The power of compassion
Have compassion for all beings, rich and poor alike; each has their suffering. If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
—Teachings of Buddha
Dear Pitt Med Readers,
A doctor with a good bedside manner, holding open discussions with patients about diagnosis, exploring their cultural and psychosocial context, developing appropriate treatment plans, arranging effective follow-ups and connecting patient families to needed support services—that’s the ideal holistic medical practice. Yet in the real world today, the ideal can be hard to achieve. Instead, doctors are trying to keep up with the enormous increase in medical knowledge, the need for preapprovals for medical interventions, the requirements of electronic health record systems and the complexity of coordinating follow-up care through our fragmented social resources—while being allotted inadequate time to spend with each patient. Many physicians are overwhelmed and burnt out.
Likewise, our future physicians feel pressure. Medical students may be challenged to find adequate time to master the enormous amount of biomedical knowledge required of them, to perform at top levels on tests and to put in extended hours on clerkships, while trying to catch up from the day’s work and learn new clinical materials. The resulting reduced personal and family time also threatens to erode well-being.
Therefore, we have an urgent need not only to teach our medical students the best ways to care for themselves but also to help them become resilient physicians in the future. To accomplish this, we are implementing many innovative initiatives in our new curriculum, which we introduced this year.
This issue of Pitt Med describes some of the programs we are developing with our medical students and highlights one unique program: compassion training, in the true Buddhist sense.
We normally think of compassion as driven by sympathy for someone who is unfortunate enough to be afflicted with a disease or is in discomfort. However, in the Buddhist sense, “compassion” is a human value that has many deeper dimensions.
The compassion we instinctively feel for someone who is suffering is unidimensional, “simple compassion.” Training in Buddhist compassion urges us to practice “immeasurable compassion,” a multidimensional state that includes not just the suffering patient, but the suffering of families and, importantly, the suffering of the caregiver. Of course, there are several even higher states of Buddhist compassion and spirituality—all the way to “enlightened compassion” achieved by the Buddha himself.
Practicing such multidimensional compassion not only guides us to better care for the whole patient and provides comfort to their family and friends, it also helps us to be mindful of our own reactions, frustrations and loss, leading to better self-care.
As you will read in this edition’s cover story, our students at Pitt Med are learning how the practice of compassion can help them become better physicians while taking better care of themselves. We look forward to evaluating how these programs prepare our students for the future.
Anantha Shekhar, MD, PhD
Senior Vice Chancellor for the Health Sciences
John and Gertrude Petersen Dean, School of Medicine
