You want to be the very best RN, MD, PT, NP, OT, PA, or other kind of health professional that you can. You want to be understanding, kind, compassionate, and empathetic with your patients, those scared adults and children who are depending on you to help them.
But you worry about learning more about how to do this. In addition to shadowing medical professionals and working through other ways to gain experience, where else can you find out about what it’s like to work with (or to be) patients? How will you relate to a dying patient or a patient from another culture? What are the crucial human qualities that you will need for every one of your interactions with sick or hurt people whom you want to help?
The films, print and online books, articles, editorials, poems, stories, and documentaries on this list are all worlds where you can go to learn more — witness the range of emotions, detective work, errors, successes, and relationships between medical professionals and patients (and some medical professionals who have been patients).
For example:
- When Dr. Ed Rosenbaum was finally diagnosed with cancer of the larynx, he had to experience the same frustrations and humiliations that other patients did. He didn’t like them one bit. Read A Taste of My Own Medicine, or watch the film starring William Hurt and Christine Lahti.
- These RN’s, student nurses, and NP’s working in all areas of healthcare tell their stories in I Wasn’t Strong Like This When I Started Out.
- Get the stories behind the baffling conditions in the House, M.D. series, in the book written by the doc who was the show’s technical adviser.
- What’s “etiquette-based” medicine? This article will tell you how well Hopkins docs practice this. (Here’s the overview about this 2013 study.)
Reading or viewing any of these resources will contribute to your holistic understanding of the world of health and medicine. Please explore this list, and please do let me know what you’d like to see added.
“Yours may be the last face that someone who is dying may see. Yours may be the first face that a new baby sees.” Dr. Catherine DeAngelis (Conversations in Medicine, 2/18/16)