Prior to this past year my experience of pain had been with acute episodes. An especially painful and amusing episode occurred when I started a new job at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center after residency and fellowship. Between painting rooms in the house we were moving into and carrying boxes hither and yon I threw out my back. I lay on the floor, hardly able to move. A helpful neighbor called his PCP who came to the house. (It was 1970 and house calls actually happened.) I could see that he was regarding me with suspicion. Perhaps I was a newly arrived addict who was seeking an opiate fix. And when I started my new job, in some of my meetings I again lay on the floor, giving a rather odd impression of the new hospital ward supervisor.
The pain was severe - perhaps 9 or even 10 on the ubiquitous 0-10 scale. But I knew it would clear up before too long, and it didn't burrow into my psyche and sense of self. In the (slightly altered) words of the old spiritual, it "pained the body but not the soul."
Not so with the chronic pain I wrote about 3 days ago! It's not as severe as the back spasm, but the (a) chronicity and (b) uncertainty about if and when the pain will go away has (c) taught me lessons I only understood from the "outside" during my years of practice and (d) challenged my sense of identity.
Like many physicians, my default mode is to help others. Over the years, when asked "how are you?" my typical answer has been a hearty, upbeat "excellent!" So for the simplest of tasks - taking out the garbage and even putting on my pants (I have to protect the toes from contact with the pants leg - not easy to do) - to become difficult or impossible is a shocking change. My wife has taken over my "chores" cheerfully and uncomplainingly, but I feel ashamed at (my words) "not doing my part."
Before the foot/ankle/lower leg problem set in, I took an extended walk whenever the weather permitted, and played tennis with friends weekly. Sacrificing these activities isn't just a matter of losing forms of "recreation." Being an active, out-of-doors person has been part of who I am. These losses take another bite out of my sense of identity!
In a similar vein, I enjoy being at both of the two offices I use. But parking and walking to the office is difficult, and I can actually do most of my work from home, so I have been largely invisible at my work sites. My "productivity" may not be reduced, but collegiality is down, and loneliness is up.
Coping mechanisms are crucially important and put to the test. As an example, the toe/foot/ankle/lower leg pain is worst at night. When I try to sleep it wakes me up every 60-90 minutes. My initial reaction to these awakenings was anger, but that accomplished nothing useful and made it harder to get back to sleep. By an act of will I substituted humor - laughing at myself sitting in the dark massaging my foot and hobbling around to reduce the pain. Rather than saying "why the bleep is this happening to me" I say various forms of "what a ludicrous situation this is!"
This is a blog about organizational ethics. Readers may reasonably ask "what on earth does a painful foot and difficulty taking out the garbage have to do with organizational ethics?"
A lot!
Nowadays, organizations toot the horn about their commitment to "evidence based practice." Since the Hippocratic era, the practice with the strongest evidence of effectiveness is empathic listening. Organizations can encourage this stance or - all-to-often - squelch it with bureaucratic demands and processes that treat patients as targets for efficient "throughput."
Time pressure is a fact of life everywhere in health care, but there are skills we clinicians can develop to use time well, rather than having time use us. When I joined the mental health practice at the Harvard Community Health Plan HMO in 1975, the insurance limited the number of appointments we could have with our patients. Some clinicians put this limit front and center when they met new patients, by stressing what they couldn't do. Wise clinicians, however, approached new patients differently - "Let's first figure out what you need, and then see how we can best meet those needs." The HMO encouraged me and my colleagues to struggle with the challenge of remaining true to our mission while doing what was needed to make the necessary margin to keep the program going. (See here and here for examples of that work.)
Medical care ultimately comes down to the patient-clinician dyad, but more and more often the dyads occur in an organizational setting. Empathic listening is carried out by individuals, but organizations can encourage or thwart this deeply human process. That's where organizational ethics comes in!
(A friend who knew about my left foot problem brought to my attention a superb article by the distinguished primary care physician Thomas Bodenheimer - "Lessons From My Left Foot." It's available at http://www.annfammed.org/content/8/6/550.full.pdf)
The pain was severe - perhaps 9 or even 10 on the ubiquitous 0-10 scale. But I knew it would clear up before too long, and it didn't burrow into my psyche and sense of self. In the (slightly altered) words of the old spiritual, it "pained the body but not the soul."
Not so with the chronic pain I wrote about 3 days ago! It's not as severe as the back spasm, but the (a) chronicity and (b) uncertainty about if and when the pain will go away has (c) taught me lessons I only understood from the "outside" during my years of practice and (d) challenged my sense of identity.
Like many physicians, my default mode is to help others. Over the years, when asked "how are you?" my typical answer has been a hearty, upbeat "excellent!" So for the simplest of tasks - taking out the garbage and even putting on my pants (I have to protect the toes from contact with the pants leg - not easy to do) - to become difficult or impossible is a shocking change. My wife has taken over my "chores" cheerfully and uncomplainingly, but I feel ashamed at (my words) "not doing my part."
Before the foot/ankle/lower leg problem set in, I took an extended walk whenever the weather permitted, and played tennis with friends weekly. Sacrificing these activities isn't just a matter of losing forms of "recreation." Being an active, out-of-doors person has been part of who I am. These losses take another bite out of my sense of identity!
In a similar vein, I enjoy being at both of the two offices I use. But parking and walking to the office is difficult, and I can actually do most of my work from home, so I have been largely invisible at my work sites. My "productivity" may not be reduced, but collegiality is down, and loneliness is up.
Coping mechanisms are crucially important and put to the test. As an example, the toe/foot/ankle/lower leg pain is worst at night. When I try to sleep it wakes me up every 60-90 minutes. My initial reaction to these awakenings was anger, but that accomplished nothing useful and made it harder to get back to sleep. By an act of will I substituted humor - laughing at myself sitting in the dark massaging my foot and hobbling around to reduce the pain. Rather than saying "why the bleep is this happening to me" I say various forms of "what a ludicrous situation this is!"
This is a blog about organizational ethics. Readers may reasonably ask "what on earth does a painful foot and difficulty taking out the garbage have to do with organizational ethics?"
A lot!
Nowadays, organizations toot the horn about their commitment to "evidence based practice." Since the Hippocratic era, the practice with the strongest evidence of effectiveness is empathic listening. Organizations can encourage this stance or - all-to-often - squelch it with bureaucratic demands and processes that treat patients as targets for efficient "throughput."
Time pressure is a fact of life everywhere in health care, but there are skills we clinicians can develop to use time well, rather than having time use us. When I joined the mental health practice at the Harvard Community Health Plan HMO in 1975, the insurance limited the number of appointments we could have with our patients. Some clinicians put this limit front and center when they met new patients, by stressing what they couldn't do. Wise clinicians, however, approached new patients differently - "Let's first figure out what you need, and then see how we can best meet those needs." The HMO encouraged me and my colleagues to struggle with the challenge of remaining true to our mission while doing what was needed to make the necessary margin to keep the program going. (See here and here for examples of that work.)
Medical care ultimately comes down to the patient-clinician dyad, but more and more often the dyads occur in an organizational setting. Empathic listening is carried out by individuals, but organizations can encourage or thwart this deeply human process. That's where organizational ethics comes in!
(A friend who knew about my left foot problem brought to my attention a superb article by the distinguished primary care physician Thomas Bodenheimer - "Lessons From My Left Foot." It's available at http://www.annfammed.org/content/8/6/550.full.pdf)
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