Katherine Treadway teaches medical students about the patient-doctor relationship at Harvard. She will give a free talk in Lenox, MA next week.
Heart Matters:
The Patient-Doctor Relationship
Thursday, October 11, 2012 at 6:00 p.m.
Shalespeare and Company
Founder's Theater
70 Kemble Street, Lenox, MA
Sponsored by BMC
Treadway has written extensively on this topic. "I watch the second-year students file into the Ether Dome for their first day of my “Patient–Doctor 2” course. For me, this course marks their true entry into medical school. Here, they will refine their history-taking skills, building on their knowledge of pathophysiology and disease; they will learn how to perform a physical examination; and they will touch a living stranger's body as clinicians for the first time. For them, right now, these are just skills to be learned. They do not see how they will be transformed by them. They know that these newfound abilities will open the door to clinical medicine. They do not know how utterly changed they will be by crossing that threshold." Full Article
If you wish to attend, please email Sue Kelly at BMC or call 413-447-2775 by October 9
Dr.
Treaway’s advice to students:
As
you acquire more medical knowledge and responsibility, there will be times you
will focus more and more on the problem and forget the patient attached to it.
As you strive to take a good history, get the facts straight, perform a good
physical exam, and put it all together into a comprehensive clinical picture,
you will find that with all the anxiety involved in wanting to do it right, the
patient becomes further and further away...
While
I am busy treating the bodies of my patients, I try to remember to treat the
patients as well — to touch them in small ways as well as large.