Why Doctors Should Not Be Emotionally Attached with patients?

“For patients, doctors are next to the God, conversely, patients being the mysterious God to doctors.” I remember this quote by a famous person I had read in a magazine during my schooling. After so many years, during short course of these two years in medical college, I can feel the heavyness of these words.

Like God, patient’s body is a mystery to be solved. Solving this mystery, the doctor’s emotional state and their way of dealing with their own emotions have been playing a critical role. Such emotions have been continuously expressing difficulties in revealing sensitive information to their patients, affecting medical decisionmaking and ultimately affecting the whole physical outcome.

If doctors attach themselves emotionally, their feelings for the pat ients will suffer from the resulting lack of judgement. If every medical professional gets emotional with patients then we would have blabbering Doctors walking around, not making clear conscious decisions. They have to separate themselves from their patients in order to do their jobs. This is what keeps them sane. Besides if they took on every emotional task with every patient that came into their office or hospital especially if that patient was dying, then the doctor would not be able to function after sometime. He/She would end up taking it home.
Feelings seem to add an important dimension of complexity to doctors. It has been seen that doctors attending patients, when get emotionally attached to them, then that makes them more vulnerable to feelings of loss when these patients die. Studies have shown that junior doctors may be more strongly affected by patient’s death than senior doctors and female doctors report more psychological distress than male doctors indicating that female doctors and interns may require more emotional support after patient’s death. By this, I don’t mean doctors and other medical professionals should be cold and heartless, but they have to maintain a certain distance from their patients in order to keep going on a daily basis.

The medical profession is definitely no walk in the park, even though it is really rewarding and in addition to the miracles, they see a lot of tragedy. Also, when a patient is sick, the doctor should not be over emotional and panicky. They should be able to think straight so that they can give the best care possible and they have to put on a brave face for their patient. They must learn to control their emotions in order to do their job.
Same thing goes for many very, very professional music teachers. Many people who take up music and really feel their music so much that it becomes part of their soul.They go crazy over expressing their emotions in their music. But since they are teachers, they cannot let out their emotions in front of their students’.

Doctors should be more serious about performing their work and saving the patient than being nice and emotional. It is very hard for anyone to make critical time sensitive decisions when they let emotions get involved. Doctors must make an effort to keep from ever getting emotionally attached in order to make the life saving decisions needed.

A hospital is a sad place. If every doctor got upset and started crying over every sad case there would be no more doctors. If patient was dying and doctor came in to tell but then all of a sudden he started crying, wouldn’t that seem a bit wrong? Doctors are regular people just like everybody else. If they don’t learn to train themselves not to cry over every patient that would just be pitiful. What would one think if he/she saw their doctor read their chart and start crying? Caring for dying patients is part of every doctor’s clinical experience both during training and in subsequent practice. In every case, good of the patient should be the highest priority, not the feelings of the own. To deliver the best care, the doctors should not let emotions interfere with their decisions. They must be level-headed, detached, tough but all the while caring. The best care comes from a doctor who looks at a patient as a mathematician looks at a complicated equation.

Thank you!

– Prakash Chand
2007 Batch,RIMS,Ranchi