Should Doctors Cry?

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2019

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Anne McElvoy debates at the Free Thinking Festival with intensive care doctor Aoife Abbey, GP & Prof Louise Robinson, Naeem Soomro expert in using robotic surgery and Michael Brown medical historian. Does emotion have any place in relationships with patients in a more open age? Medical professionals are trained to adopt “clinical distance” when dealing with patients. Tradition says that getting emotional weakens their judgement of medical evidence and can cause safeguarding issues. But how can those in caring roles prevent disinterest seeming like un-interest?

Aoife Abbey is a doctor working in Intensive Care whose book Seven Signs of Life is an account of her experiences told through the emotions she encounters on a daily basis. Aoife previously wrote a blog as The Secret Doctor for the British Medical Association and works on a national training programme for doctors in intensive care medicine. She is a council member of the Intensive Care Society (UK).

Michael Brown is a cultural historian at the University of Roehampton who is currently leading a project for the Wellcome Trust entitled Surgery & Emotion exploring this relationship from 1800 to the present. He is the author of Performing Medicine: Medical Culture and Identity in Provincial England, c. 1760-1850

Louise Robinson is Director of Newcastle University’s Institute for Ageing, Professor of Primary Care and Ageing and a GP. She leads one of only three Alzheimer Society national Centres of Excellence on Dementia Care and is a member of the national dementia care guidelines development group.

Dr Naeem Soomro is Leading Consultant Urologist at Freeman Hospital, Newcastle. He has pioneered minimally invasive and robotic surgery in the North East and has developed the biggest multi-speciality robotic surgery program in the UK.

Producer: Fiona McLean

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds,
0:34.5	music, radio, podcasts. I'm Matthew Sweet, and in a moment we'll be bringing you one of the discussions recorded at our Free Thinking Festival.
0:43.4	For this year's theme, we set out to explore the emotions, so be ready with your happy or sad or enraged face just after this short message.
0:54.5	Hello, just butting in.
0:56.4	I'm Eleanor Rosamond Baraklough, and I'm here to tell you about time travellers,
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1:21.4	and what any of this has to do with anything,
1:24.6	then you'll have to subscribe to the Time Travelers podcast. Find us on BBC Sounds.
1:36.0	Hello, medical professionals are trained to adopt clinical distance when dealing with their patients
1:46.0	that brisk bedside manner that will sort out our pains or worse and not get too involved in the messy
1:52.2	human feelings that accompany illness. Tradition often says that getting emotional weakens judgment
1:58.6	of medical evidence and can cause safeguarding issues too. But how can
2:02.9	those in caring roles prevent professional distance from seeming like uninterest in people
2:09.0	in painful and distressing situations? Does emotion have any place in the doctor-patient relationship
2:15.1	in a more open age? And at a time when technology is causing sweeping changes
2:20.6	in the way that the profession works as a whole.
	...

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