Fort Worth Med School Wants to Stop Making Scary Doctors
A doctor in a white coat walks into a examination room. The patient’s diagnosis: veisalgia. There is no cure, only treatments. The patient will have to live with nausea, lethargy, muscle aches and a sensitivity to bright light and loud noises. Doctor leaves the room. Next patient.
Relax, dude, it’s just a hangover. Why did this imaginary patient go to the doctor for a hangover? It doesn’t matter. It’s certainly not because the writer of this story actually has a hangover as he dredges up a rhetorical example for a story about a new medical school in North Texas that will begin teaching future doctors how not to talk down to patients.
Even if he did, that does not discount the fact that doctors can induce anxiety in patients when they describe even the simplest of medical issues and follow-up instructions in scientific jargon and terminology. So a new medical school in Fort Worth is rolling out a first-of-its-kind curriculum that will condition future doctors to be more sensitive in how they relate with patients.
“I’ve seen the impact that is made when you sit down with a family rather than stand over them,” says Dr. Stacey Vanvliet, one of the educators inside the Texas Christian University-University of North Texas Health Science Center School of Medicine. “We don’t want any of our future doctors to be that intimidating presence in the room.”
Read more: https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/fort-worth-med-school-wants-to-stop-making-scary-doctors-10918632