I have been going to a hospital five days a week for the past 5 weeks to complete an observership. This has been my first experience of being in a hospital setting with the physicians and nurses who work there since I’ve started medicine school in 2019. Since day 1 of my observership I’ve been spending hours both in the hospital and at home writing in my personal journal about the patients I’ve seen, physicians I’ve talked to, diseases I’ve only theoretically learned about but saw them for the first time in real patients, about life and death and hospitals and healthcare. I’ve shared a glimpse of my writings here on this blog. Why do I write and describe and reflect on a lot of what I encounter? Because that’s what I’ve known and have been doing my whole life, I document what I see, what I experience, and I write my reflections on it. I’ve always kept a diary from the days when I couldn’t write and only scribbled, to the days when I had a childish handwriting to the days when I was learning Turkish and wrote my diary entries in Turkish to when I started medicine school till today. Keeping a diary is a habit I’m proud and happy that I’ve maintained over the years, and I owe this to my parents, whom I learned the importance of writing and documenting my life from.
The other day, I was reading the Winter 2017 edition of the magazine of Yale School of Medicine, and I thought Kathleen Raven’s article “Writing Toward Better Care” was interesting. Raven talks about Geoffrey Z. Liu, M.D. who has always believed in the power of reflective writing in increasing empathy in medicine students and physicians, and that’s extremely important because studies show that medical students are the most empathetic at the beginning of medical school, but empathy decreases in a very scary way as the students start clinical training. And I feel this has happened with me as well, I haven’t started my clinical years at university yet, but I feel as if I’m slightly less empathic towards people’s sickness as I started spending more time in the hospital this summer.
Reflective writing, defined here as “writing with the goal of finding significance in personal experience,” (1) helps physicians become more aware of their own emotions and consequently improve their ability to be empathetic towards others (2).
Today, many universities, include mine, have incorporated reflective writing into the curriculum of medicine schools for the reason of “humanizing” medicine studies.
For me, I didn’t really write what I wrote during my observership to make sure I don’t lose my empathy or anything. In fact, I haven’t thought much about why I write and document a lot of what I see and experience at the hospital. I just do it because that’s what I’ve been doing my whole life. But now that I know that reflective writing can be used as a solution to the declining empathy in medicine students, I can see how writing about the patients I’ve been seeing and how I felt while at the hospital made me see the patients beyond their diseases. I suppose I will start looking at my writing with a different perspective, knowing how important it is. I hope I’ll be able to maintain this habit when I start my clinical rotations and internship and whatever I decide to do after that..
References:
(1) G. Z. Liu, O. K. Jawitz, D. Zheng, R. J. Gusberg and A. W. Kim, “Reflective Writing for Medical Students on the Surgical Clerkship: Oxymoron or Antidote?,” 2016.
(2) E. M. Hirsch, “The role of empathy in medicine: a medical student’s perspective,” 2007.