The wounded healer & Presentations

Presentations

Please bring your creative enquiry assignment to share in this session. It does not have to be completely finished. 

It is an opportunity to share your work with each other and give and receive feedback to and from each other. 

Wounded healer & Kintsugi

Wounded Healer.... Doctors as patients – quotes assembled by Dr Jonathon Tomlinson

Loss of identity

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick…Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

It is a truth, universally acknowledged that doctors make the worst patients. Kate Granger (#Hellomynameis)

Don’t assume depressed doctors know that they’re sick. The view is quite different from this side of the sanity divide…Chances are that we think that we are only stressed by work, and are distressed by our perceived inability to cope. An insider’s guide to depression. BMJ 27.10.2001

87% of GPs said they would not call in sick for a severe cold, compared to 32% of office workers who were asked the same question. Why doctors don’t take sick days. New York Times

Loneliness, shame and stigma

… all that confidence that I had gradually built up over several years was taken away when I discovered I had cancer. I felt unexplainably ashamed. I felt guilty. I felt frightened. Kate Granger

It was also hard to accept that I had a mental illness. I felt weak and ashamed, and began to appreciate, too, the embarrassment and stigma my patients felt.                                                                  A patient’s journey. Psychotic depression

I had become a psychiatric patient and am embarrassed to say the stigma made me feel physically sick. I felt ashamed of being ‘weak’. Doctors go mad too. RCPsych

Seeing a patient as a person

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, or a cancerous growth, but a sick human being. Treating the whole patient. Medical Education Jan 2014.

Having studied medicine at a very academic university, I had a very strict perception of knowledge. Knowledge was hard and fast medical facts…it was a real challenge to realise that this knowledge is as valid as my knowledge of my conditions, symptoms and triggers, developed through experiencing it day in day out…in my first year at university I lost track of how many outpatient appointments I sat in on – they are just another 15 min slot in a very busy day. As a patient, my perspective couldn’t be more different…I have one appointment with my consultant a year, and spend weeks planning and preparing, then a month recovering emotionally. Anya De Longh. The patient patient

An analogy to living with cancer is solitary confinement: once inside the prison cell you are trapped…the most useful people and the best doctors are those prepared to come inside the cell, sit down, and spend some time with you. Teratoma of the testis. Lancet 1982

The viscissitudes of life as a clinician or academic are as nothing compared with accepting and managing a major illness and the treatment for it. A patient’s journey. Psychotic depression

Many ill doctors now came to identify more with their patients (e.g. getting results to patients faster)…some joked that ideally, medical students should be hospitalized and forced to sleep in patient rooms…to experience the disruptions, inconveniences, powerlessness, and humiliations that patients routinely encounter. When doctors become patients