Are You Treating the Patient or the Person?

When you walk into a room for the first time, what do you see, a patient or a person?

I recently spoke with one of my clients, a neurologist specializing in stroke, about this. For him, this question of patient or person is absolutely and inextricably linked to the fixer-healer question. As a physician in a specialty where events have often already happened, a good deal of his energy is spent providing comfort and information, ultimately empowering the patient with knowledge.

“The healing happens before the tests, prescriptions and surgeries,” he says. “You have to set people up to be healed. They are more than an embodied source of pain and disease.” This perspective holds the patient as whole, as a person.

If the healing is in the hearing, the answers to life’s problems are rarely fixable. Healing, however, is always possible — for the physician and the people they treat.

How does this view of medical treatment vary from specialty to specialty? And, how does a physician’s view of the patient/person relate back to their own view of themselves: healer or a fixer? Ultimately, is there a correlation between the perspective of the patient/person and the physician’s view of themselves as fixer or healer.

Do you view your life as a series of boxes to be checked? Or, do you see yourself and solutions to your challenges as nuanced and connected to your entire being — body, mind and spirit? Do you see yourself as someone to be fixed, healed or neither?