For many doctors, their role as powerful healer precludes thoughts of ever getting sick themselves. When they do, it initiates a profound shift of awareness - not only in their sense of their selves, which is invariably bound up with the invincible doctor role, but in the way that they view their patients and the doctor-patient relationship. While some books have been written from first-person perspectives on doctors who get sick, never has there been a systematic, integrated lookat what the experience is like for doctors who get sick, and what it can teach us about our current health care system and more broadly, the experience of becoming ill. The psychiatrist Robert Klitzman here weaves together gripping first-person accounts of the experience of doctors who fall ill and see the other side of the coin, as a patient. The accounts reveal how dramatic this transformation can be - a spiritual journey for some, a radical change of identity for others, and for some a new way of looking at the risks and benefits of treatment options. For most however it forever changes the way they treat their own patients. These questions are importantnot just on a human interest level, but for what they teach us about medicine today. While medical technology advances, the health care system itself has become more complex and frustrating, and physician-patient trust is at an all-time low. The experiences offered here are unique resource that pointthe way to a more humane future.
Introduction; Part I: Becoming a Patient; Magic white coats: forms of denial and other internal obstacles to becoming a patient; The medical self: self-doctoring and choosing doctors; Screw-ups: external obstacles faced in becoming patients; They treated me as if I were dead: peripheralization and discrimination; Coming out as patients: disclosures of illness; Part II: Being a Doctor After Being A Patient; Double lens: contrasting views and uses of medical knowledge; Being strong: Workaholism, burnout, and coping; Once a doctor, always a doctor?: retirement; Touched by the light: spiritual beliefs and their obstacles; Part III: Interacting with Their Patients; Us vs. them: treating patients differently; Improving education: can empathy be taught?; Conclusions: the professional self;
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