Not who, but what are you?

By popular request (as in 1 person...) here is a post about some of the work I have been doing lately.

Life is often busy.  Because of that I, like probably all of us, resort to quick, impersonal interactions with people.  When waiting in line at the grocery store I look at magazine covers and stuff like that, rarely acknowledging and even more rarely interacting with others in line.  When I get to the front of the line, I engage the clerk in a friendly, and largely meaningless conversation.

I struggle with this, however, because if you think about it none of these interactions mean anything.  None of them actually need another person.  For this reason for some time now I make the attempt to force their humanity upon those I interact with.  By that I mean that when I resort to depersonalized interactions with other people, they are doing the same thing.  In other words, both of us treat the other as an object of necessity and not a person, thereby also reducing our self to an object and not a human being.  So, when I interact with others, I try to avoid allowing them to reduce their self and force more than a mindless, automatic exchange with them.  When I say hello back to them and ask how their day is I always try to mean it.  I try to use their name.  I try to do something to pull them out of their automatic interaction, thereby also trying to pull them out of their automatic self objectification.

This same process happens in medicine.  It is not uncommon for a physician to interact with a patient and focus only on the symptoms of an illness that they have with a complete disregard for the patient's understanding of or experiences of those symptoms.  The patient is often reduced to a biological machine that is broken and needs to be tweaked in some way.  Patients also tend to learn this and so they will supply the information they think the Dr wants and act how they think the Dr wants them to - which often means they at that point see their self as a laundry list of broken biological processes and veil their self, their humanity.

Religious beliefs are very common in the United States, and as such, religious beliefs often undergird people's understanding of the world.  Those beliefs provide the meaning and color for their reality.  If a physician were to try and connect with a patient on a more personal level, beliefs and values may be one such personal dimension.  I have been finding, however, that how religious the patient population is actually has nothing to do with how often the physician talks about religion with patients or prays with them.  We could be talking about a physician who is in the middle of the Bible Belt and a majority of their patients are strongly religious or a physician on the west coast with a patient population who is largely non-religious.  It won't matter - neither impacts how often the Dr talks about religion and in some cases the more often a physician reports that their patient population speaks to them about religion the less often they reciprocate.  In other words, some dimensions of the patient's personal identity may not matter at all in clinical interactions and in some cases may be actively avoided by the Dr.  It is hard to avoid habitual, automatic, time saving interactions with others, but this may be costly on a personal level for both the patient and the physician in the long term.