The “doctor switch,” a protective coping mechanism ingrained into the emotional training of doctors, is a double-edged sword.
Doctors see and experience things that many people would consider intimate, gory, horrifying and even repulsive on a regular basis. Doctors must balance the scales of life and death in their hands in addition to the heavy responsibility of carrying the health and wellness of their patients in addition to living their own personal lives. The “doctor switch” is what I call the emotional state doctors often learn to acquire in order to prevent themselves from feeling vulnerable to all of these daily emotional assaults on their mental health. This emotional stoicism could also be described as compartmentalization, a thick skin, putting up walls or even, frankly, dehumanization. Regardless of what it’s called, many believe its role is to prevent doctors from getting more burnt out and depressed.
As I notice less human interaction with the modernization of patient care, physicians must cautiously welcome the benefits of these changes and be cognizant of the tendency many seem to have to lose the coveted skill once known as bedside manner. In the metacognition of how doctors think, efficiency and outcomes often trump the patient-doctor relationship. Good bedside manner — a term that could be used to summarize empathy, humanism, and genuineness — has been associated with better patient satisfaction, adherence to medicines, and even less physician burnout and depression.
Doctors see and experience things that many people would consider intimate, gory, horrifying and even repulsive on a regular basis. Doctors must balance the scales of life and death in their hands in addition to the heavy responsibility of carrying the health and wellness of their patients in addition to living their own personal lives. The “doctor switch” is what I call the emotional state doctors often learn to acquire in order to prevent themselves from feeling vulnerable to all of these daily emotional assaults on their mental health. This emotional stoicism could also be described as compartmentalization, a thick skin, putting up walls or even, frankly, dehumanization. Regardless of what it’s called, many believe its role is to prevent doctors from getting more burnt out and depressed.
As I notice less human interaction with the modernization of patient care, physicians must cautiously welcome the benefits of these changes and be cognizant of the tendency many seem to have to lose the coveted skill once known as bedside manner. In the metacognition of how doctors think, efficiency and outcomes often trump the patient-doctor relationship. Good bedside manner — a term that could be used to summarize empathy, humanism, and genuineness — has been associated with better patient satisfaction, adherence to medicines, and even less physician burnout and depression.
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