). Therefore, detachment between patient and health workers is developed and established, to which the patient cannot recognize or know the people assisting them. In addition, Grealy discusses this in her earliest accounts and appointments with doctors. She states that there is a layer of “condescension” and is an “endemic in the medical

After a week working in the hospital, I went on home visits with nurses, doctors, nutritionists, psychologists and a monk. The first patient lives in a shabby wooden house. A great contrast could be seen between the room that the patient lives in and the rest of the house. “The patient is diagnosed with prostate cancer with bone metastasis. The room is specially built for him by the hospital and his family. He won’t live long.” A nurse told me. On another visit, I met a man with esophagus cancer.

How many patients have they experimented on? What if it is true, then what do I do right there and then? Several questions overloading my thoughts, nervously squeezing my hands. But once I saw the mental hospital I was less anxious. It was a beautiful place to be an asylum. It was clean, peaceful, smelled like roses, a sparkling water fountain right in the middle of everything, it was a perfect place. Maybe after all there's really nothing to worry about patients brutally being experimented on. But then I had a suspicious feeling of the mental hospital being to nice to be one. It could've been a way to convince people it wasn't a bad place. The only way to know really, is to go inside and check it myself.

A patient is a human being. Illness disturbs biological, social, psychological elements that make the patient human. It is not enough to centre and diagnoses and decisions on scientific data and empirical fact; medicine is about much more. The focus of this paper is to make the argument that the practice of medicine is a discipline that requires human empathy as well as scientific data and empirical fact to establish diagnoses with emphasis on five components of the physician-patient relationship: patient’s experience of illness, physician-patient communication, and proficiency of end of life care, medical ethics and spiritual growth. This position will be supported through the film “Wit (Nichols & Brokaw, 2002)” through the character Vivian Bearing 's revelation that illustrates a patient’s struggle with death and in the process exposes the distinction between medicine and science.

Some enter the ward with this mental disorder while the author supposes some develop this paranoia overtime as Chief Bromden nervously states, "...nobody ever lets loose and laugh, the whole staff'd be in with notebooks and a lot of questions"(17). A collective understanding patients follow when under the watchful eye of authority or each other is to be aware of their own behaviors and emotions. This Reaction points out that one can't gain true perspective on themselves since revealing their true selves might do more harm than

A doctor’s mind and heart are very much involved in the patient’s road to recovery. Evidence in support of this statement is shown in William Carlos William poem “ The Red Wheelbarrow, and his essay “The Practice.” Also, in Jack Coulehan poems “The Man with Stars Inside Him, The Six Hundred Pound Man,” and the article “What’s a good doctor and how do you make one?” Individually, each reading and poem has expressed doctor’s emotions with their patients, and what characteristics have guided them into becoming a good doctor. The readings are a representation of how doctors are in fact remorseful when it comes to their patients. While reading these articles, I realize that doctors have been restricted to how much emotion they are allowed to show. All doctors have their weaknesses and their strengths, and they should be vocal about them especially when it comes to treating their patients.

The rooms were confined to themselves by a large metal door with a small slot about 5 feet from the floor that could only be opened from the outside. The walls were once a brilliant white, but now filled with the scratch marks and blood stains from the ones before me. The room stench of urine, most likely from the other patients. All there was in the room was a small cot with a mattress so thin, it almost looked as if it was a thin piece of plywood. As I laid there strapped to my bed by leather restraints that were made to “protect” me from myself, I kept pondering on the question “what did I do to deserve to be locked up in a place like this?” Then I remember my crime, and smile.

It was a while ago, before I had escaped, but I still remember the first time he walked in. I did not know what to think of him, but I could see that he was very charismatic. He called me chief. Everyone thought I was deaf and dumb, but he talked to me like I had nothing wrong with me. When he made me play basketball, he made me feel big, as if I could do anything, he made me happy. I was not the only one who felt this way about him. The majority of the patients in the ward agreed, he made everyone feel special, much to the anger of Nurse Ratched. He brought us together during his time in the ward. It reminds of the play Twelve Angry Men and the high school in America, T.C. Williams High School. They were brought together, like us, like a family.

Some inmates, or patients as we were instructed to call them were not always as serene as the others. My first assignment was to simply watch a lady, making sure she stayed away from mirrors or anything reflective, she was a colored lady named Louise she was thirty-five from Asheville, North Carolina. Louise had a full blown phobia of black people; I found it odd that a lady could be terrified of her own racial ethnicity, as she could see her own hands apart from her arms, but as it was my first job; I did as I was told causing me to chalk up the fact that it was possible, nevertheless, I did work in a mental institution. The first few months were rough the staff was constantly paranoid of her seeing her reflection. She inevitably became restless of being in the same room every day. I brought her food and kept her clean I also made sure she was stable; apart from the occasional doctor, I was the only person she

But instead, it seems that what they are doing is feeding on each other hope. For example, patients remain hopeful that doctors can cure their diseases and doctors are hopeful that technology can deliver these changes to their patients. However, by feeding on their unrealistic hope, physicians enter without knowing into this vicious cycle for pushing for harsher and unrealistic means or treatments that endanger in the process the patient’s sense of dignity. That said, Susan ‘s physicians and his son, at one point, were victims of this cycle because they allowed, instead of alleviate the pain in Susan’s

It was a chilly day but began just as any other day of shadowing a pediatrician. We rushed between patients in order to keep on schedule but instead of dismissing patients early, thorough evaluation remained present. This next patient, however, was one apart from the ordinary. A father had brought his child in to see the doctor but it was the end of the routine checkup which was disjoint with the mundane patient. It was a series of troubles his wife possessed over the past weeks and contemplation of suicide followed by a narrative of the futile efforts of every single doctor she had seen. The end of his child’s evaluation ended in the father’s insipid begging to see his wife despite the fact he was just a pediatrician and had no jurisdiction among adults. Succumbing to the father in concern for her safety, the doctor told him to bring her in during his lunch hour.

In Dr. Charon’s piece, “To Render the Lives of Patients,: she talks about preventing the dehumanization of medical students during medical training and explains a method that could help medical students distance themselves from their own needs and focus on the patient’s point of view, which in thus would reduce frustration and hinder dehumanization.

I shadowed medical professionals as they treated their patients, one of whom was a forty-something year-old man with Stage II lung cancer. I didn’t know his name or how long he'd been sick, but it was clear that he was desperate and emotionally worn. In the doorway between the scanning room and the observation room, I watched him prepare for tests. On my right, the patient stepped onto the “couch”, or the CT scan bed. I entered the observation room and was instructed to flick on a switch, alerting personnel to vacate the room so as not be exposed to the radiation. A red light flashed and the loud rumbling of the gantry startled me, a seemingly normal procedure to everyone else. Four doctors surrounded a control panel and a set of displays, shooting each other uncertain looks and mumbling what I assumed must have been bad news. Perhaps the tumor had spread. I followed the lead doctor into another room, never to hear of that patient again, never to learn what had become of

I become aware of the fact that I’ve been taken to a different room. White walls and a slab tile floor replace concrete, but the same imposing lights burn in the ceiling of my new smaller and no less austere windowless box. There are some slight improvements though. For one my steel gurney has been replaced by an, only slightly softer, clinical bed. For two, that loathsome semi-human drone of an interrogator is presently absent. At this some deep part of myself stirred. The words “that’s not fair” floated through my mind and I became filled with sadness. I remembered that even this seemingly vile person is capable of suffering, of pain, of despair, and of grief, of loneliness and fear, of love, and of heartbreak. I began to weep, for myself, for him, for the