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‘Ow! Doctor, that hurt!’
Scientists reckon doctors don’t feel your pain much – and maybe that’s best
If you have ever felt like you have had a doctor who just did not care, you may just be right – but that may not be wrong. Got it?
Doctors tend to suppress the urge to empathise with other people’s suffering, researchers have found in a brain study. However, they claim this may be a good thing, as it could help the physicians focus on actually helping.
‘Without emotion regulation skills, repeated exposure to the suffering of others in healthcare professionals may be associated with… personal distress, burnout and compassion fatigue,’ wrote Jean Decety of the University and Chicago and colleagues, authors of the study published in the Jan. 14 online issue of the journal Neuroimage.
Past research has found that watching or imagining other people in pain activates the brain’s own pain centres, the group noted. Doctors’ dialling down their own pain response may thus free up ‘cognitive resources necessary for being of assistance.’
Can the brain distinguish between pain, and no-pain
Decety and colleagues measured electrical activity in the brain from physicians, and from a matched group of non-physicians, as they watched images of body parts pricked by either a needle, or a Q-tip. The goal was to measure whether the brain would distinguish these ‘pain’ and ‘no-pain’ situations.
Non-physicians showed diverging brain responses to the two types of stimuli, the researchers found. The different responses occurred early in the brain processing, and showed up in brain areas known as frontal and centro-parietal regions, roughly the front and top of the scalp.
No such responses were detected in the physicians, according to the researchers, who studied electrical activity by means of electroencephalography, or electrodes placed on the scalp. ‘Our results indicate that emotion regulation in physicians has very early effects, inhibiting the bottom-up processing of the perception of pain in others,’ Decety and colleagues wrote.
Source: http://www.world-science.net.
