The heart of medicine—the patient-physician relationship—led to moving stories at Inspirations in Medicine, the Friday night kickoff event of the 2014 AMA Annual Meeting.
Moderated by Sylvia Perez, a three-time Emmy award-winning journalist specializing in medical reporting, the event featured three physicians and one patient telling their personal accounts of how the patient-physician relationship has inspired them.
For William Lynn Weaver, MD, senior associate dean at Ross University School of Medicine Dominca campus, a patient came to him that was simply too ill. He did his best but still felt he had failed the man after having to amputate the patient’s legs and remove a large portion of his intestines.
“I realized I had failed to do what I thought was the most important thing—to save his life or make him better,” Dr. Weaver said. “But what I had done was to give some peace to him and his family.”
Robert Alan Probe, MD, chair of the board of Scott and White’s integrated medical group, had his own inspirational story. A young girl came to him with an unusually shortened humerus and couldn’t fulfill her dream of playing basketball. Dr. Probe was able to lengthen the bone and help the girl get back to the sport she loved.
“Because of her willpower, because of 21st-century medicine, because of the human spirit and the partnership between the patient and physician, she realized her dreams,” Dr. Probe said. “All in this room would agree that medicine is in chaos now .... The one thing that cannot change, that should not change, is that relationship of understanding your patients’ dreams.”
Physicians also heard from Stacy Tessler Lindau, MD (pictured below), director of the University of Chicago Medicine’s program in integrative sexual medicine. Dr. Lindau shared that she helps to see the “unvisible”—the things physicians might not see but patients do—in her work to help identify, treat and prevent sexual health problems in female cancer patients.
A patient of Dr. Lindau’s also shared how her relationship with her physician has transformed her life. The patient had lost her libido after undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Dr. Lindau listened to the patient, which the patient said was “very simple, yet profound,” and helped her regain this part of her life after undergoing such a shock to her body in the cancer treatment.
“I truly believe that you physicians are called to this medical field as your vocation,” the patient said. “It takes a unique individual to deal with all the responsibility that comes with being a doctor, and a good doctor is such a gift.”
