today i was thinking...

how important really it is to be a compassionate doctor... and stay that way!

you know, i'm already looking forward to next year when our phase II starts, where we can start talking to patients and getting down to doing more interesting stuff... and but i was thinking about easily it'd be for me, after going through patient after patient after patient, to start treating patients as patients, not as people.

in medicine, i guess, while professional lines should be drawn, every patient you face still is a person... and a person who should not be just defined by his illness... i.e. "He's patient XXX with a heart problem..." maybe that's why they've trained us to ask about psycho-social issues, to ask about worries, to ask about concerns, to ask about many things other than just the defining illness itself...

so that's just the first step.

a christian doctor.... has to take two steps to take.

compassion perhaps is the next step to go.

as doctors, we can give professional holistic advice to patients...but as christian doctors, i guess, being able to empathize, being able to 'share' a person's suffering, to understand that patients are people too, really is what compassion is about.

"a patient is a doctor's neighbour"

you know, one thing i really fear in the course of studying medicine, and something I have to constantly keep in check, is how i may one day i may just lose compassion for ill/suffering people... "seeing 1000 patients with cancer, doesn't make the 1001st patient less important."

so while admittedly, we won't be able to bear everyone's burden, i guess, its still important that we don't lose compassion for individual patients... you know, i reckon many medical students who want to be doctors, start off with the ideal of 'helping' people who are suffering from disease, a compassionate ideal, which becomes lost so easily in the sea of patients...

so how does this tie in with being a christian?

the bible talks about loving your Neighbour as yourself... in many ways, patients make a doctor's neighbour. in this, loving someone should not be limited by professional boundaries... loving people transcends these boundaries... and perhaps "a christian doctor who shows compassion to a person who's ill is really a consequence/result/act of his love for people, a love that crosses his professional boundaries...

so, this doesn't only apply to doctors... but to all Christians in whatever situation they find themselves in (be you a doctor/engineer/lawyer/salesman/banker/employee... ... to whoever your neighbor be...)

and ultimately... love others because God first loved us... and that's evangelistic.