Heroes Not Zombies

I’m big on empathy. I think it’s such an important quality for doctors. Cold, distant, doctors don’t appeal to me. But I also understand the importance of trying to keep the emotions which empathy stirs in check. If I sat in tears and distress with my patients all day, not only would I soon become lost in depression and despair, but I wouldn’t be able to meet any of my patients’ needs. There’s a balance to be struck, and the balance point changes constantly throughout the doctor-patient interaction. I can’t be a useful therapist unless I understand the patient. So, I have to begin, at least, with empathy. I need to do my best to put myself in their shoes, to try to understand their experience of the world and to try to figure out what’s going on in their lives. But then I need to call upon my knowledge and skills and access my previous experience and carry out whatever therapy seems appropriate. Actually this might not be a therapy stage yet, it might be a physical examination, or working out which investigations to suggest.

When I worked as a junior hospital doctor, one of my responsibilities was to be in charge of the cardiac arrest team. This was high pressure, dramatic work. Basically the shrieking pager was screaming that someone had just died and I had to run as fast as I could to their bedside to take charge of the other half dozen or so folk who had also run there to try and save this person’s life – to get their heart restarted, to get them breathing again. You can imagine how my heart was banging and how “wired” I’d be feeling. This was high energy, high stress. BUT everyone would say “I felt really anxious until Bob turned up, then you could see everyone became calm” Wow! I never understood that. How could people pick up “calm” from me when inside I was feeling anything but calm!

Well, here’s a fascinating paper where researchers decided to study empathy in doctors from a neuroscientific perspective. Actually, Clive Thompson’s most excellent blog, “collision detection” was where I read about this and he not only gives a superb summary but his reflections on it are also worth reading.

The researchers used a technique called functionalMRI scans which measures and displays brain activity as it happens. They got a group of doctors and a group of non-doctors to watch video clips of people having acupuncture needles inserted or of being touched with Q-tips. And they asked them to rate how much pain they thought the subjects were experiencing.

Among the control group, the scan showed that the pain circuit, which comprises somatosensory cortex, anterior insula, periaqueducal gray and anterior cigulate cortex, was activated when members of that group saw someone touch with a needle but not activated when the person was touched with a Q-tip.Physicians registered no increase in activity in the portion of the brain related to pain, whether they saw an image of someone stuck with a needle or touched with a Q-tip. However, the physicians, unlike the control group, did register an increase in activity in the frontal areas of the brain–the medial and superior prefrontal cortices and the right tempororparietal junction. That is the neural circuit that is related to emotion regulation and cognitive control.

They also asked the two groups to rate the level of pain they felt people were experiencing while being pricked with needles. The control group rated the pain at about 7 points on a 10-point scale, while the physicians said the pain was probably at 3 points on that scale.

So, it seems that doctors learn how to shut down the empathy functions of the brain. Now, you can argue that’s a good thing, or you can argue that’s a bad thing. I come back to my hero not zombie perspective. If a doctor goes on automatic pilot, he or she is likely to lose the ability to empathise and not even realise it’s happened. It’s important for doctors to be reflective and aware, so they can increase and decrease the empathy functions as is appropriate.