The foundation of medicine should be empathy
Mike Wilson fell in love with science when he was in high school. “The intricacies of biology were so cool and amazing to me,” says Wilson, “but I knew we were just touching the surface, that there was much more to it than what we were learning.”
A simplistic approach to biology, chemistry and physics was solved for Wilson when he became a student first at Georgia Tech and then at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.
“My mother had always encouraged me to become a doctor, from the time I was seven or eight,” Wilson says. “Maybe she saw that kind of potential in me.”
Wilson says he can’t imagine doing anything else now. He’s been practicing internal medicine for nearly 30 years, the larger part of that time in Walker and Catoosa counties where all but the oldest of his eight children were born.
In spite of having a bundle of children, Wilson says that in his medical practice he feels he relates best to older people. “Even when I was in school, I found myself gravitating toward the parents and grandparents of my friends,” he says.
Wilson’s experience treating the elderly, many of whom have serious health problems and disabilities, has caused him to reflect on issues that most of us will face at some point – as caretakers or in relation to our own health.
“I’ve worked with a lot of nursing home residents,” says Wilson. “It’s solidified in me the concept of the worth and value of human life and has made me think a lot about the practical outworkings of how to take care of the elderly, feeble or very ill in environments that are becoming increasingly utilitarian. We need to think about how to compassionately and judiciously care for people in the ways we’d like to be cared for ourselves.”
Empathy is a theme Wilson comes back to again and again. “A caretaking situation affords everyone involved the opportunity to become better, more empathetic people. It’s our job to help those we’re caring for live the best lives they can, not to speculate on whether or not their lives are worth living.”
Wilson relates the story of one of his patients: “The man was in a hunting accident and became a quadriplegic. A lot of people would say his life lacks sufficient quality to make it worth living. But like most of us, he doesn’t place a quality-level on his life. He’s happy and content and has adjusted to his limitations and need for help with the most basic aspects of existence.”
“It’s incredibly presumptuous of those of us in a healthy state to project onto a patient what we consider to be quality of life,” Wilson says. “People may say when they’re well that they’d never want someone else to have to wipe their bottom or change their diaper, but when someone ends up in that situation, like so much else in life, they usually learn to adapt to it.”
Wilson believes empathy is a skill that can and should be taught. “We need to learn to put ourselves in the shoes of others.”
On the practical side, Wilson says that caring for the severely ill or injured improves the clinical skills of everyone from CNAs to doctors. “It’s not a one-way act of giving. Seriously impaired patients help us gain new understanding and skills in addition to helping us become better human beings.”
Wilson says another of his big concerns as a doctor is the breakdown of families due to drug addiction and divorce. “We have so many grandparents raising their grandchildren because the children’s parents are physically or emotionally dysfunctional and sometimes in jail.”
“The disintegration of healthy relationships that results in things like drug abuse and divorce, living out of sync with what our Creator meant for us, makes for situations that lead to poor health,” Wilson says. “Working on fostering strong families will improve not only the emotional and spiritual health of communities, but the physical health, too.”
On the issue of healthcare costs, Wilson holds strong views. “A nearly universal complaint about insurance companies is the degree of control they exert over what patients can do, what tests they can get, what treatments they can have, what medications they can take. People find it highly offensive that a set of bureaucrats who don’t know them can make such personal decisions about them and prevent their doctors from doing what they’ve determined is best.”
Wilson says part of the solution to this would be to facilitate health savings accounts and put the power of decision-making back into the hands of patients and their doctors. “There would still be a need for catastrophic insurance,” he says, “but with people in charge of their own health expenses, the cost of care and medicines would go down, and people would pay more attention to the bad choices they often make that contribute to poor health – high-fat foods, sugary drinks, tobacco.”
Wilson would also like to see better lines of communication between healthcare professionals when it comes to individual patients. “There’s a lot of fragmentation today,” he says. “You have primary doctors, specialists, subspecialists, hospitalists, and too often they’re not communicating with each other about the same patient they’re all seeing. That makes for impersonal and less effective treatment.”
“The whole practice of medicine should begin with empathy,” says Wilson, “with caring deeply about patients and what they’re going through and working hard to do what’s best for them. We all owe each other the effort of seeing life through the other person’s eyes. It makes for better healthcare and better communities.”