Medical Education Center, Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University, Yoshida-Konoe-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-8501, Japan.
Faculty of Health and Welfare, Kawasaki University of Medical Welfare, Kurashiki, Japan.
Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract. 2023 Mar;28(1):87-106. doi: 10.1007/s10459-022-10143-5. Epub 2022 Aug 11.
The ability of doctors to empathise with patients is a crucial concern in establishing humanistic medicine. Therefore, the cultivation of this ability has been discussed extensively in medical education. One theory suggests that the experience of patienthood can increase empathy among doctors. This theory is supported by previous research that published doctors' illness narratives. However, the concept of empathy has been ambiguously defined in academic fields, including medicine; therefore, analysing how doctors experience 'empathy' in their interactions with patients is difficult. Our research question is how doctors who became patients describe the relationship between their illness experiences and the interactions with patients after their illness. To this end, this paper initially tracks the debates on 'empathy' in medicine and other disciplines, to develop a lens for analysing doctors' illness narratives. Next, we conduct a narrative analysis of illness stories from 18 Japanese medical doctors who became patients. Our analysis supports the traditional idea that an illness can enable a doctor to become more empathetic. However, this is overly simplistic; how doctors experience and subsequently process their illness is more complex. Moreover, this notion can disregard doctors' suffering in these circumstances, and fail to represent the often-lengthy process of mastering 'empathy' based on their experiences. Therefore, our analysis deconstructed the concept of 'empathy', showing that it can appear in various ways. Further research is required to elucidate how empathy is cultivated during the process of transformation of doctors' illnesses, focusing on their communities and practices.
医生对患者的同理心是建立人文医学的关键关注点。因此，这种能力的培养在医学教育中得到了广泛的讨论。有一种理论认为，患者的体验可以增加医生的同理心。这一理论得到了先前发表医生疾病叙事的研究的支持。然而，同理心的概念在包括医学在内的学术领域中被定义得模棱两可；因此，分析医生在与患者互动中如何体验“同理心”是困难的。我们的研究问题是，生病后的医生如何描述他们的疾病经历与与患者互动之间的关系。为此，本文首先跟踪医学和其他学科中关于“同理心”的争论，以开发一种分析医生疾病叙事的视角。接下来，我们对 18 名成为患者的日本医生的疾病故事进行了叙述分析。我们的分析支持了这样一种传统观点，即疾病可以使医生变得更有同理心。然而，这过于简单化了；医生如何体验和随后处理他们的疾病要复杂得多。此外，这种观念可能忽略了医生在这些情况下的痛苦，也无法代表他们基于经验逐渐掌握“同理心”的漫长过程。因此，我们的分析解构了“同理心”的概念，表明它可以以各种方式出现。需要进一步的研究来阐明同理心是如何在医生疾病转变的过程中培养的，重点是他们的社区和实践。
