Stewarding the Vulnerable Moments | Audrey Shafer, MD

The Doctor's Art

Henry Bair and Tyler Johnson

Medicine, Society & Culture, Health & Fitness, Philosophy

5 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2022

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What is it like to comfort patients in the moments before they surrender consciousness to undergo surgery? What can the humanities teach us about being present for a patient when they are at their most vulnerable? As an anesthesiologist and founding director of Medicine and the Muse, Stanford Medicine’s health humanities program, Audrey Shafer, MD has spent her career pondering and addressing these questions. In this episode, Dr. Shafer discusses how her exploits in the humanities have s...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Henry Bear.
0:03.0	And I'm Tyler Johnson.
0:05.0	And you're listening to The Doctor's Art, a podcast that explores meaning in medicine.
0:09.0	Throughout our medical training and career, we have pondered.
0:13.2	What makes medicine meaningful?
0:15.1	Can a stronger understanding of this meaning
0:17.2	create better doctors?
0:18.8	How can we build health care institutions
0:20.6	that nurture the doctor-patient connection?
0:23.0	What can we learn about the human condition from accompanying our patients in times of suffering?
0:28.0	In seeking answers to these questions, we meet with deep thinkers working across health care, from doctors and nurses to patients and health care executives, those who have collected a career's worth of hard-earned wisdom.
0:40.0	Probing the moral heart that beats at the core of medicine, we will hear stories that are by turns heart-breaking, amusing, inspiring, challenging, and enlightening.
0:49.0	We welcome anyone curious about why doctors do what they do.
0:52.8	Join us as we think out loud about what illness and healing can teach us
0:57.1	about some of life's biggest questions.
0:59.3	The moments just before and after surgery can be some of the most harrowing and
1:07.2	uncertain experiences in a patient's life. During surgery, patients surrender their bodies to the anesthesiologist who takes over control of core bodily functions like breathing and blood circulation.
1:19.0	What is it like to accompany patients during these moments?
1:23.4	Joining us to discuss this is Dr. Audrey Schaefer,
1:26.4	professor of anesthesiology at Sanford Medicine.
1:30.0	A poet, a novelist.
1:31.8	Dr Schaefer was also, for nearly 20 years, the founding director of medicine and the muse, the medical humanities program at Stanford.
	...

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