When Doctors Become Patients

by Robert Klitzman

Overview

For many doctors, their role as powerful healer precludes thoughts of ever getting sick themselves. When they do, it initiates a profound shift of awareness— not only in their sense of their selves, which is invariably bound up with the "invincible doctor" role, but in the way that they view their patients and the doctor-patient relationship. While some books have been written from first-person perspectives on doctors who get sick— by Oliver Sacks among them— and TV shows like "House" touch on the topic, never has there been a "systematic, integrated look" at what the experience is like for doctors who get sick, and what it can teach us about our current health care system and more broadly, the experience of becoming ill.

The psychiatrist Robert Klitzman here weaves together gripping first-person accounts of the experience of doctors who fall ill and see the other side of the coin, as a patient. The accounts reveal how dramatic this transformation can be— a spiritual journey for some, a radical change of identity for others, and for some a new way of looking at the risks and benefits of treatment options. For most however it forever changes the way they treat their own patients. These questions are important not just on a human interest level, but for what they teach us about medicine in America today. While medical technology advances, the health care system itself has become more complex and frustrating, and physician-patient trust is at an all-time low. The experiences offered here are unique resource that point the way to a more humane future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195327670
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/30/2007
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.45(w) x 9.31(h) x 0.95(d)

About the Author

Columbia University

Table of Contents

1. IntroductionPART I: Becoming a Patient. 2. "Magic White Coats": Forms of Denial and Other Internal Obstacles to Becoming a Patient3. "The Medical Self": Self-Doctoring and Choosing Doctors4. "Screw-Ups" in the System and in Care: External Obstacles Faced in Becoming Patients5. "They treated me as if I were dead": Peripheralization and Discrimination6. "Coming Out" as Patients: Disclosures of IllnessPART II: Being a Doctor After Being A Patient. 7. Double Lens: Contrasting Views and Uses of Medical Knowledge8. "Being Strong": Workaholism, Burnout, and Coping9. "Once a Doctor, Always a Doctor?": Retirement10. Touched by the Light: Spiritual Beliefs and their ObstaclesPART III: Interacting with Their Patients. 11. "Us vs. Them:" Treating Patients Differently12. Improving Education: Can Empathy be Taught? 13. Conclusions: The Professional SelfReferences. Index.

Editorial Reviews

Reviewer: Nicholas Greco IV, MS, BCETS, CATSM, FAAETS (C3 Education and Research, Inc.)
Description: This is one of the best books written on the role reversal that occurs when physicians become ill. It opens readers' eyes to the vulnerability and human nature of physicians.
Purpose: The purpose is to illustrate the complicated lives of doctors when they become ill, their emotions, their need for balance, and their identity. The author successfully breaks down the myth of invulnerability, opens readers up to the preciousness of life, and provides firsthand accounts of 48 doctors coping with their own mortality.
Audience: Anyone in healthcare will be moved and benefit immensely from this book. The author is a compassionate and well read clinician of both psychiatry and of the human spirit.
Features: Every chapter is engaging. There is an excellent chapter on self-doctoring and choosing doctors. The interplay between the physician's staff and hospital, the VIP treatment, and the insider versus outsider role bring to light the advantages and disadvantages of being an ill physician. While the physician may know what treatment to use and who the best specialist is, he also knows the prognosis, mortality, and morbidity. The issues of power and powerlessness in the role of patient highlight the complexity of treating those in the field of healthcare. The discussions of one's identity as a doctor and the loss of identity when one cannot continue in a career provide a rich platform for discussion.
Assessment: This is recommended reading for everyone in healthcare. This is one of the best books of the year.

Doody's Review Service

"In an excellent new book, When Doctors Become Patients, Dr. Robert Klitzman interviews 50 physicians with cancer, HIV and other conditions who typically have as hard a time as their patients do in dealing with illness and the doctor-patient relationship, though for different reasons: They have been conditioned to believe in the "magic" of their own superiority and have trouble operating in the alternative universes of a doctor's invulnerability and a patient's neediness." — USA Today

"Dr. Klitzman has captured masterfully what 'sick' doctors hide not only from others but from themselves—their fears, hopes, practical strategies of survival in their jobs and families, and—most powerfully, their 'unscientific' approach to the world of the spirit. The descriptions are rich, deep, sad, funny, and powerful. Klitzman has done a marvelous job in painting the portrait of 'the wounded healer'—the person within each of us doctors. To learn that the suffering of illness can lead a doctor toward more mutual, compassionate connection with patients is an affirming, even redeeming moment."—Dr. Samuel Shem, author of The House of God, Mount Misery, and Bill W. and Dr. Bob

"Who heals the healers? We all benefit from the answer."—Mehmet Oz, author of You: The Owner's Manual

"Seneca famously said, 'The wounded doctor heals best,' and Robert Klitzman's beautifully researched and intimate book examines this idea. He combines his own experience as physician and patient with in-depth interviews with a fantastic array of ailing doctors. As it turns out, doctors can be disadvantaged by the anxiety attached to mortality, but they can also grow and transform themselves when they know both sides of the medical equation."—Andrew Solomon, author of Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

"A comprehensive and deeply empathetic study of the wounded healer as patient, colleague, and person."—Peter D. Kramer, author of Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind and Listening to Prozac

"Dr. Robert Klitzman, himself a physician who has faced serious illness, gives a fascinating 360 degree portrait of what happens when those charged with healing others unexpectedly find themselves in the vulnerable role of patient."—Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

"Anyone in healthcare will be moved and benefit immensely from this book. The author is a compassionate and well read clinician of both psychiatry and of the human spirit...Every chapter is engaging...This is recommended reading for everyone in healthcare. This is one of the best books of the year."—Doody's

"Klitzman...is part of a contemporary group of reflective doctors who, through their writings, contribute to the less palpable but nevertheless crucial moral, social, and experiential dimensions of medicine."—British Medical Journal

"A great strength of the book lies in the richness of the patients' words, through which the reader learns firsthand that illness is transforming and that 'human lives are messy and complex.'"—New England Journal of Medicine

"Klitzman's work is an important contribution to physical training and patient care. The wisdom shared in When Doctors Become Patients holds potential to make all physicians better caregivers."—JAMA

"This is a thoughtful and carefully written book. Read it. You will not come away unaffected."—Journal of Clinical Investigation

"[Klitzman] interviewed more than 50 doctors who suffered from such diseases as HIV, Hodgkin's lymphoma, breast cancer, bipolar disorder and leukemia. Identified only by pseudonyms, they bared their souls to Klitzman. The result is a remarkable book,When Doctors Become Patients, which helps illuminate the medical profession's mind-set under duress."—The Associated Press

"This is a thoughtful and carefully written book. Read it. You will not come away unaffected."—Journal of Clinical Investigation

"When Doctors Become Patients addresses the ethos and pathos of a universal but frequently taboo subject for physicians. Robert Klitzman, a psychiatrist and bioethicist at Columbia University, has composed a print documentary consisting of the distilled and interwoven narratives of nearly 50 physician-patients combined with the author's deft analysis and measured self-reflection. The reading of Dr. Klitzman's thoughtfully conceived and constructed book is instructive and therapeutic as it allows the reader to comtemplate his or her own responses to illness and suffering...we glimpse in Dr. Klitzman's book a transformed "Home of Women and Men" in which the humanity, hopes, uncertainty, fears, and frailty common to both doctors and patients might be addressed with compassion, dignity, humility, and reverence."—Peter Lewis, MD as reviewed in Family Medicine

"What is unique here is that this is the first study to systematically document the complex, emotionally difficult process by which doctors assume the role of patient, replete with struggles over issues related to their mortality, physical limitations, and possible retirement from clinical practice...Klitzman's interviews are as rich in detail as they are emotionally poignant...When Doctors Become Patients offers us a rare peek into the complexities associated with dedicating one's professional life to medicine and healing, all the while struggling with a serious, often fatal illness...a fascinating analysis..."—Sociology of Health and Illness

From the Publisher