Physician
What?
- A physician is a healer, teacher and philosopher. Scientific knowledge and technical skill serve the patient’s health; reflection on human nature and the purposes of medicine guides their use.
- Healing includes restoring health where possible and caring for people living with pain, disability or incurable illness. Teaching means forming future clinicians and helping patients understand and maintain their health. Philosophical reflection asks what medicine is for and what human beings need.
So What?
- Medical knowledge brings responsibilities to patients and society. Patients entrust intimate concerns to someone with the expertise they need, making competence, discretion and fidelity to trust essential.
- When cure is impossible, the physician still has a duty to care. Trainees also learn from the physician’s conduct, including how difficult conversations are handled.
Now What?
- Continue developing clinical knowledge and skill throughout your career. Practice humility about what you do not know, and place the patient’s good ahead of competing interests.
- Study the human person as well as disease. Explain care thoughtfully to patients, model good practice for learners, and make room to ask why a particular action serves healing.
Clinical Case
During a busy day of clinic on your OB-GYN rotation, you talk with your attending prior to seeing a couple who has been struggling with infertility for around five years now. Your attending explains that the couple is older, and, though the couple continues to try to conceive, the probability of a successful pregnancy is low. “The odds aren’t great,” he says brusquely, “and they’re resistant to my suggestions. They’re more the type for alternative therapies.”
You follow him into the room and see the couple waiting anxiously. Your attending immediately begins the conversation, explaining that, after the failure of their most recent trial, the couple is running out of options. As he continues, the husband and wife both begin to cry. Seeing this, the attending pauses and, after a few short moments, quietly leaves the room. You remember that you are supposed to present the next patient to the attending.
Discussion Questions
- Was the attending fulfilling the physician’s role well? What could he have done differently?
- What pressures in training or practice make it harder to act as a healer? How can we respond to them?
- What comes to mind when you hear “physician,” and what practices could keep that role central during the day?
- Why should physicians also be philosophers and teachers? What has the attending taught through his conduct?
- Does medicine serve a patient’s needs, desires or good? How should that distinction inform this encounter?
Sources
Based on the linked LearnWorlds lessons.